Vine Deloria Jr.

Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was born in 1933 in Martin, South Dakota, into a family of remarkable Native intellectual and religious lineage. His grandfather Philip Joseph Deloria (Tipi Sapa, Black Lodge) was a Yankton Sioux Episcopal priest. His father Vine Deloria Sr. was an Episcopal priest as well, working on Lakota and Dakota reservations across the upper Midwest. His aunt Ella Cara Deloria was a major linguist and ethnographer of Lakota culture (her Speaking of Indians and her novel Waterlily are foundational). The family’s religious-intellectual life held Christian and Lakota traditions together across multiple generations.

Vine Deloria Jr. was educated at Iowa State University (BA), the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois (where he received an MDiv but did not pursue ordination), and the University of [[boulder|Colorado]] School of Law (JD, 1970). He served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967 — one of the most consequential periods in modern Native political history. He produced his most-read book, Custer Died for Your Sins, in 1969 at age thirty-six.

The major works

A handful of his books deserve direct mention:

• Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). The book that made his name — a fierce, witty, devastating critique of American policy toward Native peoples and of the anthropological tradition that had spent a century studying Native peoples without listening to them. Helped launch the modern Native American Studies field.
• We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (1970). Companion volume; political and cultural analysis of Native America in the late-1960s ferment.
• God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1972; rev. 1992, 2003). His major theological work. Argues that Native traditional religion is centered on place (specific lands, specific relationships) where Christianity is centered on time (a single historical narrative of fall and redemption); that Native religion is communal where Christianity is individual; that Native religion is participatory where Christianity is dogmatic. The argument is provocative and has been substantially debated; the book is foundational regardless.
• Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974). On treaty rights, sovereignty, and the post-Wounded Knee II political situation.
• The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979). His most philosophically ambitious book; engages physics, biology, and religion in a comparative frame.
• Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1995). A controversial late book questioning some standard archaeological/paleontological consensus on Native presence in the Americas; widely criticized by scientists, defended by Deloria as a Native-knowledge-grounded skepticism. [[0mn1one|The platform]] notes the controversy without resolving it.

What he taught

Several recurring themes across the work:

• Sovereignty. Deloria insisted, against the dominant assimilationist liberalism of his era, that the proper political-legal frame for Native peoples is sovereignty — a government-to-government relationship between tribal nations and the United States, grounded in treaties, not absorption into U.S. citizenship as the final goal. His legal-political work substantially shaped the federal recognition of tribal sovereignty in the 1970s and 1980s.
• Place over time. His theological argument: where Christianity (and Western thought generally) understands the religious life through a single historical narrative running from creation through fall to redemption, Native traditions understand it through the specific places one comes from and the specific beings one is in relationship with. The land knows you, even when you are lost. The implications for ecology, for displacement, for what is lost when peoples are removed from their lands are substantial.
• Communal participation. Native religion, for Deloria, is not finally about individual salvation but about the right ordering of a particular community’s relationship with a particular land. Western individualism — including in its Christian forms — has missed this.
• The critique of anthropology. Custer Died for Your Sins contains the famous chapter Anthropologists and Other Friends, a savage critique of the anthropological enterprise as it had been conducted on Native peoples — extracting knowledge for academic careers while contributing nothing to the communities studied. The critique reshaped the field.
• Plastic medicine men. In a 1990 essay (published in various contexts), Deloria coined the phrase plastic medicine men for non-indigenous spiritual entrepreneurs claiming to teach Native ceremony for fees. The phrase remains the standard term for the phenomenon.

Honest engagement

A note for clarity. Deloria was not a quiet man. His prose is direct, often funny, often angry; some of his targets were deserved and some — by his own later reflection — were not as carefully aimed as they could have been. [[0mn1one|The platform]] engages him as a genuinely consequential intellectual whose work substantially redirected several fields, while taking seriously the specific scholarly criticisms (especially of Red Earth, White Lies) that have been raised.

A second note. Deloria’s category Native religion unifies what is in fact enormously diverse — five hundred and seventy-four federally-recognized tribes in the U.S. alone, each with its own traditions. The unification was strategic at the political moment of his work; subsequent indigenous scholarship has substantially refined the picture by attending to specific tribal traditions on their own terms.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[spirituality]]
• Parallels: [[animism]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. Vine Deloria Jr. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Macmillan, 1969 (rev. University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). Source class: book / primary.
2. Vine Deloria Jr. We Talk, You Listen. Macmillan, 1970. Source class: book / primary.
3. Vine Deloria Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Grosset & Dunlap, 1972 (rev. Fulcrum, 1994, 2003). Source class: book / primary.
4. Vine Deloria Jr. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence. Harper, 1979 (rev. Fulcrum, 2012). Source class: book / primary.
5. Vine Deloria Jr. Red Earth, White Lies. Scribner, 1995 (rev. Fulcrum, 1997). Source class: book / primary, controversial.
6. Vine Deloria Jr. Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria Jr. Reader. Fulcrum, 1999. Source class: collected essays.
7. Steve Pavlik & Daniel R. [[bobcat|Wildcat]] (eds.). Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria Jr. and His Influence on American Society. Fulcrum, 2006. Source class: edited volume / scholarly engagement.

Lenses still to grow

• The Deloria family lineage — Philip Deloria, Vine Sr., Ella Deloria, Philip J. Deloria (Vine Jr.’s son, historian at Harvard). Few American intellectual families compare.
• The post-Wounded Knee II political moment and Deloria’s role in it.
• The argument about place over time in detail; one of the most generative pieces of Native theology.
• The Red Earth, White Lies controversy and the question of indigenous epistemology vs. mainstream science.
• Plastic medicine men as a continuing problem in non-indigenous engagement with Native traditions.