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2008 Year in Review Vine Deloria, Jr.
Biography: Vine Deloia
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Vine Deloria, Jr. (born 1933) is known as a revolutionary thinker who speaks out against the decadence of U.S. culture and insists that young Native Americans receive traditional teachings before exposing themselves to the philosophies of the dominant Euro-American culture. Through his widely published books, he has brought greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy to a vast global audience.
Vine Deloria, Jr., of the Hunkpapa Lakota, became well-known as a political activist whose publications explained to the American people what the Native American rights movement was seeking. His family heritage combined with academic training gave him credibility in his writings. Deloria was born on March 26, 1933, in Martin, South Dakota, the son of Vine and Barbara (Eastburn) Deloria. He joined a distinguished family: his great-grandfather Francois Des Laurias ("Saswe") was a medicine man and leader of the White Swan Band of the Yankton Sioux tribe; his grandfather Philip Deloria was a missionary priest of the Episcopal Church; his aunt Ella C. Deloria was a noted anthropologist who published works on Indian ethnology and linguistics; and his father, Vine Deloria, Sr., was the first American Indian to be named to a national executive post in the Episcopal Church. Deloria's own comment about his family gave context to his first major book. In its afterword he wrote: "As long as any member of my family can remember, we have been involved in the affairs of the Sioux tribe. My great grandfather was a medicine man named Saswe, of the Yankton tribe of the Sioux Nation. My grandfather was a Yankton chief who was converted to Christianity in the 1860's. He spent the rest of his life as an Episcopal missionary on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in South Dakota." From 1923 to 1982 the Indian Council Fire, an organization in Chicago, presented fifty-four achievement awards to recognize quality of Indian initiative and leadership. Of these awards, three were to members of the Deloria family: Vine, Sr., Ella, and Vine, Jr.
After attending grade school in Martin, South Dakota, the younger Deloria graduated from high school at St. James Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. He served in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956, then attended Iowa State University where he received his B.A. degree in 1958. In his youth, he had considered following his father in the ministry, but exposure to his father's frustrations convinced him that church life did not have the bearing on Indian life that he wanted his career to have. Before he gave up the idea entirely, however, he earned a B.D. in theology at Augustana Lutheran Seminary, Rock Island, Illinois, in 1963. The following year he was hired by the United Scholarship Service in Denver to develop a program to get scholarships for American Indian students in eastern preparatory schools. He successfully placed a number of Indian students in eastern schools through the program.
He served as the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C., from 1964 to 1967, an experience he claimed was more educational than anything he had experienced in his previous thirty years. He was expected to solve problems presented by Indian tribes from all over the country, but found that unscrupulous individuals made the task impossible. He was frustrated by the feeling that the interests of tribes were often played against one other. In addition the NCAI had financial difficulties, and was often close to bankruptcy, so that a majority of time had to be spent resolving funding issues. Increased memberships and a research grant gave the organization enough strength to successfully win a few policy changes in the Department of Interior. Although Deloria felt the organization had been successful, especially because of the support and hard work of organization members, he realized that other tactics would have to be used to further the cause for Indian rights.
Earns Law Degree
Two circumstances influenced his decision to return to college and earn a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. One was learning of the success of the National Association for the Advancement of Color People's Legal Defense Fund which had been established to help the black community. The second was the realization that local Indian tribes were without legal counsel and had no idea what their rights were. His goal when receiving his law degree was to start a program which would assist smaller tribes and Indian communities to outline their basic rights. Throughout his career his goal in life has been twofold: to support tribes through affiliation with various advocacy organizations and to educate Native Americans on aspects of the law through teachings and writings which stress the historical and political aspects of the relationships of Indians to other people. His role as an activist in the efforts of Native Americans to achieve self-government has focused on change through education rather than through violence.
From 1970 to 1972 Deloria was a lecturer at Western Washington State College in the division of ethnic studies. While there, he worked with Northwest Coast tribes in their effort to gain improved fishing rights. From 1972 to 1974 he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. During the same period, from 1970 to 1978, he was the chairperson of the Institute for the Development of Indian Law, headquartered in Golden, Colorado. From 1978 to 1991 he was a professor of American Indian studies, political science, and history of law at the University of Arizona. In 1991 he moved to the University of Colorado in Boulder to join the faculty of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. In addition to his teaching positions, Deloria served in leadership positions in several organizations including the Citizens Crusade against Poverty, the Council on Indian Affairs, the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent, the Institute for the Development of Indian Law, and the Indian Rights Association.
Publishes Indian Activist Views
Deloria has been an activist writer, dramatically presenting his case for Indian self-determination. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, written while he was attending law school, captured the attention of reviewers and critics and bolstered Native American efforts for recognition. Written at the time the American Indian Movement (AIM) was drawing public attention to Native American rights, Deloria's book was an articulation of the activist goal: to become self-ruled, culturally separate from white society and politically separate from the U.S. government. While blasting America's treatment of Indian people, Deloria explained the concepts of termination and tribalism. Although contemporaneous with the civil rights movement of other American groups, he distinguished between black nationalism and Indian nationalism, explaining that because Indian civil rights issues were based upon treaties they needed to be addressed in a different way. Deloria explained his reasons for writing the book in its afterword: "One reason I wanted to write it was to raise some issues for younger Indians which they have not been raising for themselves. Another reason was to give some idea to white people of the unspoken but often felt antagonisms I have detected in Indian people toward them, and the reasons for such antagonism."
Deloria's second book, We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf, also addressed the issue of tribalism and advocated a return to tribal social organization in order to save society. His third book, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, again captured a national audience. In this book Deloria offered an alternative to Christianity which he explained had failed both in its theology and its application to social issues. He proposed that religion in North America should follow along the lines of traditional Native American values and seek spiritual values in terms of "space" by feeling the richness of the land. Most critics applauded his presentation of Indian religious practice, but were offended by his attack on the Judeo-Christian tradition. His later book The Metaphysics of Modern Existence followed up on this theme by questioning non-Indian world views of modern life and recommending a reassessment of reality about moral and religious property.
In all of Deloria's writings, he has emphasized the failure of U.S. treaties to adequately provide for the needs of Indian people. Using his legal training, he has analyzed past relationships between the U.S. government and Native American groups and has continually pressed for renewed treaty negotiation in order to allow more Indian self-control over their culture and government. His book Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties provided an account of events which led to the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by supporters of the American Indian Movement. In this work he argued for reopening the treaty-making procedure between Indian tribes and the U.S. government. As an expert in U.S. Indian treaties, Deloria was called as first witness for the defense in the trial of Wounded Knee participants Russell Means and Dennis Banks in 1974. Later, in his writing about Indian activism of the early 1970s, Deloria blamed the failure of the Indian civil rights movement on the unwillingness of the American public to forget their perception of what an Indian should be. In the second edition of God Is Red he stated: "When a comparison is made between events of the Civil Rights movement and the activities of the Indian movement one thing stands out in clear relief: Americans simply refuse to give up their longstanding conceptions of what an Indian is. It was this fact more than any other that inhibited any solution of the Indian problems and projected the impossibility of their solution anytime in the future. People simply could not connect what they believed Indians to be with what they were seeing on their television sets." He castigated the American public for its avoidance of the real Indian world in a series of ironic contrasts between current events of the Indian movement of the 1970s and what the American public was reading. "While Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was selling nearly twenty thousand copies a week, the three hundred state game wardens and Tacoma city police were vandalizing the Indian fishing camp and threatening the lives of Indian women and children at Frank's Landing on the Nisqually River. … As Raymond Yellow Thunder was being beaten to death, Americans were busy ordering Touch the Earth from their book clubs as an indication of their sympathy for American Indians. As the grave robbers were breaking into Chief Joseph's grave, the literary public was reading his famous surrender speech in a dozen or more anthologies of Indian speeches and bemoaning the fact that oratory such as Joseph's is not used any more."
Deloria's writing style has been consistent. In his books he often attempts to peel away platitudes that his white readers have developed so that they begin to comprehend the issues and the Indian viewpoint. Not without humor, he cynically derides white culture, and then offers his replacement. He commented in an interview that Americans can be told the obvious fifty times a day and revel in hearing it, but not learn anything from it. Some critics have been disappointed that Deloria's books do not describe Indian culture. As Deloria stated in an interview in The Progressive, "I particularly disappoint Europeans. They come over and want me to share all the tribal secrets. Then I lecture and harangue about the white man." In the same interview he derided his own success as an Indian writer in the early 1970s. "I happened to come along when they [the media] needed an Indian. The writing is not very good at all. But Indians were new, so everybody gave Custer great reviews. I never fooled myself that it was a great book."
His second edition of God Is Red, published in 1992, built upon the arguments against Christianity he wrote in the first edition. Encouraged by trends in American society to be more concerned about religion and ecology, he raised additional issues in the revised edition. "I suggest in this revised edition that we have on this planet two kinds of people - natural peoples and the hybrid peoples. The natural peoples represent an ancient tradition that has always sought harmony with the environment." Hybrid peoples referred to the inheritors of Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian traditions who adopted a course of civilization which exploits the environment. When The Progressive's interviewer asked Deloria his views on renewed interest in Native American spirituality, Deloria commented: "I think New Age shamanism is very interesting. Whites want to take our images, they want to have their Indian jewelry; at the same time, they need our valley to flood for a dam. People are desperately trying to get some relationship to Earth, but it's all in their heads. … New Age shamanism may be one of the few solutions." At the same time, he admitted his own dependence upon technology. "I wouldn't delude myself for a minute that I could go back to the reservation and live any kind of traditional life. I've been in the cities too long. … I would love to go back to the old shamanism. My great-grandfather was a very powerful man. But here I am in Tucson, Arizona, dependent upon Tucson Electric Power to stay comfortable."
Another of his major themes has been concern for the natural environment. He blames contemporary technological society for destroying the earth, and presents an apocalyptic view. He envisions the end of the earth if changes are not made soon to allow the natural environment to recover. He predicts in The Progressive interview that in 500 years "there will be fewer than 100,000 people on whatever this continent comes up as, there will probably be some Indians and all kinds of new strange animals - the Earth a completely different place, people talking about legends of the old times when iron birds flew in the air."
Other works by Vine Deloria include Indians of the Pacific Northwest (1977), Of Utmost Good Faith (1971), A Better Day for Indians (1976), The nations within: the past and future
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Works: Works by Vine Deloria Jr
Home > Library > Literature & Language > Works by Authors(b. 1933)
1970 Custer Died for Your Sins. This is the most popular and the initial work of the Native American activist attorney and social historian. Subtitled "An Indian Manifesto," the book excoriates white America's treatment of Native Americans and explores the strengths and weaknesses of tribalism, which fosters a sense of community but also a sense of isolation from other Americans. The work prompts social scientists to reassess their study of tribal peoples and various institutions to return human remains and artifacts to the tribes from which they had been taken
Wikipedia: Vine Deloria, Jr.
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Vine Deloria, Jr.
Born March 26, 1933(1933-03-26)
Died November 05, 2005
(aged 72)
Nationality American
Field Author
Poet
Theologian
Historian
Vine Deloria, Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005) was an American Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist.
Biography and writing
Deloria was the grandson of Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge) aka Rev. Philip Joseph Deloria, an Episcopal priest and a leader of the Yankton band of the Nakota Nation. Vine Jr. was born in Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation, and was first educated at reservation schools.
Deloria's father, Vine Sr., studied English and Christian theology, became an Episcopal archdeacon and missionary on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, to which he transferred the family's tribal citizenship.
Deloria Jr. originally sought to be a minister, like his father, and in 1963 received a theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois. (He had first graduated from Iowa State University in 1958.) His aunt was the anthropologist Ella Deloria. Deloria earned a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. From 1964 to 1967, Deloria was Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians. His son, Philip J. Deloria is also a respected historian.
In 1969, Deloria published his first of more than twenty books, entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. This book became one of Deloria's most famous works. In it, Deloria addressed Indian stereotypes and challenged white audiences to take a new look at the history of American western expansionism. The book was released around the time that the American Indian Movement was gaining momentum, and the book helped draw attention to the Native American struggle. The book focused on the Native American goal of sovereignty without political and social assimilation, and stood as a hallmark of Native American Self-Determination at the time.--Joecoulter (talk) 14:24, 21 November 2008 (UTC) The American Anthropological Association sponsored a panel in response to Custer Died for Your Sins.
In 1995, Deloria argued in his book Red Earth, White Lies, that the "Bering land bridge" never existed, and that the ancestors of the Native Americans did not migrate to the Americas over such a land-bridge, as has been claimed by many archaeologists. Rather, he asserted that the Native Americans may have originated in the Americas, or reached them through transoceanic travel, as some of their creation stories suggested.
His views on the age of certain geological formations, the length of time Native Americans have been in the Americas, their possible co-existence with dinosaurs, etc. were very influential in the development of American Indian Creationism.[1][2]
Deloria wrote and edited many subsequent books, focusing on many issues as they relate to Native Americans, such as education and religion. Deloria taught at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1990, and then taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In 1999, he received the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award in the category of prose and personal/critical essays for his work Spirit and Reason. He was honorably mentioned on October 12, 2002 at the 2002 National Book Festival and also received the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in Boulder on October 23, 2002.
He was the winner of the 2003 American Indian Festival of Words Author Award. He was involved with many Native American organizations, and was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian beginning in 1977.
After Deloria retired in May 2000, he continued to write and lecture until he died on November 13, 2005.
Criticism
Deloria was criticized for his embrace of American Indian creationism. Deloria often cited Christian creationist authors in support of his views relating to science. Deloria also relied on Hindu creationists such as Michael Cremo.[3]
Deloria was further criticized for his reliance on authors of pseudoscience such as Zecharia Sitchin and Immanuel Velikovsky. Deloria cited Sitchin to argue that white people were created by space aliens.[4] Deloria also believed that dinosaurs and humans may have lived at the same time, and that the stegosaurus possibly still existed in the 19th century.[5].
Quotations
"The twentieth century has produced a world of conflicting visions, intense emotions, and unpredictable events, and the opportunities for grasping the substance of life have faded as the pace of activity has increased." -from the intro to Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks.
"The massive amount of useless knowledge produced by anthropologists attempting to capture real Indians in a network of theories has contributed substantially to the invisibility of Indian people today." -paragraph 22 of chapter 4, titled "Anthropologists and Other Friends" from Custer Died for Your Sins.
"Scientists, and I use the word as loosely as possible, are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory. Initially, at least, Indians are homogenous. But there are also eight major language families within the Western Hemisphere, indicating to some scholars that if Indians followed the trend that can be identified in other continents, then the migration went from east to west; tourists along the Bering straits were going TO Asia, not migrating FROM it." [8]
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.." [9]
Works
Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since The 1880s, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-87722-349-1.
American Indian Policy In The Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. ISBN 0-8061-1897-0.
American Indians, American Justice, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. ISBN 0-292-73834-X.
Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1974.
A Better Day for Indians, New York: Field Foundation, 1976.
A Brief History of the Federal Responsibility to the American Indian, Washington: Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1979,
Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York: Macmillan, 1969. ISBN 0-8061-2129-7.
For This Land: Writings on Religion in America, New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-92114-7.
Frank Waters: Man and Mystic, Athens: Swallow Press: Ohio University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8040-0978-3.
Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (with Marijo Moore), New York: Nation Books, 2003. ISBN 1-56025-511-0.
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, Golden, Colorado: North American Press, 1994. ISBN 1-55591-176-5.
The Indian Affair, New York: Friendship Press, 1974. ISBN 0-377-00023-X.
Indians of the Pacific Northwest, New York: Doubleday, 1977. ISBN 0-385-09790-5.
The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. ISBN 0-06-450250-3.
The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. ISBN 0-394-72566-2.
Of Utmost Good Faith, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971.
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, New York: Scibner, 1995. ISBN 0-684-80700-9.
The Red Man in the New World Drama: A Politico-legal Study with a Pageantry of American Indian History, New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Reminiscences of Vine V. Deloria, Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota 1970, New York Times oral history program: American Indian oral history research project. Part II; no. 82.
The Right To Know: A Paper, Washington, D.C.: Office of Library and Information Services, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1978.
A Sender of Words: Essays in Memory of John G. Neihardt, Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1984. ISBN 0-935704-22-1.
Singing For A Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux, Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 1999. ISBN 1-57416-025-7.
Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader, Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Pub, 1999. ISBN 1-55591-430-6.
Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (with Wilkins, David E.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. ISBN 0-292-71607-9.
We Talk, You Listen; New Tribes, New Turf, New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths, Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Pub, 2002.
The Pretend Indian: Images of Native Americans in the Movies,
Secondary Literature
DeMallie, Raymond J. (2006) "Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)." American Anthropologist, Vol. 108, No. 4: 932-935.
Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology, ed. by Thomas Biolsi, Larry J. Zimmerman, University of Arizona Press 1997, ISBN 0816516073
Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society, ed. by Steve Pavlik, Daniel R. Wildcat, Fulcrum Publishing 2006, ISBN 1555915191
See also
List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
Native American Studies
References
^ Jenkins, Philip Dream Catchers:How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality OUP USA (24 Nov 2005) ISBN:978-0195189100 p.233 [1]
^ O'Leary, Denyse By Design or by Chance in the Universe: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life Augsburg Fortress (3 Aug 2004) ISBN:978-0806651774 p. 155[2]
^ Some of Deloria's critics include: Bruce Thornton, Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, ISI Books, 1999.; H. David Brumble, "Vine Deloria, Jr., Creationism, and Ethnic Pseudoscience". American Literary History 1998 10(2):335-346; George Johnson, "Indian Tribes' Creationists Thwart Archeologists", New York Times, October 22, 1996; Bernard Ortiz de Montellano. "Post-Modern Multiculturalism and Scientific Illiteracy", APS (American Physical Society) News, January 1998, Vol 7, No. 1; John C. Whittaker. "Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americas and the Myth of Scientific Fact", book review in The Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1997
^ God Is Red, 2nd edition
^ Red Earth, p. 241
^ "Vine Deloria's other side," The Denver Rocky Mountain News 11/18/2005.
^ John C. Whittaker. "Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americas and the Myth of Scientific Fact", book review in The Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1997
^ Vine Deloria, Jr
^ God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr.
Native American Authors Project: Vine Deloria Jr. Retrieved May 17, 2005.
External links
Biography: Vine Deloria Jr.
Native American Authors Project
Vine Deloria, Jr.
American Philosophical Association Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy, Fall 2006
Join the WikiAnswers Q&A community. Post a question or answer questions about "Vine Deloria, Jr." at WikiAnswers.
Copyrights:
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Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Vine Deloria, Jr.". Read more
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2008 Year in Review Vine Deloria, Jr.
Biography: Vine Deloia
Home > Library > Miscellaneous > Biographies
Vine Deloria, Jr. (born 1933) is known as a revolutionary thinker who speaks out against the decadence of U.S. culture and insists that young Native Americans receive traditional teachings before exposing themselves to the philosophies of the dominant Euro-American culture. Through his widely published books, he has brought greater understanding of Native American history and philosophy to a vast global audience.
Vine Deloria, Jr., of the Hunkpapa Lakota, became well-known as a political activist whose publications explained to the American people what the Native American rights movement was seeking. His family heritage combined with academic training gave him credibility in his writings. Deloria was born on March 26, 1933, in Martin, South Dakota, the son of Vine and Barbara (Eastburn) Deloria. He joined a distinguished family: his great-grandfather Francois Des Laurias ("Saswe") was a medicine man and leader of the White Swan Band of the Yankton Sioux tribe; his grandfather Philip Deloria was a missionary priest of the Episcopal Church; his aunt Ella C. Deloria was a noted anthropologist who published works on Indian ethnology and linguistics; and his father, Vine Deloria, Sr., was the first American Indian to be named to a national executive post in the Episcopal Church. Deloria's own comment about his family gave context to his first major book. In its afterword he wrote: "As long as any member of my family can remember, we have been involved in the affairs of the Sioux tribe. My great grandfather was a medicine man named Saswe, of the Yankton tribe of the Sioux Nation. My grandfather was a Yankton chief who was converted to Christianity in the 1860's. He spent the rest of his life as an Episcopal missionary on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in South Dakota." From 1923 to 1982 the Indian Council Fire, an organization in Chicago, presented fifty-four achievement awards to recognize quality of Indian initiative and leadership. Of these awards, three were to members of the Deloria family: Vine, Sr., Ella, and Vine, Jr.
After attending grade school in Martin, South Dakota, the younger Deloria graduated from high school at St. James Academy in Faribault, Minnesota. He served in the Marine Corps from 1954 to 1956, then attended Iowa State University where he received his B.A. degree in 1958. In his youth, he had considered following his father in the ministry, but exposure to his father's frustrations convinced him that church life did not have the bearing on Indian life that he wanted his career to have. Before he gave up the idea entirely, however, he earned a B.D. in theology at Augustana Lutheran Seminary, Rock Island, Illinois, in 1963. The following year he was hired by the United Scholarship Service in Denver to develop a program to get scholarships for American Indian students in eastern preparatory schools. He successfully placed a number of Indian students in eastern schools through the program.
He served as the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) in Washington, D.C., from 1964 to 1967, an experience he claimed was more educational than anything he had experienced in his previous thirty years. He was expected to solve problems presented by Indian tribes from all over the country, but found that unscrupulous individuals made the task impossible. He was frustrated by the feeling that the interests of tribes were often played against one other. In addition the NCAI had financial difficulties, and was often close to bankruptcy, so that a majority of time had to be spent resolving funding issues. Increased memberships and a research grant gave the organization enough strength to successfully win a few policy changes in the Department of Interior. Although Deloria felt the organization had been successful, especially because of the support and hard work of organization members, he realized that other tactics would have to be used to further the cause for Indian rights.
Earns Law Degree
Two circumstances influenced his decision to return to college and earn a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. One was learning of the success of the National Association for the Advancement of Color People's Legal Defense Fund which had been established to help the black community. The second was the realization that local Indian tribes were without legal counsel and had no idea what their rights were. His goal when receiving his law degree was to start a program which would assist smaller tribes and Indian communities to outline their basic rights. Throughout his career his goal in life has been twofold: to support tribes through affiliation with various advocacy organizations and to educate Native Americans on aspects of the law through teachings and writings which stress the historical and political aspects of the relationships of Indians to other people. His role as an activist in the efforts of Native Americans to achieve self-government has focused on change through education rather than through violence.
From 1970 to 1972 Deloria was a lecturer at Western Washington State College in the division of ethnic studies. While there, he worked with Northwest Coast tribes in their effort to gain improved fishing rights. From 1972 to 1974 he taught at the University of California at Los Angeles. During the same period, from 1970 to 1978, he was the chairperson of the Institute for the Development of Indian Law, headquartered in Golden, Colorado. From 1978 to 1991 he was a professor of American Indian studies, political science, and history of law at the University of Arizona. In 1991 he moved to the University of Colorado in Boulder to join the faculty of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America. In addition to his teaching positions, Deloria served in leadership positions in several organizations including the Citizens Crusade against Poverty, the Council on Indian Affairs, the National Office for the Rights of the Indigent, the Institute for the Development of Indian Law, and the Indian Rights Association.
Publishes Indian Activist Views
Deloria has been an activist writer, dramatically presenting his case for Indian self-determination. Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, written while he was attending law school, captured the attention of reviewers and critics and bolstered Native American efforts for recognition. Written at the time the American Indian Movement (AIM) was drawing public attention to Native American rights, Deloria's book was an articulation of the activist goal: to become self-ruled, culturally separate from white society and politically separate from the U.S. government. While blasting America's treatment of Indian people, Deloria explained the concepts of termination and tribalism. Although contemporaneous with the civil rights movement of other American groups, he distinguished between black nationalism and Indian nationalism, explaining that because Indian civil rights issues were based upon treaties they needed to be addressed in a different way. Deloria explained his reasons for writing the book in its afterword: "One reason I wanted to write it was to raise some issues for younger Indians which they have not been raising for themselves. Another reason was to give some idea to white people of the unspoken but often felt antagonisms I have detected in Indian people toward them, and the reasons for such antagonism."
Deloria's second book, We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf, also addressed the issue of tribalism and advocated a return to tribal social organization in order to save society. His third book, God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, again captured a national audience. In this book Deloria offered an alternative to Christianity which he explained had failed both in its theology and its application to social issues. He proposed that religion in North America should follow along the lines of traditional Native American values and seek spiritual values in terms of "space" by feeling the richness of the land. Most critics applauded his presentation of Indian religious practice, but were offended by his attack on the Judeo-Christian tradition. His later book The Metaphysics of Modern Existence followed up on this theme by questioning non-Indian world views of modern life and recommending a reassessment of reality about moral and religious property.
In all of Deloria's writings, he has emphasized the failure of U.S. treaties to adequately provide for the needs of Indian people. Using his legal training, he has analyzed past relationships between the U.S. government and Native American groups and has continually pressed for renewed treaty negotiation in order to allow more Indian self-control over their culture and government. His book Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties provided an account of events which led to the occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by supporters of the American Indian Movement. In this work he argued for reopening the treaty-making procedure between Indian tribes and the U.S. government. As an expert in U.S. Indian treaties, Deloria was called as first witness for the defense in the trial of Wounded Knee participants Russell Means and Dennis Banks in 1974. Later, in his writing about Indian activism of the early 1970s, Deloria blamed the failure of the Indian civil rights movement on the unwillingness of the American public to forget their perception of what an Indian should be. In the second edition of God Is Red he stated: "When a comparison is made between events of the Civil Rights movement and the activities of the Indian movement one thing stands out in clear relief: Americans simply refuse to give up their longstanding conceptions of what an Indian is. It was this fact more than any other that inhibited any solution of the Indian problems and projected the impossibility of their solution anytime in the future. People simply could not connect what they believed Indians to be with what they were seeing on their television sets." He castigated the American public for its avoidance of the real Indian world in a series of ironic contrasts between current events of the Indian movement of the 1970s and what the American public was reading. "While Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee was selling nearly twenty thousand copies a week, the three hundred state game wardens and Tacoma city police were vandalizing the Indian fishing camp and threatening the lives of Indian women and children at Frank's Landing on the Nisqually River. … As Raymond Yellow Thunder was being beaten to death, Americans were busy ordering Touch the Earth from their book clubs as an indication of their sympathy for American Indians. As the grave robbers were breaking into Chief Joseph's grave, the literary public was reading his famous surrender speech in a dozen or more anthologies of Indian speeches and bemoaning the fact that oratory such as Joseph's is not used any more."
Deloria's writing style has been consistent. In his books he often attempts to peel away platitudes that his white readers have developed so that they begin to comprehend the issues and the Indian viewpoint. Not without humor, he cynically derides white culture, and then offers his replacement. He commented in an interview that Americans can be told the obvious fifty times a day and revel in hearing it, but not learn anything from it. Some critics have been disappointed that Deloria's books do not describe Indian culture. As Deloria stated in an interview in The Progressive, "I particularly disappoint Europeans. They come over and want me to share all the tribal secrets. Then I lecture and harangue about the white man." In the same interview he derided his own success as an Indian writer in the early 1970s. "I happened to come along when they [the media] needed an Indian. The writing is not very good at all. But Indians were new, so everybody gave Custer great reviews. I never fooled myself that it was a great book."
His second edition of God Is Red, published in 1992, built upon the arguments against Christianity he wrote in the first edition. Encouraged by trends in American society to be more concerned about religion and ecology, he raised additional issues in the revised edition. "I suggest in this revised edition that we have on this planet two kinds of people - natural peoples and the hybrid peoples. The natural peoples represent an ancient tradition that has always sought harmony with the environment." Hybrid peoples referred to the inheritors of Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian traditions who adopted a course of civilization which exploits the environment. When The Progressive's interviewer asked Deloria his views on renewed interest in Native American spirituality, Deloria commented: "I think New Age shamanism is very interesting. Whites want to take our images, they want to have their Indian jewelry; at the same time, they need our valley to flood for a dam. People are desperately trying to get some relationship to Earth, but it's all in their heads. … New Age shamanism may be one of the few solutions." At the same time, he admitted his own dependence upon technology. "I wouldn't delude myself for a minute that I could go back to the reservation and live any kind of traditional life. I've been in the cities too long. … I would love to go back to the old shamanism. My great-grandfather was a very powerful man. But here I am in Tucson, Arizona, dependent upon Tucson Electric Power to stay comfortable."
Another of his major themes has been concern for the natural environment. He blames contemporary technological society for destroying the earth, and presents an apocalyptic view. He envisions the end of the earth if changes are not made soon to allow the natural environment to recover. He predicts in The Progressive interview that in 500 years "there will be fewer than 100,000 people on whatever this continent comes up as, there will probably be some Indians and all kinds of new strange animals - the Earth a completely different place, people talking about legends of the old times when iron birds flew in the air."
Other works by Vine Deloria include Indians of the Pacific Northwest (1977), Of Utmost Good Faith (1971), A Better Day for Indians (1976), The nations within: the past and future
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Home > Library > Literature & Language > Works by Authors(b. 1933)
1970 Custer Died for Your Sins. This is the most popular and the initial work of the Native American activist attorney and social historian. Subtitled "An Indian Manifesto," the book excoriates white America's treatment of Native Americans and explores the strengths and weaknesses of tribalism, which fosters a sense of community but also a sense of isolation from other Americans. The work prompts social scientists to reassess their study of tribal peoples and various institutions to return human remains and artifacts to the tribes from which they had been taken
Wikipedia: Vine Deloria, Jr.
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Vine Deloria, Jr.
Born March 26, 1933(1933-03-26)
Died November 05, 2005
(aged 72)
Nationality American
Field Author
Poet
Theologian
Historian
Vine Deloria, Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005) was an American Indian author, theologian, historian, and activist.
Biography and writing
Deloria was the grandson of Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge) aka Rev. Philip Joseph Deloria, an Episcopal priest and a leader of the Yankton band of the Nakota Nation. Vine Jr. was born in Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Oglala Lakota Indian Reservation, and was first educated at reservation schools.
Deloria's father, Vine Sr., studied English and Christian theology, became an Episcopal archdeacon and missionary on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, to which he transferred the family's tribal citizenship.
Deloria Jr. originally sought to be a minister, like his father, and in 1963 received a theology degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Rock Island, Illinois. (He had first graduated from Iowa State University in 1958.) His aunt was the anthropologist Ella Deloria. Deloria earned a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. From 1964 to 1967, Deloria was Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians. His son, Philip J. Deloria is also a respected historian.
In 1969, Deloria published his first of more than twenty books, entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. This book became one of Deloria's most famous works. In it, Deloria addressed Indian stereotypes and challenged white audiences to take a new look at the history of American western expansionism. The book was released around the time that the American Indian Movement was gaining momentum, and the book helped draw attention to the Native American struggle. The book focused on the Native American goal of sovereignty without political and social assimilation, and stood as a hallmark of Native American Self-Determination at the time.--Joecoulter (talk) 14:24, 21 November 2008 (UTC) The American Anthropological Association sponsored a panel in response to Custer Died for Your Sins.
In 1995, Deloria argued in his book Red Earth, White Lies, that the "Bering land bridge" never existed, and that the ancestors of the Native Americans did not migrate to the Americas over such a land-bridge, as has been claimed by many archaeologists. Rather, he asserted that the Native Americans may have originated in the Americas, or reached them through transoceanic travel, as some of their creation stories suggested.
His views on the age of certain geological formations, the length of time Native Americans have been in the Americas, their possible co-existence with dinosaurs, etc. were very influential in the development of American Indian Creationism.[1][2]
Deloria wrote and edited many subsequent books, focusing on many issues as they relate to Native Americans, such as education and religion. Deloria taught at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1990, and then taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
In 1999, he received the Wordcraft Circle Writer of the Year Award in the category of prose and personal/critical essays for his work Spirit and Reason. He was honorably mentioned on October 12, 2002 at the 2002 National Book Festival and also received the Wallace Stegner award from the Center of the American West in Boulder on October 23, 2002.
He was the winner of the 2003 American Indian Festival of Words Author Award. He was involved with many Native American organizations, and was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian beginning in 1977.
After Deloria retired in May 2000, he continued to write and lecture until he died on November 13, 2005.
Criticism
Deloria was criticized for his embrace of American Indian creationism. Deloria often cited Christian creationist authors in support of his views relating to science. Deloria also relied on Hindu creationists such as Michael Cremo.[3]
Deloria was further criticized for his reliance on authors of pseudoscience such as Zecharia Sitchin and Immanuel Velikovsky. Deloria cited Sitchin to argue that white people were created by space aliens.[4] Deloria also believed that dinosaurs and humans may have lived at the same time, and that the stegosaurus possibly still existed in the 19th century.[5].
Quotations
"The twentieth century has produced a world of conflicting visions, intense emotions, and unpredictable events, and the opportunities for grasping the substance of life have faded as the pace of activity has increased." -from the intro to Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks.
"The massive amount of useless knowledge produced by anthropologists attempting to capture real Indians in a network of theories has contributed substantially to the invisibility of Indian people today." -paragraph 22 of chapter 4, titled "Anthropologists and Other Friends" from Custer Died for Your Sins.
"Scientists, and I use the word as loosely as possible, are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory. Initially, at least, Indians are homogenous. But there are also eight major language families within the Western Hemisphere, indicating to some scholars that if Indians followed the trend that can be identified in other continents, then the migration went from east to west; tourists along the Bering straits were going TO Asia, not migrating FROM it." [8]
"It is becoming increasingly apparent that we shall not have the benefits of this world for much longer. The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can only be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making this shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political.." [9]
Works
Aggressions of Civilization: Federal Indian Policy Since The 1880s, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-87722-349-1.
American Indian Policy In The Twentieth Century, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. ISBN 0-8061-1897-0.
American Indians, American Justice, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983. ISBN 0-292-73834-X.
Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1974.
A Better Day for Indians, New York: Field Foundation, 1976.
A Brief History of the Federal Responsibility to the American Indian, Washington: Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, 1979,
Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, New York: Macmillan, 1969. ISBN 0-8061-2129-7.
For This Land: Writings on Religion in America, New York: Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-92114-7.
Frank Waters: Man and Mystic, Athens: Swallow Press: Ohio University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8040-0978-3.
Genocide of the Mind: New Native American Writing (with Marijo Moore), New York: Nation Books, 2003. ISBN 1-56025-511-0.
God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, Golden, Colorado: North American Press, 1994. ISBN 1-55591-176-5.
The Indian Affair, New York: Friendship Press, 1974. ISBN 0-377-00023-X.
Indians of the Pacific Northwest, New York: Doubleday, 1977. ISBN 0-385-09790-5.
The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. ISBN 0-06-450250-3.
The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. ISBN 0-394-72566-2.
Of Utmost Good Faith, San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1971.
Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, New York: Scibner, 1995. ISBN 0-684-80700-9.
The Red Man in the New World Drama: A Politico-legal Study with a Pageantry of American Indian History, New York: Macmillan, 1971.
Reminiscences of Vine V. Deloria, Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota 1970, New York Times oral history program: American Indian oral history research project. Part II; no. 82.
The Right To Know: A Paper, Washington, D.C.: Office of Library and Information Services, U.S. Dept. of the Interior, 1978.
A Sender of Words: Essays in Memory of John G. Neihardt, Salt Lake City: Howe Brothers, 1984. ISBN 0-935704-22-1.
Singing For A Spirit: A Portrait of the Dakota Sioux, Santa Fe, N.M.: Clear Light Publishers, 1999. ISBN 1-57416-025-7.
Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr., Reader, Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Pub, 1999. ISBN 1-55591-430-6.
Tribes, Treaties, and Constitutional Tribulations (with Wilkins, David E.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999. ISBN 0-292-71607-9.
We Talk, You Listen; New Tribes, New Turf, New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Evolution, Creationism, and Other Modern Myths, Golden, Colorado: Fulcrum Pub, 2002.
The Pretend Indian: Images of Native Americans in the Movies,
Secondary Literature
DeMallie, Raymond J. (2006) "Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005)." American Anthropologist, Vol. 108, No. 4: 932-935.
Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Critique of Anthropology, ed. by Thomas Biolsi, Larry J. Zimmerman, University of Arizona Press 1997, ISBN 0816516073
Destroying Dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and His Influence on American Society, ed. by Steve Pavlik, Daniel R. Wildcat, Fulcrum Publishing 2006, ISBN 1555915191
See also
List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
Native American Studies
References
^ Jenkins, Philip Dream Catchers:How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality OUP USA (24 Nov 2005) ISBN:978-0195189100 p.233 [1]
^ O'Leary, Denyse By Design or by Chance in the Universe: The Growing Controversy on the Origins of Life Augsburg Fortress (3 Aug 2004) ISBN:978-0806651774 p. 155[2]
^ Some of Deloria's critics include: Bruce Thornton, Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge, ISI Books, 1999.; H. David Brumble, "Vine Deloria, Jr., Creationism, and Ethnic Pseudoscience". American Literary History 1998 10(2):335-346; George Johnson, "Indian Tribes' Creationists Thwart Archeologists", New York Times, October 22, 1996; Bernard Ortiz de Montellano. "Post-Modern Multiculturalism and Scientific Illiteracy", APS (American Physical Society) News, January 1998, Vol 7, No. 1; John C. Whittaker. "Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americas and the Myth of Scientific Fact", book review in The Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1997
^ God Is Red, 2nd edition
^ Red Earth, p. 241
^ "Vine Deloria's other side," The Denver Rocky Mountain News 11/18/2005.
^ John C. Whittaker. "Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americas and the Myth of Scientific Fact", book review in The Skeptical Inquirer, Jan-Feb, 1997
^ Vine Deloria, Jr
^ God is Red by Vine Deloria Jr.
Native American Authors Project: Vine Deloria Jr. Retrieved May 17, 2005.
External links
Biography: Vine Deloria Jr.
Native American Authors Project
Vine Deloria, Jr.
American Philosophical Association Newsletter on American Indians in Philosophy, Fall 2006
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