Vine Deloria Jr.

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Standing Rock Sioux writer, lawyer and scholar, and one of the most influential Native American intellectuals of the twentieth century. His book Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) attacked US Indian policy and popular stereotypes. In God Is Red (1973) he contrasted Christianity, which he saw as centred on time and history, with Native religions centred on space and sacred places. He taught at the University of Arizona and the University of Colorado, and argued throughout his career for tribal sovereignty and treaty rights.

Key ideas

• Western religion is oriented to time and history, while Native American religions are oriented to space and particular places.
• Sacred lands are central to Native spiritual life, so protecting land is a religious as well as a political issue.
• Native nations are sovereign peoples whose treaty rights should be honoured rather than assimilated away.
• Indigenous oral traditions deserve a serious hearing as knowledge, a stance that led him to dispute mainstream accounts such as the Bering land bridge.

Major works

• God Is Red (1973)
• Custer Died for Your Sins (1969)
• Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974)
• The Nations Within (1984, with Clifford Lytle)
• Red Earth, White Lies (1995)
• Power and Place (2001, with Daniel Wildcat)

In the Book corner

• God Is Red 1973 · Intermediate
  A book by the Standing Rock Sioux scholar and activist, first published in 1973, amid the Native American activism of the period,…

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