If MLK were Red, His Name Would've Been Vine

Remembering Vine Deloria Jr.
'The Pope of Native America' leaves a rich legacy


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By Ben Winton
Scholar Vine Deloria Jr.'s death on Sunday, Nov. 13, rekindled memories of American Indian activists who took his 1969 manifesto “Custer Died for Your Sins” to heart.
“Vine Deloria was a wonderfully gifted Lakota man who quite possibly saved Indian people from extinction,” said Rick Williams, president of the American Indian College Fund. “It is an understatement to contend that his political awareness and savvy leadership changed American people's perception of Indian people irrevocably.”
Deloria, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux nation, died of an aneurysm Sunday in Golden, Colo., not far from his academic home at the University of Colorado, where he taught until retiring in 2000.
Deloria, trained as both a lawyer and seminarian, helped win major human rights advances for American Indians, from getting anthropologists to return human remains and artifacts to getting the U.S. government to acknowledge tribal sovereignty. His book in 1969 entitled "Custer Died for Your Sins" was perhaps his most seminal work, according to many, who today say they are still inspired by it.
The American Indian Movement became one of the most radical, sometimes outspoken, advocates for many of the things Deloria pushed. On Wednesday, it posted a statement on its Web site crediting Deloria for many of the gains of American Indian people.
"It is safe to say that without the example provided by the writing and the thinking of Vine Deloria, Jr., there likely would have been no American Indian Movement, there would be no international indigenous peoples' movement as it exists today, and there would be little hope for the future of indigenous peoples in the Americas," said the statement.
Former students also vowed to carry forward Deloria's work.
“As future Indian leaders and modern warriors we must now take the reins handed to us, and carry on in his honor and those that came before us,” said Heidi McCann, a Yavapai-Apache, who was a student in one of Deloria’s religious studies classes in Boulder, Colo. “His memory and work will live forever. We must follow the example he set for us and respectfully bring it into the future with as much meaning, perhaps more.” A descendant of Sitting Bull and of legendary Yankton medicine man Saswe, and son of a Christian minister, Deloria was born in Martin, S.D., in 1933. He served in the U.S. Marines and graduated from Iowa State University and the Lutheran School of Theology, and later received a law degree from the University of Colorado.
He served as director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1964 to 1967. Under his guidance, the NCAI became a strong presence in Washington, D.C. His 1965 editorial "Now Is the Time" helped establish tribal autonomy and installed Deloria as "our Martin Luther King," in the words of Indian-rights attorney Charles Wilkinson.
Deloria published "Custer Died for Your Sins" and its 1970 sequel, "We Talk, You Listen," at the apex of the Indian-rights movement, which culminated that same decade with the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, where hundreds of activists demanded many of the things he advocated in his books. Indeed, a version of the Custer slogan remains scrawled on a wall at Alcatraz. It reads, "Custer Had It Coming." Wilma Mankiller, former principal chief of Cherokee Nation, called Deloria's books the clearest articulation of "the unspoken emotions, dreams and lifeways of our people."
Even today, former students continue to carry on the work of Deloria. Luci Beach is one of those students. She is a leader of the Gwich’in Steering Committee in Alaska, which has fought for years to prevent oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, which also is home to sacred sites and ancestral lands of Native people. The committee won a reprieve this month when Congress decided not to drill for oil. She calls that reprieve temporary, as she headed back to Washington on Wednesday for more talks with politicians. She was a student during the time that Deloria also taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“Having Vine Deloria Jr. as a professor was not easy,” Beach said on Wednesday. “As a teacher he was quite demanding and required his students to really think and question. It was not all archives and papers. Occasionally, Vine would invite students to a lively interchange after class at local campus cafes. He was a brilliant historian and had quite the humorous view of the world. One would leave his class or gatherings knowing you had been challenged and enriched.”
Reaction to "Custer Died for Your Sins" instigated the American Anthropological Association's first ethics panel on tribes and sacred artifacts, and inspired the wry Floyd Red Crow Westerman song "Here Come the Anthros," from the 1970 album named after Deloria's book.
Deloria challenged anthropologists’ claims that American Indians might be descendants of Asians who migrated across the Bering Strait thousands of years ago, forcing scholars to look more critically at historical and physical evidence about the emergence of the first peoples in the Western Hemisphere.
Simultaneously, while at odds with anthropology, Deloria used his writing to advocate for the rights of American Indian people. For that, he won numerous awards, including the 2002 Wallace Stegner Award, the 1999 Woodcraft Circle Writer of the Year and other honors he accepted with humility.
In his speech for the 2005 American Indian Visionary Award, Deloria suggested others, including Westerman, as more appropriate honorees.
"I think you just jump back and forth between the poles of radical and moderate," he once said, explaining his philosophy of using humor and candor to advance his causes. "You can bring up very radical things by using a moderate style."
University of Nebraska communications professor Bruce Johansen, who specializes in American Indian studies, called Deloria "the pope" of Native America. "If Native America had a Pope – of course, it doesn’t – it would have been Deloria," Johansen said Wednesday.
"While some scholars debate whether Native Americans really had a religious ethic that viewed the earth as mother, contemporary Native American religious and intellectual leaders continue to use the image with a frequency that evokes the rhetoric of Tecumseh and Black Elk. Deloria, who is arguably the father of the late twentieth century's intellectual renaissance in Native America, has been arguing ecological views of history for more than three decades with a rising sense of urgency as environmental crises intensify around the world. The stakes, in Deloria's analysis, include the future of humanity (as well as other animals) as viable species on an increasingly sullied earth.
Survivors include his wife, Barbara Deloria, of Golden; sons Phil Deloria of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Daniel Deloria of Moore, Okla.; daughter Jeanne Deloria of Tucson; brother Philip Samuel Deloria of Albuquerque; sister Barbara Sanchez of Tucson; and seven grandchildren.
Deloria's son, Phil, said a memorial service is scheduled for 3:30 p.m. Friday, Nov. 18, at the Mount Vernon Event Center in Golden. (Address and map at http://www.mtvernoneventcenter.com/)
Includes information from news services.