Some words about Vine Deloria Jr., who died Sunday at age 72:
Mr. Deloria, who was trained as both a seminarian and a lawyer, steadfastly worked to demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths, he often said – whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt – were both shallow. The truth, he said, was a mix, and only in understanding that mix, he argued, could either side ever fully heal.
And while [Custer Died for Your Sins], with its incendiary title, was categorized at the time as an angry young man’s anthem, Mr. Deloria’s real weapon, critics and admirers said, was his scathing, sardonic humor, which he was able to use on both sides of the Indian-white divide. He once called the Battle of the Little Bighorn, where Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry were defeated by a combined force of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne in 1876 in the Montana territory, “a sensitivity-training session.”
“We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years,” he wrote….
“Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century — one of the most influential Americans, period,” said Charles Wilkinson, of the University of Colorado School of Law at Boulder and an Indian law expert.
Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, “Custer Died for Your Sins,” that brought him to the nation’s attention.
In 2002, Wilkinson called it “perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs” and described it as “at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical.”
Burn tobacco today for the wonderful spirit of Vine Deloria Jr., who passed into the world of the ancestors Nov. 13.