Vine Deloria Jr Quotes

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.

Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.

These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating

Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them. The white man must learn to stop viewing history as a plot against himself.

Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.

Western science, following Roger Bacon, believed man could force nature to reveal its secrets; the Sioux simply petitioned nature for friendship. — Vine Deloria, Jr.

But there was no question in Jung’s mind that psychology had replaced theology. Indeed, he believed that twentieth-century man had devised a psychology precisely because theology no longer provided any explanation of the world or any comfort for the soul. Jung

Religion, as I have experienced it, is not the recitation of beliefs but a way of helping to understand our lives. It must, I think, have an intimate connection with the world in which we live, and any religion that promotes other places—heaven and so on—in favor of what we have in the physical world is a delusion, a mere control device to allow us to be manipulated.

Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American people that Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty or agreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, the saying went, to be Communists. Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these statements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement despite the fact that the United States government signed over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian tribes. It would take Russia another century to make and break as many treaties as the United States has already violated.

The first and great difference between primitive religious thought and the world religions, therefore, is that primitive peoples maintain a sense of mystery through their bond with nature; the world religions sever the relationship and attempt to establish a new, more comprehensible one. Foremost

The argument, therefore, that the Europeans brought the great conception of civilization, conceived as a sedentary agricultural enterprise, to the New World is absurd on its face. That

Because the Negro labored, he was considered a draft animal. Because the Indian occupied large areas of land, he was considered a wild animal.

I strongly doubt that American Christianity has the foresight or flexibility to embark on new paths of action. It has always been torn between being good and being real and generally chosen to be good.

discovery and settlement of the New World resulted in: “a dietary revolution unparalleled in history save possibly for the first application of fire to the cooking of edibles.” He continued, “Picture the long centuries when the Old World existed without white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn and the many varieties of beans, and you have some notion of the extraordinary gastronomic advance. Add, for good measure, such dishes as pumpkins, squashes, turkeys, cranberries, maple syrup,

One little, two little, three little Indians” is not simply a familiar children’s nursery rhyme, it is also a celebration of North American genocide. This little ditty, many Indian militants argue, captures in lyrical form the belief held during the last century by most in­formed Americans that Indians were vanishing from the face of the earth. This view was popularly symbolized earlier in this century by a small figurine showing an exhausted warrior on horseback, head slumped over and bowed, entitled “End of the Trail,” which adorned the mantlepiece of many white homes. The

Preconceived standards of conduct are unimportant and the assumption of the innate sinfulness of human is impossible, for the individual is judged instantaneously by his or her fellows as as useful or useless according to his or her degree of participation in community affairs. -God is Red

New Swedens, New Frances, and New Englands flourished, and one glance at the map of New England will indicate how thoroughly the new settlers wished to relive their former lives in familiar places. No comprehensive theory of human existence, no profound religious insights, and no universal political ideas came to these shores initially. Rather the ideas that came with the first settlers were the perverted ideas that had failed in Europe; the psychological walking wounded brought with them an irrational fear of the unknown that was slightly less emotional than the fear of extinction that they had known in Europe. All

This is a way of thinking about the past in which space and time echo each other, and it is by no means particular to the Bandanese. Indeed, this form of thought may well have found its fullest elaboration on the other side of the planet, among the Indigenous peoples of North America, whose spiritual lives and understanding of history were always tied to specific landscapes. In the words of the great Native American thinker Vine Deloria Jr., a shared feature of Indigenous North American spiritual traditions is that they all “have a sacred center at a particular place, be it a river, a mountain, a plateau, valley, or other natural feature. . . . Regardless of what subsequently happens to the people, the sacred lands remain as permanent fixtures in their cultural or religious understanding.”12 Developing this argument, Deloria contrasts modes of thought that take their orientation from terrestrial spaces with those that privilege time. For the latter, the crucial question in relation to any event is “when did it happen?” For the former, it is “where did it happen?” The first question shapes the possible answers in a determinate way, locating the event within a particular historical period. The second question shapes the possible answers in a completely different way, because it accords a degree of agency to the landscape itself, and all that lies within it, including the entire range of nonhuman beings. The result, in Deloria’s words, is that “the [Indian] tribes confront and interact with a particular land along with its life forms. The task or role of the tribal religions is to relate the community of people to each and every facet of creation as they have experienced it.” For many Indigenous groups, landscapes remain as vividly alive today as they ever were. “For Indian men and women,” writes the anthropologist Peter Basso, of the Western Apache of Arizona, “the past lies embedded in features of the earth—in canyons and lakes, mountains and arroyos, rocks and vacant fields—which together endow their lands with multiple forms of significance that reach into their lives and shape the ways they think.”13 Stories about the past, built around familiar landmarks, inform every aspect of Apache life. Through these stories features of the landscape speak to people just as loudly as the human voices that historians bring to life from documentary sources.

The argument between nature and our species is certainly not restricted to measurements of the physical universe. It includes the great variety of possible human reactions and responses to nature that the social sciences and humanities have also described. The manner in which the argument is now being conducted is less a struggle for control and more a desire for participation. Western peoples have previously believed that scientific knowledge could indefinitely provide them with techniques to control and understand nature. They partially accomplished this goal by reducing the phenomena of nature to objects valuable only because they could be measured and modified. Even while technological progress continues, scientists are retreating from an absolute stance that purports to explain everything in theoretical terms. “The primary significance of modern physics lies not in any disclosure of the fundamental nature of reality,” Ian Barbour writes, “but in the recognition of the limitations of science.”31 If we have knowledge of nature at all, we must conceive it as a “modest, sharply delimited sector of, and extract from, the multiplicity of phenomena observed by our senses,”32 Heisenberg argued. Complete knowledge of the world, either in the scientific or philosophical sense, would require the reintroduction of factors previously omitted from consideration. The metaphysical task that brings together all facets of human knowledge

Feyerabend’s work is critically important for non-Western and post-Western peoples because he stands within the Western tradition yet has mastered many of its social and political barriers so that he can speak meaningfully and critically to its less intelligent proponents.

An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The

Wilma P. Mankiller No writer has more clearly articulated the unspoken emotions, dreams, and lifeways of contemporary Native people than Vine Deloria. This collection of Deloria’s works takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Indian country as Deloria responds to some of the most important issues of the last three decades. Deloria’s literary gift is amply demonstrated in pieces that are a mix of logic, humor, irreverence, and spirituality. But it is his clarity of thought and stunning ability to express complex concepts in a simple, straightforward manner that captivate the reader. One of the most compelling pieces in the collection, “If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True,” reminded me of the phrase coined by Alice Walker, “looking backward toward the future.” With flawless logic and adroit use of language, Deloria examines the way many traditional Native people look at the universe, the connectedness of all living things, and our own insignificance in the totality of things compared to the objective, segmented way scientists in the academy view the universe. Deloria points out that “everything that humans experience has value and instructs in some aspect of life. . . . The

Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. explains further: “Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation; unfortunately the technology of industrial society always leads us in the other direction. Yet it is certain that as we permanently foul our planetary nest, we shall have to learn a most bitter lesson.

that the Sioux people cherished their lands and treated them as if they were people who shared a common history with humans.

One of the finest things about being an Indian is that people are always interested in you and your "plight". Other groups have difficulties, predicaments, quandaries, problems, or troubles. Traditionally, we Indians have had a "plight".

The most common characteristic of the new interpretations modern science gives concerning the kosmos is the willingness to abandon the old belief that truth could be discovered by isolating phenomena and reducing knowledge to measurable quantities. A much more cohesive picture of the world emerges when we include rather than exclude, and the inclusionary aspect of modern science, while seeming strange at the beginning, is actually more in line with our experiences than with our previous efforts to understand things. Ian Barbour gives a clear and concise summary of the physical world as conceived by modern science when he explains that “time and space are indissolubly united in a space-time continuum. Matter and energy must be taken together as matter-energy, and according to relativity matter-energy is simply a distortion in the structure of space.”28

in one major synthesis would seem to be the next major step in understanding that our species must take.

THE PROCESS OF LIFE The Greek conception of the kosmos was not simply that of a world of atoms, metaphysical ideas and numbers, and random energies. It also consisted of plants and animals, the life-forms of the biological world, including the human species, considered as observable phenomena. We would be remiss if we based any critique of culture and civilization on the discoveries and theories of modern physics alone. Of more importance to the layman are the principles that seem to describe and govern activities in the world of which they are a part. Therefore we must investigate other fields of knowledge to see if some of contemporary interpretations of the world can be made compatible with the discoveries in the field of physics, thereby extending the possibility of our metaphysical search into a broader perspective. The

Indeed, as important as the prospect of physical bodily changes, he saw the immigrant psyche changing as it gradually adopted the psychology of the aboriginal peoples. Despite the best efforts of American whites, fragments of an American Indian soul were constantly appearing in their dreams and fantasies. “The American presents a strange picture,” Jung said, “a European with Negro behavior and an Indian soul. He shares the fate of all usurpers of foreign soil.”18

In evoking the figures of the devil and the divine, Jung interpreted the trickster figure in comparative terms that made sense to European psychologists and scholars, but which had little to do with American Indians. His misreading should caution us about the dangers of this kind of comparative work. Indeed, having laid this base in Western theology, Jung found it hard to stop, and he found himself arguing that the trickster is: a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.23

Second, a large portion of the first generations of settlers were the criminal element of England who had a choice between immediate execution or exile in the wilderness of America. Georgia was a penal colony of the British crown and the first families of Georgia for many generations were descendants of whores and footpads of the Old World. There was not, therefore, an inbred respect for the law or human rights that we today attribute to the Founding Fathers. A

syrup, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, crab apples, chest-nuts and peanuts.”7 Schlesinger concludes, “In the four and a half centuries since Columbus blundered into the Western Hemisphere the American has not developed a single indigenous staple beyond those he derived from the Indians. Today, it is estimated, four-sevenths of the country’s agricultural output consists of plants (including tobacco and a native species of cotton) which were discovered with the New World.”8

Indian country is a means of forecasting where the larger society may be headed. The bicentennial inspired much enthusiasm for recapturing individual ethnic heritage, and the intense desire of non-Indians to have some Indian ancestry or activity may be a part of that movement. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have the patience to find both our own heritage and the place in which heritage can make a positive contribution to the larger society. We are in the process of establishing a new kind of American identity, apart from the Pilgrim tradition, and it is a very painful process of sorting out values. We must not take any easy or superficial answers.

Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.

Even if there is a general consensus that reduces the figure from one hundred million to fifty million—and some qualified investigators concede that we could hardly settle for less than that number—we must now accept the fact that the dismal story of Indian depopulation after 1492 is a demographic disaster with no known parallel in world history. We must also acknowledge that the catalyst of all this was undoubtedly the European invasion of the New World.1 The estimate of the aboriginal population of the New World not only has important consequences for American history, it may also force us to draw some very unpleasant parallels with contemporary events in Central and South America.

Indian activists holding religious ceremonies in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building concluding their stay by looting the building seems incongruous and ridiculous, unless we probe deeper into the nature of the relationship between Indians and whites. Indian activists accused of fomenting the destruction made a rather weak reply. What about the rape of the North American continent, the destruction of tribal cultures, the wasteful use of human beings, the deprivation of rights to a helpless minority? Do not these crimes make the destruction of a building pale in significance, they asked. Do they?

A significant proportion, then and now, was from the beginning devoted to the violation of laws, the disregard of rights of any kind, and the casual murder or rape of those who resisted them. Something in the neighborhood of fifty thousand convicts were transported to the New World in an effort to provide law and order in the Old.3 Third, a substantial number of immigrants arrived in the New World with their foreseeable future years already mortgaged to pay for their passage over. “Redemptioners” or “free-willers” booked passage for America and on their arrival were auctioned off by the ship captain to the highest bidder. Many English merchants specialized in this trade and fraudulent practices in recruiting were commonplace. The immigrants were packed aboard like sardines, and a mortality of more than 50 percent during a trip to the New World was not unusual. These

The intensive cultivation methods of European farming were finally abandoned by the immigrants and they moved swiftly to the other extreme, farming soils to exhaustion and abandoning them to move on to new fields. American genius in agriculture until the dust bowl years has really never been its cleverness but its inexhaustible supply of land that could be carelessly exploited and abandoned. Southern planters controlled thousands of acres and ruthlessly exploited labor and land and then sought more land. By the Revolution “the older tobacco areas along the Chesapeake and the great rivers

When this conglomerate of ideologies hit the American shores and filtered among the criminals, religious fanatics, and indentured servants, it appealed to the worst of their instincts, because it was basically a European doctrinal complex transported to a world in which the physical and political and indeed even the religious boundaries of Europe did not exist. Scattered efforts were made to reincorporate the old baronial holdings of Europe into the new continent. Francis

The two revolutions, therefore, taken together, must be understood as a centuries-long process of fundamental change in which the triumphant Western worldview of colonial days is replaced by a planetary understanding of the meaning of human existence that so transcends particular national differences as to enable the human species to create a planetary peace in the absence of an imperial power to enforce its particular institutions on anyone. In short, a coming to maturity of the human species. A transformation of this profound a depth must necessarily take form in the actions of the most capable nation on the planet, and Revel, after surveying the various claimants to leadership, decided that the United States fulfilled the basic requirements such a role entailed. He acclaimed the United States as the prototype nation in a process of world transformation. He cited many factors present in the United States but absent or improperly developed in other nations as justification for his choice. The United States had a continuing pattern of growth and economic prosperity unmatched by any other nation, a technological excellence unrivaled by anyone else, and a high level of basic research that would continue to provide increasingly sophisticated insights into the nature of basic scientific and social problems. Revel also felt that the United States was culturally oriented toward the future, whereas the European countries were directed toward the past, and the Communists were mired in theoretical and doctrinal considerations, rendering them incapable of confronting rapid and continued change. The

The multiple and dissident lifestyles emerging in the 1960s also indicated to Revel that the United States had more internal flexibility to tolerate change than did any other country and that this diversity would produce sufficient human vitality to make the United States a society of experimentation in new expressions of human experience. But the most important quality Revel found in Americans was their willingness to admit collective guilt in the treatment of racial minorities. Pointing out that the educational system of the Western nations from the time of the Greeks until the present had been designed to justify crimes committed against humanity in the name of national honor or religion, Revel noted that “the Germans refused to admit the crimes of the Nazi; and the English, the French, and the Italians all refused to admit the atrocities committed during their colonial wars.”4 The United States, as Revel saw it, was the first nation in history to confront seriously its own misdeeds and to make some effort to change national policy to make amends for acknowledged wrongs. This manifestation of a collective conscience indicated a greater sensitivity to human needs and an ability to empathetically deal with foreign cultures and values. This was the vital characteristic needed to provide a stance of moral leadership to support a planetary transformation of cultures. Rather

There are a number of white organizations that attempt to help Indian people. Since we would be better off without them I will not mention them, except to comment that they do exist.

But the understanding of the racial question does not ulti­mately involve understanding by either blacks or Indians. It in­volves the white man himself. He must examine his past. He must face the problems he has created within himself and within others. The white man must no longer project his fears and in­ securities onto other groups, races, and countries. Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of denying them. The white man must learn to stop viewing history as a plot against himself.

Experts paint us as they would like us to be. Often we paint ourselves as we wish we were or as we might have been.

There needs to be a way that Indian traditions can contribute to the understanding of scientific beliefs at enough specific points so that the Indian traditions will be taken seriously as valid bodies of knowledge. Both changes involve a fundamental struggle over the question of authority since even when Indian ideas are demonstrated to be correct there is the racist propensity to argue that the Indian understanding was just an ad hoc lucky guess—which is perilously close to what now passes for scientific knowledge.

The dams on the Upper Missouri, called the Pick-Sloan Plan, were located so as not to disturb white settlements. Instead, they would flood the bottomlands of eight reservations, land guaranteed to tribes by treaty and home to thousands of families. Pick-Sloan, the Lakota historian Vine Deloria, Jr., wrote, was “the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States.

Traditional education gives us an orientation to the world around us, particularly the people around us, so that we know who we are and have confidence when we do things. Traditional knowledge enables us to see our place and our responsibility within the movement of history. Formal American education, on the other hand, helps us to understand how things work, and knowing how things work, and being able to make them work, is the mark of a profes­sional person in this society. It is critically important that we do not confuse these two kinds of knowl­edge or exchange the roles they play in our lives.