Deloria, Vine, Jr. (1933–2005)

Vine Deloria, Jr., an American Indian from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, was both an advocate for American Indian rights and a scholar of American Indian culture, history, and law. During the mid to late 1960s, he acted as Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), a pan-tribal organization that worked on behalf of tribes and lobbied the U.S. Congress in order to secure Indian rights. Under his leadership, the NCAI became increasingly financially sound and became one of the most well-respected American Indian advocacy groups. In 1969 he published Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, a set of essays that critiqued Native Americans' treatment by non-Indians and lauded many of the native cultural traditions that European Americans attempted to eliminate from the American landscape. His work was widely read by Indians and non-Indians alike, many of whom saw it as a refreshing attempt to deromanticize commonly [Page 443]held views of Indian people. This book launched his career as one of the most adamant, articulate, and witty social critics of the era. He went on to a career in law, writing dozens of books on the topic of federal Indian law and policy.

He was born in 1933 to Barbara Sloat and Vine Deloria, Sr., and grew up near both the Pine Ridge and Standing Rock Indian Reservations. His father, a Sioux and an Episcopal missionary, was a well-known figure among many of the reservation communities. He encouraged his son to pursue higher education, and the younger Deloria received his undergraduate degree in the sciences from Iowa State University, and a degree in theology from Lutheran School of Theology in Illinois. His law degree, which he earned from the University of Colorado, Boulder, in 1970, provided the basis for much of his legal scholarship and activism.

Witnessing the grave poverty on the reservations and the surrounding communities, the Deloria became a critic of U.S. Indian policy and agencies—particularly the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)—which he saw as being destructive to the people they pretended to help. He became a spokesperson for Indian sovereignty and self-determination. For him, sovereignty meant allowing American Indian people to develop their own governments, institutions, and policies for improving their lives and lessening the federal govern-ment's intrusion. He also promoted a return to the treaty-making process, which the federal government abolished in the 1870s. If the federal government went back to making government-to-government agreements with Indian nations, then this would raise Indian nations to the level of sovereign states and grant a new level of respect to Indian tribal governments.

Outside of advocating a revision of U.S.-Indian relations, Deloria was a great critic of Western science, particularly the social science of anthropology, which he derided as an attempt to fragment the world into its constituent pieces in order to understand them. This method of study, he argued, denigrated the interconnectedness of people, animals, and the planet. Instead, he supported a study of the world and human beings that examined the relatedness of all material and spiritual things. In pursuing this relatedness, he believed that the broader U.S. population could learn a great deal from Native American culture and thought, which had a long history of examining and learning from connections, rather than encouraging disintegration of the bonds between the spiritual and biological entities in the world.

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