Comments for Vine Deloria Jr. upon his Early and Untimely Death, 2005

The Sioux people (Dakota, Lakota, Nakota) are veterans of countless campaigns against European invasions and land thefts, as well as the European ideological war of subjugation and genocide of the last five hundred years. Early in the twentieth century, a tribal warrior named Vine Victor Deloria emerged from the Sioux homelands to study and write in defense of his people and to teach the rest of us how to think analytically about the deeply disturbing experience of American Indians everywhere. He became the most fearsome warrior on the academic battlefields of this country. His life illustrated the newest and most essential campaign against racism and political malfeasance, which seems to consistently penetrate the perennial anti-Indian sentiment in the ongoing Indian-white conflict, and he influenced every writer and scholar he ever met.

Until Vine Deloria came along, genocide or massacre were words that rarely appeared in the history books of this country. Historians talked of "Manifest Destiny," white anthropologists, with their obvious colonial structures, apologia, and misinformation, talked of "a clash of cultures," and sociologists talked of "cultural pluralism." In 1969, Deloria stunned them all with his Custer Died for Your Sins, and the intellectual world concerning Indians changed forever.

Deloria's works tied together the depth of the white man's psychology and political theory and gave Indian writers and thinkers the language to defend ourselves against the merciless "Westward Ho!" mentality we faced in the past and continue to face today. His influence has been incalculable.

It is no accident that his work emerged in full force in the 1960s and '70s when termination and relocation were the words used to describe our destinies, and racist laws were put in place to assure our subjugation and disappearance from the modern scene. It is no accident, either, that his friend Floyd Red Crow Westerman emerged as the foremost songwriter and guitarist of our time who wrote songs that reminded us of when "we came close to the end." It is obvious that the persuasive American Indian Movement was also much influenced by Vine, who wrote of the relocation era as a function of genocide. He helped us understand that our squalid condition was not our fault; it was the fault of a vicious federal policy that brought about an endless tide of misery to our homelands. He was not one to blame the victim, and his words helped us toward an intellectual awakening that confirms our worthiness as First Nations to this land.

It is our misfortune that good men often die too soon. As a writer who has been enormously influenced by Vine Deloria, I had looked forward to his retirement years when he would write more books and tell us, as he always did, to take heart! I am saddened by his early passing.