Red Prophet: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria Jr. by David E. Wilkins (review)

Ever since Standing Rock Sioux activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr. passed away in 2005, the American Indian/Native American Studies community has been awaiting a significant work on his life and legacy. With Red Prophet, renowned political and legal expert David E. Wilkins (Lumbee) has published what has the distinction of being the first monograph dedicated to Deloria's monumental body of work, an oeuvre that has long been admired for crossing a variety of academic disciplines, including history, religion, and politics. Admittedly, attempting to synthesize Deloria's voluminous output, from keynote addresses to book-length projects, is daunting for any writer to undertake in a single volume.

Consequently, Red Prophet focuses on Deloria's contributions to the discourse on American Indian law and policy, placing particular emphasis on the concept of self-determination. Toward this end, the book is divided into four chapters addressing some of the major themes evident in Deloria's political writings, namely sovereignty, the federal system, and tribal government, which are complemented with a concluding chapter on how Deloria's ideas continue to inform the discourse on Indian affairs. As such, Wilkins has created a primer on Deloria's work as an American Indian political thinker. In this sense, the reader is given an overview of the numerous writings, replete with Deloria's copious ideas and opinions, about the historic issues affecting tribes in their never-ending struggle to maintain their sovereign powers. More specifically, maintaining sovereignty against the encroachment of state governments, federal Indian policy, the legacy of the Rehnquist court, and America's general ignorance about Indigenous nations.

From the outset, what the reader experiences is prose that gushes with excessive praise for its subject. Indeed, on the first page of the preface, Wilkins states emphatically: "Most of Deloria's adult life was spent in unrelenting, prodigious, and largely successful efforts to provide grounded Native individuals and their governments with the intellectual, theoretical, philosophical, and substantive arguments necessary to support their inherent personal and national sovereignty" (xvii). As one of Deloria's students at the University of Arizona, Wilkins then recalls that he and his peers "were aware of our profound privilege and opportunity to study with the most gifted intellectual of our time" (xix). Taken by itself, Wilkins's ebullient language may not sound over-the-top. But over the course of the next 144 pages, the obsequious narration of Deloria's incontestable profundity on virtually every important topic to define Indian politics can be a bit tiring. Why exactly Wilkins felt he needed to work hard at canonizing someone who is already canonized I cannot say. What I can affirm is that Red Prophet reads like it is striving to be the fifth gospel. Indeed, only Bobby Bridger's foreword, in which he portrays Deloria, Wilkins, and himself as mystical figures, goes further with sycophantic language (ix–xv).

As for Red Prophet, in chapter 1, "Eyes Wide Open," there are two tables titled "Recommendations for Native Peoples and Governments" and "Recommendations for Federal and State Governments" (12–17), which correspond to the two main chapters, 2 and 3. Each table is divided into four columns labeled Date, Source, Recommendations, Responses, going respectively from 1965 to 2009 and 1965 to 2011. The purpose in both cases is to chart the connection between Deloria's published ideas with major developments in either Indian Country or Indian law and policy. Interestingly, most of Deloria's recommendations are noted as having not generated any "substantive response." Nonetheless, this schematic of corroborating Deloria's influence on developments, particularly in federal Indian law and policy, is what orients much of Wilkins' discourse on Deloria's intellectual history. For example, Wilkins highlights as one of Deloria's distinctions as that of having conceptualized "the essential doctrine of tribal self-determination," which led to the passage of the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (18). However, while some examples are convincing, such as selfdetermination, to the extent that Deloria...