The "Indian Handshake" between Generations

Anyone intimately familiar with Native Country can perhaps identify with the same "hole in the world" feeling I experienced on learning that Vine Deloria Jr. had joined our ancestors on November 13, 2005. A couple weeks prior to his passing, I also learned he had survived a heart attack. Hearing about his first heart attack, I pondered the difficult thought of Native Country without Vine. Now we are left to struggle with that reality. And because we could count on Vine to pen the next critique that would skin one of the whites' sacred cows, I find it a bit scary that he will no longer be among us. However, Vine did leave us his intellectual skinning knives, and we must apply the same degree of skill as Vine did whenever he skinned one of those sacred cows. These intellectual skinning knives are, in a manner of speaking, Vine Deloria Jr.'s magnum opus that he bequeathed to Native Country; and let us not be fooled, there remain plenty of sacred cows—manifest destiny (genocide), plenary power (colonialism), white privilege (racism), Native studies–lite (colonial laureates), and so on—that need skinning.

I suppose describing Vine's work in such terms is a tribute to his influence. Moreover, the tributes to Vine that have poured in from all directions prove that he attained a unique status within Native Country: he was our favorite son. So, when asked to write a tribute to Vine, "What," I thought, "has not been written about Vine and his work since November 13, 2005, that I could add? How might I do justice to Vine or his life's work?" In searching for an appropriate tribute, I turned to Lakota traditions, since we measure the quality of a person by them, and they in turn answered these difficult questions. Our kola pi tradition, a highly respected relationship among Lakota men, especially among our grandfathers' generation, comes to mind as I think about Vine. This tradition did not manifest itself between Vine and me but instead between Vine and my father, Cato Valandra. Because of their kola relationship, I can offer a narrative about Vine that embodies the gratitude we felt, the praise he earned, and the affection we have for him.

I imagine that people who had the good fortune to spend time with Vine, if only briefly, will understand what I mean when I say that Vine's way of doing things is reminiscent of an "Indian handshake" of a bygone era. My father, Cato Valandra, would recall that—despite being retired from office in 1969 by the Sicangu people as president of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe (1962–69)—throughout his presidency, a handshake between Lakota pi made a promise or a favor inviolate. In reality, the promise or favor might evolve into a metahandshake, because a family, a tiospaye, a society, or a community would perhaps recognize not only the importance of a promise made or favor to be returned, but also that an Indian handshake between two or more individuals signified honorable and respectful relations. It has been several years since Vine invited me to do graduate work at the University of Colorado, and during those years, I have come to acknowledge that, in some inestimable way, Vine's invitation was perhaps returning a favor to my father.

During the politically charged period of the early 1970s, I first came to know Vine through his writing. Going to a public high school on the reservation, I did not, thanks to a wasicu education, possess the range of intellectual and political frameworks to comprehend what was transpiring throughout Native Country in the late 1960s and early 1970s—the occupation of Alcatraz, the Trail of Broken Treaties, the takeover of the BIA offices in Washington, D.C., and Wounded Knee II. During this period of our political resistance against white colonialism, Native Country experienced a profound reawakening. We also know that when these acts of decolonization occurred, the wasicu dismissed them as nothing more than the efforts of a few disgruntled Indians who had an ax to grind with white colonial society. Years...