Denetdale 2004 Planting Seeds of Ideas & Rising Doubts

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Planting seeds of ideas and raising doubtsabout what we believeAn interview with Vine Deloria, Jr

JENNIFER NEZ DENETDALE

Department of History, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA

In the Spring of 2003, Vine Deloria, Jr delivered a presentation at theSchool of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Deloria, a distin-

guished Native intellectual and scholar, shared his research which involvedcollecting Native North American origin stories, including those withelements of Native people’s cosmologies and oral histories and comparingthem with the continent’s geological record. Such an approach not only vali-dates and reclaims tribal insights about their relationship to the naturalworld, but challenges parts of standard evolutionary theory and itschronologies. Perhaps predictably, some members of the audienceresponded with skepticism and outright disbelief when Professor Deloriaasserted that Native people’s oral traditions fit well with Western scholars’history of the earth’s geological changes. His frontal assault on the concep-tual structure by which the system of Eurocentric global dominance hascome to be rationalized, justified and made to seem inevitable, has beenmade across disciplines that include anthropology, archaeology, religion,history and literature. In particular, Native scholars owe a debt to VineDeloria, Jr for opening the doors of academia to Native voices. The ques-tions that guided this interview have been informed by the current issuesthat Native communities and scholars face, including those about the nature

Journal of Social Archaeology A R T I C L E

Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (www.sagepublications.com)ISSN 1469-6053 Vol 4(2): 131–146 DOI: 10.1177/1469605304041072

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of research on Native peoples and the questions of ethics and responsibility;the political implications of conducting research on Native peoples; Nativescholars’ responsibilities to their Native communities and the nature ofcollaborative research.

This interview was conducted on 28 March 2003 at the School ofAmerican Research. We thank SAR President Richard Leventhal for hissupport in bringing Professor Deloria to Santa Fe.

JND: I am thinking about last night’s talk, our conversation and myunderstanding of your work from the past 20 years. The questionsI have focus on two major lines of thought that I see in yourscholarship. First, your work has made people sensitive to the ideaof representation, that knowledge is not objective and apolitical.And second, you pose questions like how do we, as Native peoples,reclaim Native knowledge and traditions to create a better worldfor the coming generations.

In your talk, you mentioned your recent search for tall and littlepeople and giants who may have peopled the New World. Oneaudience response I noted was skepticism. You then also noted thatyou presented the possibility for the existence of such people, notbecause you want the audience to believe you or that you believeit, but that we should consider these possibilities. Would youelaborate on the significance of your investigations? How mightyour investigations change the way we understand the history ofthe Americas?

VDJ: In the present world history and the present North Americanhistory, there is a very homogenized generalized thing. It does notinclude very many facts, actually, so it’s more of an ongoingmythology. Consequently, when you come across some unusualfact, an archaeological investigation or historical discovery, peoplejust can’t stand aside as if it has no bearing on anything. I noticedthat some years back. The Doheny expedition in 1924 found allthese petroglyphs – and these were all top scientists of the day. Andthey reported this fact and the profession as a whole said, ‘No, no,no, this can’t be dinosaurs. This can’t be dinosaurs’. Now, what youare looking at there with the petroglyphs is a fact. They went downthe Grand Canyon and found this stuff. But the fact is over-whelmed by the dogma and doctrine that dinosaurs were farremoved from human beings. So the only thing you can say is,‘Well, was this person who chipped that figure into the rock veryprophetic and it’s merely a happy coincidence that he made thatpetroglyph that today resembles what we know as a dinosaur?’

So I got interested in why things were always covered over whenthey didn’t fit into the orthodox paradigm. So, growing up on the


133Denetdale Planting seeds of ideas

reservation, we were getting reports of strange things happeningand meeting people who were doing healings and prophecies,locating lost bodies and all manner of things we knew were a factof human life. But then you have to go into this sterile scientificstructure that says that those things can’t happen. I had to believein one or the other. So I went with my experience, rather than whatI was taught to believe.

Going back to the first two questions you asked. I’m not anti-scientific although I write in that style. What I’m trying to push isthat to be truly scientific means you have to be empirical; you haveto have data and facts to support your beliefs. Here, I presentedthe possibility of locating 500 different items ranging fromuniversity discoveries and excavations clear down to the localfarmer digging up a mound.

Now I consider those facts. They are reports. But what I got lastnight in response was ‘Oh no, no, no. We’ve got to see a body. Wecan’t believe in any of this’. But people in science believe in allkinds of things they can’t see. Quantum physics is simply mathe-matics. Much of astronomy today is mathematics. We don’t pointtelescopes at the sky anymore. We point instruments that canmeasure things. Punch out numbers and you know from thenumbers what you’ve seen. So, it’s hard for people to break awayfrom what they have been taught to believe and to open their mindsand say, ‘Well, maybe this is possible’. If we get enough data on acertain topic, whatever the topic, then you ought to take it seri-ously and investigate it. Where I’ve investigated, the tracks leadright up to the museum door. And they say, ‘No, we didn’t do this’.Then you say, ‘Wait a minute. What’s going on here?’

JND: That is one of the major thoughts I take away from your work, thatis to consider the possibilities and look seriously at how our wayof thinking is so entrenched in Western thought when there is not,in some cases, a basis for it.

VDJ: One of the current theories on Noah’s flood is that this asteroidmade an impact off Antarctica and created a massive tidal wavecoming up the Tigris Euphrates valley. I found a story from one ofthe Navajo sources that seemed to fit in with the theory. They saidthey could see the flood coming for three days. They could see itway up in the sky, this wall of water. Well, that description fitsperfectly with that scenario. Then you have an example from sometribes on the Pacific coast, who say the land originally was flat. Theydidn’t have the Cascade Mountains. Then this terrible catastrophecame and the mountains rose up. So, you have to ask yourself whathappened and how did the mountain-building occur. Then you



discover that, at one point, some geologist gave an estimate just offthe top of his head – let’s say 30 million years. Then you say, ‘But,that’s not scientific’. And then you look at what he’s doing. He’strying to find a radioactive measuring device that will coincide withthe number that he picked out of the air. Well, you say to yourself:‘that’s not a fair measuring thing’.

JND: You also noted the possibility of migrations and travel to the NewWorld dating before Columbus’ appearance. Now, Native peopleswould say that such assertions undermine their claims as theoriginal inhabitants of this land. What do you have to say aboutyour outlook and what can be seen as counterclaims?

VDJ: First, you have to accept the idea that North America has a verycomplex history. You have to admit that all kinds of peoplesunquestionably have been here at one time or another. There istoo much evidence on this point. What I’m trying to do is take theperiod 2400 BC to about Columbus and try and determine whatkind of expeditions or explorers from other continents came hereand what they did. There is good evidence of Chinese exploration,Phoenicians, Vikings and Celts. A number of those must have beenonly one or two ships for explorations that probably went back toEurope, or they just dissolved like some of the Spanish expeditions.In the Southeast, they just came apart and you had survivors andmost of them died. Now, this doesn’t interfere with the variousIndian claims. I’ve said nothing about the Indians and in fact manytribes have stories of strange people crossing their lands. In fact, ifyou go back to the giants, there is a Choctaw story of how theyoriginated the blowgun – the poison darts – during a war with thegiants. It’s a very realistic story and if you, on the one hand, arefinding in various mounds, cutting through hills for roads, findinggiant bones and then you find in Indians’ stories references to thesecreatures, then you have to pose a question: are these bones andthese stories something that connects? Then you start to build abody of knowledge.

Were Indians already here and being visited by these otherpeople? One Chinese story says that they landed around LosAngeles and they marched inland. They came to the GrandCanyon and they said: ‘Wow, this is the canyon where the sun wascreated’. They met the Hopis and they gave a good description ofthe Hopis. So, I’m not saying Hopis came after the Chinese. I’msaying Hopis were already there when the Chinese came.

You can also go back into the Pleistocene era with the biganimals. You look around and check out various tribal stories.Almost universally, tribal stories say there were great big animals



here at one time. The buffalo was twice as big as he is now. Anddogface bear was a great big predator on the plains. Mammothsand mastodons thrived. And the Indians say the animals were verymean to us and abused us. We prayed to the Great Spirit. Thencame this big catastrophe when the Great Spirit destroyed themall. Some of them got downsized. They don’t say, ‘downsized’, theysay they were shrunk in size. I talked with Bill Tall Bull and he toldme of Cheyenne memories before the Ice Age when people andanimals were larger. These things fit together.

There is a book, America: New World or Old? by WernerMuller. It argues that the Sioux, the Salish and the Algonqians usedto live up north in Canada when the planet had better weather.They were forced to migrate south because of a radical change inthe climate. If you put these in the context of this newly develop-ing scenario of our history, they make sense. Asteroids kill off life,but something always seems to survive and so you have thesememories coming down. I haven’t done any research on this yetbut I’m thinking about going into Southwest stories on monstersbecause I think they’re talking about dinosaurs. So, what you wantto do is, put together the best possible scenario to explain thesethings. Then you say, ‘Well, this body of knowledge can bediscarded or enhanced, one or the other, by further research’.Anglos are so used to some authority figure, telling them what tothink. Or they will try to tell someone else what to think. If youpose an open question and consider all the alternatives, that’sscientific. Just say let’s hold all of this in suspension and if we needto refer to it then we’ll bring it forward and reconsider it. Peoplecan’t understand how to think constructively. It is very difficult. Iwas surprised at the skepticism last night. I was just presentingbodies of knowledge and saying, ‘Look, people are working onthese. At a certain point, the body of evidence is going to be over-whelming and we’re going to have to make way and include it’.

Now, you look at tribal creation stories and get into verycomplex cosmologies and you can roughly divide things accordingto a way a lot of tribes have, that current tribes are a mixture ofpeople who were created here and people came here from otherstars or other planets. The Sioux cosmology remembers back whenthere was a star in the middle of the Big Dipper and it disappeared.Some scientists speculate that there is a black hole where the Siouxsay there was a star. So what I’m saying is that fragments of knowl-edge of a far distant past are present in a lot of tribal traditions andthe people themselves. They don’t realize it because they are notconnected to this new thought, or don’t think there is a connection.So, when you begin to point these things out, a lot of this stuff starts



to come together. You begin to see tribal history in a new setting.I think, if you got a lot of this together, then you could ask medicinemen to do ceremonies, ask the spirits and check out the validity ofit. Is this true? Is this not true? There are very intriguing thingsthat tribal people remember, that don’t make sense at the presenttime. But we’ve got to be willing to say that the earth was muchdifferent at another time. It wasn’t the way we look at it now. Thelandscape testifies to that, there is evidence there. The mountainshave come up and people have remembered it. The lakes haveformed. I’m trying to develop little clusters of things that wereprobable and to get tribes to say, ‘Hey, this relates to this . . .’

JND: We have similar kinds of stories. The one people are most familiarwith is the one that takes place near Grants, New Mexico. MonsterSlayer killed a monster there, a giant, and so when you drive acrossthe lava it’s actually the monster’s dried blood. I understand whatyou are talking about. In several of your works you note that acentral question has been whether Indians ‘should be allowed topresent their side of the story, or will helpful and knowing whitesbe the Indians’ spokespeople?’ And that battle has taken up halfof your adult life. To what extent have we been able to representourselves?

VDJ: Well, it’s much, much better than it ever was. When I came intothe field, there was a big gathering of missionaries at Estes Parkevery Fourth of July. There were about 700 whites and 30 Indians.It was all the mission fields. White person after white person gotup and said what should happen to Indians. ‘We are going to makethe policy. We need to tell the government this and that’. Thatattitude had existed for a century. They were doing that whenGrant was president – the Peace Policy. And so Cecil Corbett,Sidney Byrd, myself and some others, the second time we had togo to that, we said we were going to get up and raise hell. So wegot up and said, ‘We don’t want to hear about conversion and allthat. The government is trying to do this, that and the other andwe want you to support us’. We finally took that thing over. Andthe result of it was that a lot of the white missionaries got mad andwouldn’t come. They didn’t want to listen to Indians. It finallydissolved. They don’t do that anymore.

But then, I looked around and there was much work to do.Anthropologists were still giving testimony in court cases, insteadof Indians. So, a number of us went in swinging and you’d besurprised at the attitude. In the mid-1970s, a group tried to start ahuman relations council in the Southwest, in Texas, Oklahoma,Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and California. Some of us were



invited to attend the organizing meeting. They had the boarddivided into blacks, Chicanos and whites. I said, ‘Where are theIndians?’ ‘Well, the Indians are not ready for this yet and so we aregoing to have a project, an Indian advisory committee’. I said, ‘Ohno, Indians are going to get one fourth of the board meeting’. Thenthey said, ‘Then we have to give Asians something’. And I said,‘Well then, let’s give Asians something’. ‘Why do you think wecan’t handle this? We’re running poverty programs with millionsof dollars a year. Putting complex legislation through Congress’.This was just prior to Wounded Knee [1973]. And we finally forcedIndian board membership and tried to get the organization going.Again, the whites got mad and left. So, what you learned was thatthese people don’t give up their status very easily. They weren’tgraceful people at all. That is not true anymore. Indians can formtheir own organizations. They can participate in a lot of advisorycouncils and organizations as equals. No one would dare say,‘Indians aren’t smart enough. We’ll make them a project’. I thinkthere has been a lot of progress made.

JND: Your scathing criticism of anthropological and archaeological prac-tices, perhaps best known from Custer Died for Your Sins, hasbrought about a subfield, where scholars are now publishing papersabout ideal collaborative relationships between researchers (mostof whom remain non-Native) and Native communities and Nativeresearchers and communities are insisting upon research ethics thatinclude responsibility to Native communities, research that isuseful and valid for Native peoples, among others. Consideringyour experiences and knowledge of various disciplines, do youthink that much has changed in the way research is conducted onand about Native peoples?

VDJ: There have been a lot of positive changes. When I came into thefield, there was a uniform belief that any anthropologist couldknow more about Indian tribes than the Indians. They never ques-tioned that. We started questioning that very early and they startedto back off. There was a big split in anthropology. They won’t admitit, but suddenly we had some anthropologist allies and we had somebitter enemies. I knew there was something going on inside anthro-pology. They got the ethics set up, but often, they carry the ethicsthing too far. You can’t go and talk to people without this elabor-ate process. Once you give them a form to fill out, they’ll fill outthe form but they’ll do the same thing they used to, taking picturesand talking to elders. Fill out the form and then go and talk to somepeople. The people they talk to become objects of investigationagain. It is not really collaborative. But Indians have to keep the



pressure on. You can’t let these people go wandering around yourPueblo. They had this big flap over this guy who did this book atHopi.

JND: Was it Thomas Mails?

VDJ: This was before Mails. I don’t remember his name, but he was awell-known anthropologist. Been out there eight years and finallypublished this book the Hopis didn’t like. Nancy Wood publisheda book on Taos and the Taos people didn’t like it. I did the intro-duction to it. And she is really not a scholar and repeated thingsthat had been said in confidence and some people at Taos raisedhell with me. And I said, ‘Look, you let her wander around yourPueblo for years and she regarded that as an invitation to learnand write about you’. Same with the anthropologist at Hopi. Ithink Indians really have to be vigilant. They ought to have theirown forms for people to fill out. But when you get to Indianscholars studying Indians, I think there ought to be a completelydifferent format. You ought to go in and talk to the tribal counciland the traditional elders and become part of that communityduring your research. Make certain that there’s always someonewho the tribe can point to and say, ‘She’s repeated faithfully whatwe told her to write down’. A lot of that has to change. We stillneed to put up a big fight in the social sciences to get Indianscholars in professional meetings, because often, two or threeanthropologists will bring their Indian graduate students and say,‘Indians are represented’.

JND: One of the things that I noticed and shared with other Nativescholars is that Native scholars have contributed by personalizingthe methodology. For example, when I took oral histories in my owncommunity with the descendants of Manuelito and Juanita, whathappened was that it turned into storytelling sessions. It wasn’t aquestion/answer interview, but my grandpa was there. My grand-mother was there. My mother was there. So, it’s storytelling thatgoes on. That’s one of the differences in research methods I noted.

VDJ: I ran into problems in Colorado. We started holding conferencesabout traditional knowledge and someone at the university said,‘You have to get permission to do all this’. And I said, ‘Come onnow. This is not doing research. These are my personal friends’.Am I going to say to Albert Whitehat, ‘Can you sign a paper so Ican talk to you?’ I said, ‘You have to understand, we are composedof a community looking for traditional knowledge. We representall tribes and run things more democratically than anything on thiscampus. We’re not going to sign this’. So they backed off.



JND: The Navajo Nation is starting to deal with these issues. There aretons of researchers out there. I think the Navajo Nation has beenone of the most receptive to researchers and I see that changing.The writing of Indian cultures by non-Indians has played animportant political role in legitimizing, perpetuating and sustainingimperialist attitudes toward Native peoples. Yet, in a recent IndianCountry Today, you stated that Native scholars needed to writenon-fiction. Of fiction writers you say that ‘it’s easier to write aboutemotions’ and that we’ve had ‘years of that’. Would you speak tothe place of the arts, including fiction, as a form of resistance?

VDJ: I think I’ve been kind of disappointed that so many Indian writerseither do poetry or write novels and short stories. I realize thatpersonal choice fits in well with a certain portion of Americansociety and they try to do that. On the other hand, in non-fiction,you get books that really are fiction. There is this book on the West,by Elliot West of Arkansas and in it he says Indians are respons-ible for the extinction of the bison. He says: ‘The settlers did killsome buffalo, but we won’t count them. And the buffalo huntersdid kill some, but we won’t count them’. Then he comes up withthis ridiculous scenario that the Cheyennes eliminated the buffalowhen they wintered in the Big Timbers, which was a 12-mile strip,an island in Arkansas River. That’s where some bands winteredbecause they could water their horses and the horses could eat thecottonwood bark. This guy says that the buffalo used to come downto the Big Timbers and winter there also. But when the Indianswere there, the buffalo couldn’t come and the buffalo birthrate felland they became extinct. This is totally stupid. Where are theIndian writers who can come into this non-fiction field and say,‘What is this nonsense?’.

There is Dan Flores up in Montana. He says the only way toestimate how many buffalo there were is to take the number ofanimals in this area in 1900–1910 and figure out how many animalsthe land could support. He used figures for fenced stock and thenargued that the buffalo herd was that size. This is overlookinghistorical observations. A cavalry troop in eastern Kansas in the1860s was authorized to go to a place some 30 miles away. Theywent over the first hill from the fort and there was a buffalo herdstretching to the horizon. They were inside that buffalo herd untilthey got to the next fort. It was a buffalo herd 30–40 miles wide.Lord knows how many buffalo. So the idea that Indians killing afew buffalo caused the herd to go extinct is impossible. At the sametime, when the buffalo hunters came in, they took three or fourmillion hides a year and wiped the buffalo out.



So my statement here is simply: Jump in here and get into themix. Start writing rebuttals. We need a truth squad running aroundin academia. Totally absurd, this idea that Indians came down andcleaned out all of the big game. Written by a man who has no ideahow animals live, how hunters hunt. They say a hundred Indianscame down from the north and killed a mammoth a week each andas they marched south they left no animals behind them. That’sstupid. Animals have rhythms and rotations. You could kill a wholebunch this summer and they’d just sneak around and go back upnorth or back west or away from the direction you were. If youcould clear an area of animals, American white hunters would havedone this with the deer 200 years ago. Those animals aren’t boundto be in an area. Now, hundreds of Indian scholars out of their ownpersonal knowledge could easily refute all of that. But there are noIndians there saying, ‘Wait a minute . . .’ That’s what I was talkingabout. You get a generation that just wants to express their feelingsas individuals, then what happens to the community? You havepeople saying, ‘We have to restrict Indian hunting and fishingbecause they killed off all the animals. They can’t be trusted’. Alot of what happens to us is political. We need political writers torespond.

JND: One of the longstanding facts about Navajos is that we came downfrom Canada into the Southwest with virtually no culture. Anthro-pologists note that Navajos have a complex language that is classi-fied as Athabaskan, but that we came into the Southwest with verylittle culturally. Everything we have has been borrowed fromPueblos or Spaniards or the Americans. It’s a blank slate theorythat is not applied to any other tribal peoples. We literally had to,according to the literature, wear high-heels so our knuckleswouldn’t drag.

VDJ: I’ve always thought that was tremendously unfair.

JND: In several of your works, you have articulated changes that mustbe made for successful Indian nations, including structural reform,cultural renewal, economic stability and stable relations betweenIndian nations, states and the federal government. Recently,women scholars have been raising questions about how nations,formulated on Western patriarchal values, recreate and perpetuateinequalities between men and women. What are your thoughts onthese sorts of analyses?

VDJ: If you look at all the Indian nations, they either had clans or kinshiporganizations that kept the nation together – prevented dom-estic conflict. Clan/kinship really governed the way they acted



economically. Women were primary actors in both kinship andclan. Along come the European governments, European explor-ers. And they are like the anthropologists of today who are lookingfor people like themselves and who can deal with people only onterms that they understand. You come to treaties, which in Europeis a temporary agreement to stop fighting. When they deal withIndians, they want to talk to one head chief because they’ve got aking over in Europe and expect to find one here. They don’t under-stand how you can have a council of people without any leadertelling them what to do. They don’t understand clan at all becauseyou have to see that in the actions of people, toward each other,toward relatives and strangers. You have to understand adoption.Many tribes, when they lost a family member, they’d adoptsomeone from another tribe, whereas Europeans created orphansand put them in an institution.

The whole thing got terribly overbalanced. When I say returnto new structural reform, new cultural reform, I’ve really beenthinking a long time about taking kinship and clan responsibilitiesseriously. Bat Pourier, at Pine Ridge, has set up a family gas station.He is employing all the relatives, like the old family ways. I thinkthat’s the way to go. It’s about the only successful small businessup there. If you can get people to organize, we call it tiospaye, allthe immediate blood relatives work together.

The Menominees successfully ran their timber operation usingtraditional practices. They invented sustained harvest in timberpractice. In the northwest they have longhouses – family units. Sotoday we have to go back to that and look at politics and econ-omics and even education, as functioning best in large family units.And you can do that with day schools, but now that you have thosebig consolidated schools on reservations, all the teachers can do iskeep the kids from getting in trouble. They really can’t teach themanything. Indians took care of themselves really well for a hundredthousand years. And then in the last hundred years, the kids wereseparated from the rest of the family. Even white kids. That’s whythey have so many problems. They’re separated from the family,from elders. The elders have no responsibility to the young ones.If you go to any tribe and find out how they handle crisis, you goright down the age groups, each one looking out for the other.Attack a Sioux camp and they could be ready to fight you in fiveminutes. The older children would grab the younger ones, get ona horse and disappear. The women would gather up the babies.Warriors went out to fight. Everybody had a role in society. Every-body knew what to do. And you can see that in a lot of tribes. Theyeach had different responses, but they were very well organized.



There were no orphans. There really were no unattached peoplewithout relatives. So, a society that is that well connected canrespond to anything. I think some industries on tribal land shouldbe run to provide employment, not profit. It’s far better to havepeople doing things like that. That’s really what the war on povertytried to do. You got extra money. A number of tribes had rangerprograms doing conservation work. All these unemployed peoplecame off the dole, beautifying and establishing parks. That wasvery effective. That’s what the federal government was doingduring the Depression. Everything worked.

JND: I think Native women scholars have said the same thing; we needto recreate community ties.

VDJ: You need some impetus to get over that transition and you haveto know Indians. I was very successful, when I was running theNCAI (National Congress of American Indians), at winning theelections. All kinds of people tried to knock me out of thatdirector’s position. The way I won was based on knowing howpeople acted. When we entered the convention, I knew who theinfluential women were from the different tribes. I took them forcoffee and spent some time listening to them. I spent all the timewith them. I’d win support of the tribe through the women. Onetime, Cato Valandra was going to double-cross us. He wouldn’tnominate Wendell for President. He’d made deals with somebodyelse. Alvina Graybear and Eunice Larrabee were sitting therewatching him. Finally, Alvina slammed her pocketbook down.‘Cato, you get up there and nominate Wendell. Or when we getback . . .’. He jumped out of that chair and Eunice was waving herfinger at him, ‘you won’t be able to appear in South Dakota!’ Once,when I was visiting San Carlos, we were discussing legislation andfour Apache women came and sat in the back of the room. Thoseguys really shaped up quick.

JND: Sometimes I go to chapter meetings where the women are reallyvocal. They talk and they argue and they interrupt. But when youget to the tribal council, where it’s men, you see a differentdynamic. For the past week I have been consumed by world events.It’s something a lot of us are thinking about: the US invasion ofIraq, growing anti-American sentiment in the world, the numberof Native men and women in the military. In several of your works,including God is Red: A Native View of Religion, you discuss howChristianity continues to influence and shape Western history, phil-osophy, social sciences and the sciences. As I watch the newscoverage of the war with Iraq, it’s impossible to miss the constant



references to God. A recent Newsweek or Time cover depictsGeorge Bush with head bowed in prayer. Our government declaresthat God is on our side. It seems that Americans are turning totheir churches as a way to cope with this war. The Pope hasexpressed anti-war sentiments. What are your thoughts on thereferences to Christianity in this present war?

VDJ: It’s always been an imperial religion. It’s always been extremelyaggressive. It’s always been very stubborn and intolerant. ‘We’reright and no one else is’. Using Christianity as a justification forattacking a nation is a well-known phenomenon. It’s very sadbecause people claiming to be Christian do not act in accordancewith their beliefs. When they cite the Bible they usually are citingonly the Old Testament, which is not really Christian, but Jewish.It’s not unexpected that they are going to say this war is all right.The louder they shout that ‘God’s on our side’, the less justifi-cation we actually have for doing these things. You didn’t hear thisduring the Second World War. It was minimal. We had an identifi-able enemy, Japan, and everybody assumed God was on our side.The leaders didn’t keep bashing you over the head with it. Youturn on the TV today and God is doing this, that and the other.But if you go back to the Old Testament, ‘Vengeance is mine saiththe Lord’. Even if you take the worse of the Old Testament, itdoesn’t justify killing your enemies. There is this other admoni-tion, don’t do this on the basis of revenge. It’s a major catastrophefor humankind.

JND: Native men have a long history of serving in the US military. In theFirst World War more than 12,000 Native people served, eventhough we were not US citizens. In the Vietnam War, over 50,000served and 90 percent were volunteers. In this war, there are thou-sands of Native men and women who have been deployed and onthe Navajo Nation it was reported that rallies in support of ourtroops were being held. Given our history with the USA, one ofbroken treaties and dispossession, how does it happen that asNative peoples we continue to display a loyalty and patriotism tothe USA, when it seems like such a contradiction? I’ve heard otherNative people express this as well.

VDJ: It certainly goes very deep; it’s almost hazardous to try and explainit. You take the First World War, a lot of Sioux volunteered. It wasonly 20 years after Wounded Knee, so that was unique. I thinkamong Indians there’s always been a very benign, very humaneexpectation that there will be justice. We’re always so trusting ofeverybody. Put in this context: someone has attacked the USA –



we volunteer. And after the war we want just treatment forourselves so that we don’t have to fight tooth and nail for it. Weare always willing to go one more mile than the Christian. We aremore Christian than the Christians. And when we ask for justiceor the simple fulfillment of legal obligations, then we realize onceagain that these people can’t be trusted. It’s up and down. Peoplesupport the USA with the hope that they are creating better lives.It never happens.

JND: I’ve noticed references to the ‘Indian wars’ in present militaryrhetoric. The Seventh Cavalry has several divisions named ‘CrazyHorse’ and ‘Apache’. Military hardware has names like theApache helicopter and the Black Hawk missile. A recent NewYork Times article relates that the Seventh Cavalry’s history isreplete with tales that hint at the heroism, mishap and tragedy thatgo hand in hand in war. What is significant about America’scontinual recalling of its past history, the Indian wars, with Nativepeoples?

VDJ: We are still regarded as a very strange people, just not a part ofAmerica. The Seventh Cavalry wasn’t all that heroic. They wereled by a moron and lot of soldiers panicked during the battle. Yet,this is the great myth that America cherishes. They’re always right.They are always the smartest. But to achieve that status they haveto borrow from Indians. There are no real distinguished people.You hear references to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, butthose are historical people. They don’t have that special aura sothey use Indian names and it evokes all the positive militaristicIndian traits. It assumes a religious power. Say ‘Geronimo!’ whenyou jump out of a plane. It gives the white guys added courage, byborrowing from our warrior tradition. America has won a lot ofwars by simply overwhelming their opponents. That’s not beingheroic. That’s how they beat Germany. They were able to produceso much material, they simply out-produced them. Look at Iraqand the use of every possible weapon in the world against them.That’s not heroic.

JND: I guess it’s the creation of a past because America has such a shortpast. It’s only 200 years old, so they have to create this gloriouspast.

What and who have been major influences in your career as ascholar and Native activist?

VDJ: A lot of people. A lot of books. A lot of my career was because Itook things at face value; I was very naïve. I thought you could dothings. In retrospect, if I hadn’t thought I couldn’t have done them,



I probably wouldn’t have done them. So, my being stupid has beena big help. When I read an article, I really get involved in the issue,because I know that I don’t know it. But along the way, I’vemet both elders and people my own age who have been veryhelpful to me. And it always got me back on the ground with allkinds of ideas. Some of the elders are standing up – a whole gener-ation. And then an occasional Indian maverick stands up for some-thing.

JND: Can you name them?

VDJ: Billy Frank, in Mesquakie, who was responsible for the fishingrights. Bill Tall Bull, Cheyenne medicine man. Frank Ducheneaux,who was a longtime chairman at Cheyenne River. Norbert Hale,Sr, who use to be chairman at Oneida. And there was a BIA man,Graham Holmes, who helped me understand Washington politics.He was part Choctaw. I’ve been lucky that when I neededguidance, the right people have been around. Sometimes you feellike you are lost, get discouraged. You go back to who you thinkyour friends are. Maybe you make one or two new friends doingthat and you come back out of it. Nothing is straightforward andeasy, so I think over the years different people have given medifferent insights and more opportunities to do something.

JND: You have been a major force that has influenced and shaped ageneration of academics and a generation of Native peoples. Whatdo you hope to leave as your legacy?

VDJ: If you look very seriously, almost all of my books are sketches. Iworked on each one of them for years, footnoting each one ofthem, making them precise. What I wanted to do was create a bird’seye view on a topic. I’ve written on religion, on oral tradition andon politics. I hope that the next several generations will take someof these, where there are one or two useful ideas in these books,and take that idea and move forward with it. What I wanted was atype of literature that almost anyone could pick up off the book-shelf, read through and get a reasonable idea of what the subjectwas, the complexity of it and where it originated in the past. So, agood legacy would be if people could take some of the contents ofthese books and develop their own articulation of Native rights andIndian culture. I really like seeing Greg (Cajete) and Dan(Wildcat) taking the leadership. I wish there were ten times thatmany people. It is discouraging, that you have to look for them. Iwould like for them to be really visible.



Acknowledgements

The title is taken from Vine Deloria Jr’s essay, ‘Thinking in Public: A Forum’,American Literary History 10(1) (1998). We would like to thank Lynn Meskell forher interest in and support of this project.

VINE DELORIA, Jr , Standing Rock Sioux, is one of the foremost NativeAmerican scholars today. The author of several seminal works, includingCuster Died For Your Sins, God is Red and Red Earth,White Lies: Native Ameri-cans and the Myth of Scientific Fact, Deloria is a venerated Elder whosevision for tribal peoples and sense of responsibility to the Nativecommunity are emblematic. His most recent publication is Evolution,Creationism, & Other Modern Myths: A Critical Inquiry.


Documents

Denetdale 2004 Planting Seeds of Ideas & Rising Doubts