Vine Deloria junior

Vine Deloria Jr. (* 26. March 1933 in Martin , South Dakota ; † 13. November 2005 in Golden , Colorado ) was an Indian - American legal and political scientist, author and activist. In his best-known work Custer Died for Your Sins (" Custer Died for Your Sins") from 1969, he criticizes the treatment of the Indians by the US government and ethnologists .

Live and act

From theologian to lawyer

The Yankton - Nakota -Indianer Deloria grew up in the Reservation Standing Rock on. He came from a family closely linked to the Episcopal Church . After completing his theology degree at Iowa State University , he completed a law degree at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1964 to 1967 . At the time he hoped to be able to help his people better as a lawyer, but later embarked on a professional career in the field of university teaching.

Commitment to the rights of the Indians

Even during his training, Deloria was an activist for Indian rights. He has published a number of highly regarded books on Indian rights. He was a member of various Indian organizations, board member of the National Museum of the American Indian and director of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) and received the prestigious Wallace Stegner Award from the Center of the American West in 2002 . He taught political science and history at various universities.

Impetus for the Pan-Indian movement

Vine Deloria's book "God is Red" (1973) had a significant influence on the recent history of the North American Indians . In his book he compared Christianity with the (diverse) Indian religions: the latter are based primarily on a close spiritual connection with holy places of the respective ethnic groups, while Christianity primarily relates to certain historical events. This results in a “compulsion to believe” for Christians, since these events can no longer be experienced personally, whereas “the Indian” can make contact with the transcendent world at his holy places at any time . He also criticized the claim that Christian revelation was universally valid "to subdue the earth". In fact, historical events or “time itself” play only a subordinate role in almost all ethnic religions, in contrast to current sacred “living” natural phenomena . The aim of his comparison was to strengthen the role of the Indians as “guardians of mother earth ”, which emerged in the 1960s . This was enthusiastically received by the environmental movement and the American Indian Movement and from then on served as an argument for spiritually justified land rights demands such as the return of the sacred Black Hills to the Lakota or the fight of the Apaches against an observatory on Mount Graham . Such endeavors eventually led to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act , which at least created the legal basis to better protect both traditional cults and related holy places. The Pan-Indian movement also likes to cite Deloria's book as evidence of the universal mother-earth concept of the North American Indians, although this deification of the earth is not an ancient motif of the Indian religions.

Anthropology and evolution from an Indian perspective

In the last decade of his life, Deloria devoted himself again increasingly to the criticism of the American scientific community - especially paleoanthropology - from a native point of view. In 1995, for example, he vehemently opposed the popular notions of recent , endglacial first colonization of North America via the Bering Strait , and decidedly denied the thesis that the North American megafauna had been exterminated by the ancestors of today's Native Americans . In his last major work, published in 2002, he finally presented a critical-negative view of both the theory of evolution and Christian creationism .

bibliography

• Aggressions of civilization: federal Indian policy since the 1880s. Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1984.
• American Indian policy in the twentieth century. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1985.
• American Indians, American justice. University of Texas Press, Austin 1983.
• Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: an Indian declaration of independence. Dell Publishing Co., New York 1974.
• A Better Day for Indians. Field Foundation, New York 1976.
• A brief history of the Federal responsibility to the American Indian. Dept. of Health, Education, and Welfare, Washington 1979.
• Custer died for your sins: an Indian manifesto. Macmillan, New York 1969. New edition: B&T 2003, ISBN 0-8061-2129-7
• For this land: writings on religion in America. Routledge, New York 1999.
• Frank Waters: man and mystic. Swallow Press: Ohio University Press, Athens 1993.
• God is red: a native view of religion. North American Press, Golden, Colorado 1994, God is red. An Indian provocation. Dianus-Trikont-Buchverlag, Munich 1984, new edition: Lamuv 1996, ISBN 3-88977-459-8
• The Indian affair. Friendship Press, New York 1974.
• Indians of the Pacific Northwest. Doubleday, New York 1977.
• The metaphysics of modern existence. Harper & Row, San Francisco 1979.
• The nations within: the past and future of American Indian sovereignty. Pantheon Books, New York 1984.
• Of utmost good faith. Straight Arrow Books, San Francisco 1971.
• Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact. Scibner, New York 1995.
• The red man in the new world drama: a politico-legal study with a pageantry of American Indian history. Macmillan, New York 1971.
• Reminiscences of Vine V. Deloria, Yankton Sioux Tribe of South Dakota 1970. New York Times oral history program: American Indian oral history research project. Part II; no.82.
• The right to know: a paper. Office of Library and Information Services, US Dept. of the Interior, Washington, DC 1978.
• A sender of words: essays in memory of John G. Neihardt . Howe Brothers, Salt Lake City 1984.
• Singing for a spirit: a portrait of the Dakota Sioux. Clear Light Publishers, Santa Fe, NM 1999.
• Spirit and reason: the Vine Deloria, Jr., reader. Fulcrum Pub, Golden, Colorado 1999.
• Tribes, treaties, and constitutional tribulations (with David E. Wilkins), University of Texas Press, Austin 1999.
• We talk, you listen; new tribes, new turf. Macmillan, New York 1970. German Only tribes will survive. Indian proposals for a radical cure of the wild west. Trikont-Verlag, Munich 1976, new edition: Lamuv 1996, ISBN 3-88977-427-X

See also

• Ward Churchill

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Christian F. Feest : Animated Worlds - The Religions of the Indians of North America. In: Small Library of Religions , Vol. 9, Herder, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-451-23849-7 . Pp. 36-39, 57-59.
2. ↑ See: http://centerwest.org/events/stegner/ (accessed: September 4, 2011)
3. ↑ Source: University of Colorado at Boulder (NewsCenter): " Vine Deloria Jr., Renowned Author And American Indian Leader, Dies At 72 ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and still not checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this note. ", Nov. 14, 2005 (accessed: September 4, 2011) 
4. ↑ See z. E.g. Thomas Biolsi & Larry J. Zimmerman (Eds.): "Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Deloria, JR., And the Critique of Anthropology", University of Arizona Press, 1997
5. ^ Vine Deloria Jr .: "Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact", New York (Scibner), 1995
6. ^ Vine Deloria Jr .: "Evolution, Creationism, and other modern myths - A Critical Inquiry," Golden / Colorado (Fulcrum Publishing), 2002
7. ↑ See also: Vine Deloria, Steve Pavlik, Daniel R. Wildcat: "Destroying dogma: Vine Deloria, Jr. and his influence on American society", Golden / Colorado, 2006

Web links

• Literature by and about Vine Deloria junior in the catalog of the German National Library
• Native American Authors Project: Vine Deloria Jr.
• Vine Deloria Jr. (biography), at Atlantisforschung.de
• Vine Deloria Jr .: " Indianische Urgeschichte " (excerpt from: "Red earth, white lies", 1995), at: Atlantisforschung.de

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This article is based on the article Vine Deloria junior ( memento of July 1, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) from the free encyclopedia Indianer Wiki ( memento of March 18, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) and is under Creative Commons by-sa 3.0 . A list of the authors was available in the Indian Wiki ( Memento from July 1, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).