![]() Cover of the first edition | |
Author | Vine Deloria Jr. |
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Genre | Non-fiction |
Publisher | Macmillan |
Publication date | 1969 |
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto is a 1969 non-fiction book by the lawyer, professor and writer Vine Deloria, Jr. The book was noteworthy for its relevance to the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement and other activist organizations, such as the American Indian Movement, which was beginning to expand. Deloria's book encouraged better use of federal funds aimed at helping Native Americans. Vine Deloria, Jr. presents Native Americans in a humorous light, devoting an entire chapter to Native American humor. Custer Died for Your Sins was significant in its presentation of Native Americans as a people who were able to retain their tribal society and morality, while existing in the modern world.
The book consists of eleven essays and is critical of aid organizations, churches, and the US government, for their efforts to "help" Native Americans, which often hinder rather than help progress. Deloria also objects to the efforts of anthropologists to understand Native Americans, devoting millions of dollars to the study of individual tribes that would help the tribes advance. The book advocates Native American religion, and encourages church groups to lay aside their theological differences and help the tribes whose members they sought to convert.
Deloria pointed out numerous beliefs and attitudes that affect Native American-White relations. He noted that many whites claim Indian ancestry, usually by a grandmother who was an Indian Princess and wryly noted that tribes were evidently entirely female for the first 300 years of white occupation. [1] The essay lists many other myths about Native Americans.
While noting that U.S. Presidents continually stressed the need to meet its treaty obligations with foreign powers, they have had over 400 treaties with Native American tribes and have yet to meet their obligations on any of them. [1] Deloria saw the Vietnam war as just another example of the lack of integrity in the American government. [1]
This chapter covered the termination policy of the 1950s, designed to assimilate tribal members into white society. Deloria believed that this was just another way for whites to obtain Native American land. [1]
Deloria recommended that Native Americans not cooperate with anthropologists, believing that they exploited Native Americans in order to further their own academic careers. He stated that they compiled useless knowledge and noted that not one anthropologist stepped forward during termination hearings. [1] He stated that "behind each policy and program with which Indians are plagued, if traced completely back to its origin, stands the anthropologist." [2] [3]
The role of Christian churches was also attacked, with Deloria advocating a return to traditional religion and an expansion of the Native American Church. [1]
Deloria advocated a restructuring of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), with more discretionary funds available to the tribes. He also recommended moving BIA from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Commerce. [1]
This is the most often quoted section of the book. [1] Deloria noted that humor was a critical aspect of social control in tribal relationships, as an alternate means of pointing out flaws and errors without a direct confrontation that would affect the dignity of the accused. [1] He also noted that humor was an essential part of a tribe's survival, preventing them from going to extremes. [4]
Deloria noted the similarities of the oppression of both Native Americans and African Americans, but also pointed out differences between the two. While oppression against African Americans typically excluded them from white society, oppression against Native Americans typically involved the forced inclusion into white society. [5] Deloria believed that this was due to the white desire to appropriate and exploit Native American lands and resources. He also noted that this is one of the reasons that Native Americans did not participate fully in civil rights efforts in the 1960s, believing that the liberals did not understand Native American nationalism. [5]
Deloria addresses the lack of central leadership of Native Americans and the trouble that has caused. He compares specifically to the number of leaders seen during the Civil Rights' era and laments at the absence of comparable Native figures.
Deloria uses this chapter as a response to those individuals who believe that Native Americans have no place in modern society as they are, with tribalism as the central point of contention. Deloria argues that tribalism is so inherent to the Native identity that it will one day lead them to do things once thought impossible by “Indian and non-Indian alike”. [6]
In his final chapter Deloria advocates for the end of termination and the start of a new era for American Indians. Deloria reflects the civil rights movement and suggests that it is a spot Natives can find inspiration for their own movement.
Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, was based on a bumper sticker, and a Native American slogan from the 1960s, "We Shall Overrun." The book was significant at the time of its publication, as the struggle for minority rights was gaining increased attention across the United States. Due to its importance in the Red Power movement, an original copy of the book was displayed in the National Museum of the American Indian's long-term exhibit "Our Lives: Contemporary Life and Identities". [7] The book caused anthropologists to rethink how they approached their studies of Native American tribes. [8] It remains one of the most significant non-fiction books written by a Native American.
The term tribe is used in many different contexts to refer to a category of human social group. The predominant worldwide usage of the term in English is in the discipline of anthropology. Its definition is contested, in part due to conflicting theoretical understandings of social and kinship structures, and also reflecting the problematic application of this concept to extremely diverse human societies. The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, ethnicity, nation or state. These terms are similarly disputed. In some cases tribes have legal recognition and some degree of political autonomy from national or federal government, but this legalistic usage of the term may conflict with anthropological definitions.
The Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of June 18, 1934, or the Wheeler–Howard Act, was U.S. federal legislation that dealt with the status of American Indians in the United States. It was the centerpiece of what has been often called the "Indian New Deal".
Ella Cara Deloria, also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ, was a Yankton Dakota (Sioux) educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist. She recorded Native American oral history and contributed to the study of Native American languages. According to Cotera (2008), Deloria was "a pre-eminent expert on Dakota/Lakota/Nakota cultural religious, and linguistic practices." In the 1940s, Deloria wrote a novel titled Waterlily, which was published in 1988, and republished in 2009.
Vine Victor Deloria Jr. was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights. He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964 to 1967, he served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing its membership of tribes from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and in Washington, DC, on the Mall.
Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, also Tigua Pueblo, is a Native American Pueblo and federally recognized tribe in the Ysleta section of El Paso, Texas. Its members are Southern Tiwa people who had been displaced from Spanish New Mexico from 1680 to 1681 during the Pueblo Revolt against the Spaniards.
The Trail of Broken Treaties was a 1972 cross-country caravan of American Indian and First Nations organizations that started on the West Coast of the United States and ended at the Department of Interior headquarters building at the US capital of Washington, D.C. Participants called for the restoration of tribes’ treaty-making authority, the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and federal investment in jobs, housing, and education.
Alfred Sully, was a military officer during the American Civil War and during the Indian Wars on the frontier. He was also a noted painter.
The Red Power movement was a social movement led by Native American youth to demand self-determination for Native Americans in the United States. Organizations that were part of the Red Power Movement include the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). This movement sought the rights for Native Americans to make policies and programs for themselves while maintaining and controlling their own land and resources. The Red Power movement took a confrontational and civil disobedience approach to inciting change in United States to Native American affairs compared to using negotiations and settlements, which national Native American groups such as National Congress of American Indians had before. Red Power centered around mass action, militant action, and unified action.
The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) is an American Indian and Alaska Native rights organization. It was founded in 1944 to represent the tribes and resist U.S. federal government pressure for termination of tribal rights and assimilation of their people. These were in contradiction of their treaty rights and status as sovereign entities. The organization continues to be an association of federally recognized and state-recognized Indian tribes.
Native American self-determination refers to the social movements, legislation and beliefs by which the Native American tribes in the United States exercise self-governance and decision-making on issues that affect their own people.
Philip Joseph Deloria is a Yankton Dakota Native American author and who specializes in Native American, Western American, and environmental history. He is the son of scholar Vine Deloria, Jr., and the great nephew of ethnologist Ella Deloria. Deloria is the author of the award-winning books Playing Indian (1998) and Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), among others. Deloria received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University and currently teaches in the Department of History at Harvard University. In 2021 he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Custer, also known as The Legend of Custer, is a 17-episode military-Western television series which ran on ABC from September 6 to December 27, 1967, with Wayne Maunder in the starring role of then Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Criticizing the series as "glamorizing Custer," a concerted protest headed by the Tribal Indians Land Rights Association successfully halted broadcast of the series under the FCC fairness doctrine.
The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 was a United States law intended to create a "a program of vocational training" for Native Americans in the United States. Critics characterize the law as an attempt to encourage Native Americans to leave Indian reservations and their traditional lands, to assimilate into the general population in urban areas, and to weaken community and tribal ties. Critics also characterize the law as part of the Indian termination policy between 1940 and 1960, which terminated the tribal status of numerous groups and cut off previous assistance to tribal citizens. The Indian Relocation Act encouraged and forced Native Americans to move to cities for job opportunities. It also played a significant role in increasing the population of urban Native Americans in succeeding decades.
Ex parte Crow Dog, 109 U.S. 556 (1883), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that followed the death of one member of a Native American tribe at the hands of another on reservation land. Crow Dog was a member of the Brulé band of the Lakota Sioux. On August 5, 1881 he shot and killed Spotted Tail, a Lakota chief; there are different accounts of the background to the killing. The tribal council dealt with the incident according to Sioux tradition, and Crow Dog paid restitution to the dead man's family. However, the U.S. authorities then prosecuted Crow Dog for murder in a federal court. He was found guilty and sentenced to hang.
Seymour v. Superintendent of Wash. State Penitentiary, 368 U.S. 351 (1962), was a case in which the Supreme Court of the United States that the state of Washington did not have jurisdiction to try an Indian for a crime committed within the boundaries of the Colville Indian Reservation, even if the crime was committed on land now owned by a non-Indian.
Jacqueline Keeler is a Native American writer and activist, enrolled in the Navajo Nation and of Yankton Dakota descent, who co-founded Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry (EONM), which seeks to end the use of Native American racial groups as mascots.
The Choctaw Youth Movement (CYM) was a Choctaw nationalist grassroots movement born in the late 1960s in response to efforts by the federal government to terminate the Choctaw Nation. It was formed, in part, as a tribal-centric movement to counter the Pan-Indianism of other Native rights groups, such as the American Indian Movement. As opposed to AIM, the Choctaw Youth Movement practiced non-confrontational, peaceful activism, and advocated cultural revitalization and the readoption of tribal language, and taking pride in the distinctness of being Choctaw. The defense of the tribal culture and history took precedence over maintaining inter-tribal alliances.
Helen Peterson was a Cheyenne-Lakota activist and lobbyist. She was the first director of the Denver Commission on Human Relations. She was the second Native American woman to become director of the National Congress of American Indians at a time when the government wanted to discharge their treaty obligations to the tribes by eliminating their tribal governments through the Indian termination policy and forcing the tribe members to assimilate into the mainstream culture. She authored a resolution on Native American education, which was ratified at the second Inter-American Indian Conference, held in Cuzco, Peru. In 1986, Peterson was inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame and the following year, her papers were donated to the Smithsonian's National Anthropological Archives and they are now held at the National Museum of the American Indian.
David E. Wilkins, a citizen of the Lumbee Nation, is a political scientist specializing in federal Indian policy and law. He is the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor in Leadership Studies at the Jepson School of Leadership Studies in the University of Richmond. He studies Native politics, governance, and legal systems, with a particular focus on Native sovereignty, self-determination, and diplomacy. Wilkins was a student of Vine Deloria Jr., coauthoring two books with Deloria and writing a book about his intellectual impact.