Vine Deloria Jr. 1933 – 2005

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Standing Rock Sioux philosopher, theologian, and the most widely read indigenous American intellectual of the late twentieth century. Custer Died for Your Sins, his 1969 manifesto, transformed the public American conversation on indigenous policy, while God Is Red offered a sustained philosophical and theological defense of indigenous religions of place against the time-bound religions of the Christian and Western tradition. The Metaphysics of Modern Existence and his many essays on tribal sovereignty, education, and the history of indigenous-American relations have shaped a generation of indigenous American philosophy.

Vine Deloria Jr. was born at Martin, South Dakota, on the edge of the Pine Ridge reservation in March 1933 into a Standing Rock Sioux family of Yankton and Dakota descent with a long line of Episcopal clergy. He took his bachelor's at Iowa State in 1958, a bachelor of divinity at the Lutheran School of Theology in 1963, and his doctor of jurisprudence at the University of Colorado in 1970. From 1964 to 1967 he served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, and subsequently taught at Western Washington, Arizona, and the University of Colorado, where he held a professorship in history, religious studies, political science, and law.

His books include Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), We Talk, You Listen (1970), God Is Red (1973, expanded 1992), American Indians, American Justice (1983), The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979), Red Earth, White Lies (1995), Spirit and Reason (1999), and the posthumous C. G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions (2009). Custer Died for Your Sins helped to inaugurate the Indigenous rights movement of the 1970s.

Deloria reframed the conflict between Indigenous peoples and the United States as a clash of two metaphysics — a Christian-Western linear history obsessed with conquest and a North American religious order rooted in particular places, ancestors, and ceremonial relationship — and developed the legal, political, and theological argument for tribal sovereignty in his hands. He died at Golden, Colorado, in November 2005.