Vine Deloria Jr. Quotes on Knowledge

Quotes

• Attributed to Vine Deloria Jr.:

  “Western thought began in fear of the wild; indigenous thought began in respect for it.”

• “Custer Died for Your Sins (1988), p. 2”

  All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear. It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian

• “When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, "Ours.”

  As quoted in "Vine Deloria Jr." by Melissa Lorenz EMuseum @ Minnesota State University, Mankato (2008)

• “The breakup of Christianity during the Reformation into national churches and the proliferation of denominations today would seem to indicate that a religious universality cannot be successfully maintained across racial and ethnic lines. ... Ethnicity will almost always triumph.”

  p. 209