Vine Deloria Jr. Quotes on Politics
Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969), God Is Red (1973), and the long sequence of subsequent works on Native American legal, philosophical, and religious thought give twentieth-century American Indian political philosophy its most influential public statement. The central project, developed through Deloria’s parallel work as a Standing Rock Sioux activist, attorney, and academic, is the philosophical articulation of the distinctively Native American political-philosophical tradition — the relationship between sovereignty and treaty, between tribal community and individual rights, between the spatial-religious orientation of Native traditions and the temporal-historical orientation of European Christianity — against the assimilationist frameworks the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the broader American liberal tradition had imposed on Native peoples. The framework shaped the development of Native American legal and political thought through the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act and the broader contemporary engagement with indigenous philosophy in the academy.
Quotes
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Attributed to Vine Deloria Jr.:
“God is red; the religions of place will outlast the religions of empire.”
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Attributed to Vine Deloria Jr.:
“Sovereignty is not a gift bestowed by another sovereign; it is the original condition of a people.”
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Attributed to Vine Deloria Jr.:
“We are not vanishing; we have always been here.”
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“Foreword to Words of Power: Voices from Indian America (1994), also quoted in "Vine Deloria, Jr." at Indigenous Peoples Literature (2015) by Glen Welker”
Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information "superhighway" now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness — and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is n -
“Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things. Who will listen to the trees, the animals and birds, the voices of the places of the land? As the long forgotten peoples of the respective continents rise and begin to reclaim their ancient heritage, they will discover the meaning of the lands of their ancestors. That is when the invaders of the North American continent will finally discover that for this land, God is red.”
pg. ix -
“Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land – American Indians – and the political owner of the land – American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution.”
pg. 75