Vine Deloria Jr. - In memoriam -Native American Indian Tribes - Over 2,000 articles on native american indians, their culture & traditions.

Over 2,000 articles about native americans of the US and Canada First Nations.

Submit your own articles about american indians without knowing any HTML here
Are you ready?

Today's Top Story:

2009 Calendars

Privacy Policy

Any information collected on our site is used for internal purposes only and will not be shared or sold to third parties!

Your transactions in our store are secure

Videos of the Week

Shoshone-Bannock History in Idaho
PART I OF II: 2008's historic Idaho Democratic Convention, held in Boise, ID, June 12-14, invited Idaho Native American Tribal members from the Shoshone-Bannock/Fort Hall, Shoshone-Paiute/Duck Valley, Nez Perce, and Coeur D'Alene tribal communities to take an active part in the convention activities. On June 12th, the Idaho AFL-CIO hosted a Democratic picnic for convention goers. Mr. Ted Howard, Cultural Resource Director, Duck Valley, spoke to picnic participants about the Shoshone-Paiute-Bannock history in the Boise Valley area. 9:49 minutes.

Part II-Grand Entry, Flag Ceremony and Recessional
All convention tribal members participated in the grand entry at the beginning of the June 13th Idaho Democratic Convention gathering followed by a flag ceremony and presentation by Mr. Lee Juan Tyler, Council Member, Shoshone-Bannock/Fort Hall community. Fort Hall and Duck Valley singers and drummers played songs for the grand entry, flag ceremony and recessional.
9:59 minutes

Native American Prophecy
Narrated by the late Floyd RedCrow Westerman 6:36 minutes

7 Generations
Elder Orin Lyons talks about preparing for the next 7 generations. 8:43 minutes

Lit->Authors->A-L: Vine Deloria Jr. - In memoriam

Posted on Tuesday, November 15 @ 14:01:16 CST

AUTHOR: Editors Report / Indian Country Today

Burn tobacco today for the wonderful spirit of Vine Deloria Jr., who passed into the world of the ancestors Nov. 13. Our sincerest condolences and warmest embrace reach out to his family and dear friends, and a great commiseration is extended to all of Indian country, where Deloria - author, teacher, lawyer, man - is universally respected and where his memory will live on for the generations.

Stumble It!

Deloria, the world-renown Hunkpapa author and scholar from the Standing Rock Reservation, made a huge contribution to the Native peoples of North America and the world. His intellectual output, at once free-ranging with creativity and yet tight with academic rigor, pinned down the legal and historical bases desperately needed by the national Indian discourse. He provided a great piece of the intellectual locomotion upon which a moving platform of American Indian/Native studies research, publishing, production and teaching has been constituted.

His writing is legendary, launched by the classic Custer Died For Your Sins,'' which plugged directly into the common imagination of the American Indian Movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. Along with ''We Talk, You Listen'' and ''Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties ,'' these early Deloria works informed, during those crucial years, the widest cross-section of activists, students and older community leaders and traditional authorities. For a movement that had disparate and very independent bases in Indian country, where political persuasions ran the full spectrum of left to right and front to back, Deloria's deliberate, well-reasoned tone, backed by acerbic wit and genuine self-effacement, hit the formative chord.

The best of the thinking, and the music of a movement of survival, started then, with Deloria's exquisite ear for media concepts and the lyrics and guitar of a musician brother named Floyd ''Red Crow'' Westerman. Anthems of a movement came out of that collaboration - again, now in Westerman's lyrics, ''Custer died for your sins - a new day must begin - Custer died for your sins,'' and in the old 49er stand-by, ''BIA I am not your Indian anymore.''

Targeting anthropologists, missionaries and bureaucrats alike, Deloria wrote to Indians and was heard by the national audience. He wrote popular narratives on the contemporary Indian world, backing those up with deep and far-ranging academic research, writing and editing.

Deloria went on to write and edit more than 20 books and ranged from Native contemporary issues in law and history to ponder on scientific and theological themes. A considerable risk-taker in an era of prudent assertions in academia, Deloria in his middle years took pleasure in exploding and deconstructing all manner of facile theories by would-be Indian debunkers, such as Sheppard Krech III's critical review of indigenous lifeways in his book, ''The Ecological Indian: Myth and History.''

With his Indian-take dissection of evolutionary theory and its many little-founded claims, Deloria willingly stepped out of the progressive boat and onto his own canoe, daring to follow his instincts into important theological and scientific questions in order widen the field for Indian scholarship. He piqued many in academia and government with his explorations and assertions, but this was the way he seems to have preferred it - in the arena, moving the ground forward for the people.

The author and professor was an impeccable social activist, supporting Indian movement activism in all fields faithfully, always giving of himself through lectures and strategic seminars and court testimony wherever Indian tribal people called upon him. Executive director of the National Congress of American Indians early in his career, Deloria radicalized and activated the foremost Indian advocacy organization while creating lobbying campaigns and providing strategy for court cases: often while also defending major community treaty activists such as Nisqually elder and fishing rights legend Billy Frank Jr.

Deloria straddled the generations and carried the perspectives and perception of the generation of leaders who saw Indian country through the Depression, World War II and termination. He often reminisced fondly about the old-timers of his formative years.

We remember the beloved teacher for his generosity of spirit. As a professor, Deloria mentored and touched many people across all ethnic and religious persuasions while always managing to teach and guide the work of scores of Native graduate students and young activists, many of whom went on to gain success and prominence on their own. He wrote prefaces and introductions and recommendations by the dozens in careful assessments of the work at hand, but was always ready to add his considerable gravity to the work of newer hands. He would not tolerate fuzzy thinking, however, and could and would hold his students to task.

No strangers here to the inspiration extended by the existence of Vine Deloria Jr., we are ever-thankful to have had the opportunity to have celebrated his accomplishments earlier this year at the ceremony for the 2005 American Indian Visionary Award, which Deloria received in March.

In every generation, to paraphrase the late Creek Medicine Man Phillip Deere, there is one who hits the click-stone just right, and sparks the fire. In his generation, Vine Deloria Jr. sparked the intellectual fire of political, legal, historical and spiritual illumination. He lighted the path to the fountainhead of knowledge, which points the way ahead.

We are deeply thankful for the gift of this man who taught, in the evidence of his own life, that a gift of intellectual power is only given spirit by service to the people.