Vine Deloria Jr. Quotes

If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.

With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past
and that past is not as distant as we might suppose.

The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.

These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating

Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a
people.

As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.

Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.

Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.

This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.

An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The

Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American people
that Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty or
agreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, the
saying went, to be Communists.
Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these
statements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement
despite the fact that the United States government signed
over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian
tribes. It would take Russia another century to make and break
as many treaties as the United States has already violated.

Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian ...

Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.

Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind.

Custer is said to have boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation with his Seventh Cavalry, and he was half right. He got half-way through.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.

If the tribal peoples actually represented Western origins at a much earlier time, it was exceedingly valuable that they should be studied intensely for clues about the nature and origin of human society. Consequently it was an injury to science and human knowledge to allow the military to simply exterminate them.

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.

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.

I strongly doubt that American Christianity has the foresight or flexibility to embark on new paths of action. It has always been torn between being good and being real and generally chosen to be good.

It is this subtle dimension of understanding that marks the southwestern Indian peoples from other religions and separates tribal peoples from the world's religions. Somewhere in the planetary history religious expression changed from participation in the sound, color and rhythm of nature to the abstractions of man outside this context pleading for temporary respite and hoping in the next life to return to the Garden.

Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.

Preconceived standards of conduct are unimportant and the assumption of the innate sinfulness of human is impossible, for the individual is judged instantaneously by his or her fellows as as useful or useless according to his or her degree of participation in community affairs.
-God is Red