Vine Deloria Jr. - Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact

RED EARTH, WHITE LIES

Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact

Vine Deloria, Jr.

Fulcrum Publishing

Golden, Colorado

1997 Vine Deloria , Jr

Book design by Deborah Rich

Cover illustration 1997 Sam English

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Deloria, Vine

Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact / Vine Deloria, Jr

p. cm.

Originally published: New York : Scribner, c1995

Includes biographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55591-388-1 (pbk.)

1.Indians of North AmericaFolklore. 2. Indian philosophyNorth America. 3. Oral traditionNorth AmericaHistory and criticism. 4. SciencePhilosophy. 5. Religion and science. 6. Human evolutionReligious aspectsChristianity 1. Title

E98.F6D35 1997

398.08997dc21 97-21689 CIP

Fulcrum Publishing

Golden, Colorado

Other Books by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Custer Died for Your Sins

We Talk, You Listen

Of Utmost Good Faith

God is Red

Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties

The Indian Affair

Indians of the Pacific Northwest

The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

American Indians, American Justice (with Clifford Lytle)

A Sender of Words (edited)

The Nations Within (with Clifford Lytle)

The Aggressions of Civilization (edited with Sandra Cadwalader)

American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (edited)

Prank Waters, Man and Mystic (edited)

Dedicated to my father, Vine Deloria, Sr., who told me many stories.

Preface

OTHER THAN Custer Died for Your Sins , this book has been the most pleasant to write and the most fun to defend. Learning that I did not believe in the Bering Strait theory, the anthropology department at Colorado University, in a series of secretive e-mails, decided I was a racist reactionary trying to destroy their fictional enterprise and agreed not to invite me to speak to them. Had they tendered an invitation, I doubt if I would have appeared, so perhaps a point was scored on each side. Around the country the reception has pleased me to no end. Instead of defending me, many Indian students decided to call my bluff and went to the libraries and found I was rightno good evidence except the mental illness of the academy exists supporting this theory. Across the board, younger professors and graduate students approved of the book, and the old guard formed militia movements to protect the tottering bastions of Western knowledge. Most important, however, is the flood of new articles and newspaper clippings people from all over the world have sent me-almost all supporting the ideas in this book.

I have changed some of the chapters a bit to include new materials, primarily adding a short section on Alaska. It seems that scholars studying Alaska Natives have given the oral tradition its just dueat least for the matching of recent events of geological importance with stories preserved by the people. If that same spirit were shown by scholars working with tribes of the lower forty-eight states, we would have some real change in the way we look at the history of North America.

Scholars working with the extinction of the Pleistocene megafauna continue to pass their personal fantasies off as science while becoming more absurd with each effort to come to grips with the problem. Instead of dealing with the millions of carcasses in Alaska and Siberia that suggest a massive planet-wide catastrophe, as I suggest here, they have now concocted a theory that the legendary Paleo-Indians brought infectious diseases with them across the Bering Strait. These diseases, according to alleged scholars, were carried by frogs, rats, birds, parasites, and other living baggage that accompanied the Indians. As a rule, species do not give diseases to other species, except when scholars require them to do so to bolster a theory that has no evidence to support it. After the book came out I had occasion to visit Rancho La Brea and stood in front of a 12-foot mammoth skeleton. I would have had to get right under the beast to even touch it with a spear. I suggest that the scholars advocating the blitzkrieg actually go see how big these creatures actually were.

In February 1977, a group of the most reactionary scholars issued a report from Monte Verde, Chile, to the effect that they now accepted a new date for the occupation of the Western Hemisphere by Paleo-Indians. According to newspaper reports, a site was unanimously dated at 12,500 years ago. The report then noted that the ancestors of those Chilean settlers somehow managed to travel some 10,000 miles from the Bering Strait to southern South America in only a few hundred years. In other words, another anthropological sleight of handhitting the Alaskan shore, these fictional people made a beeline for South America, forsaking the green pastures of North America, and trooping through almost impassable deserts and jungles to arrive in time to save anthropological theories 12,500 years later. The admission was hailed as a major event in anthropology and archaeology. The headline should have read Scholars Moving Reluctantly Toward Sobriety.

At any rate, enjoy the book. Watch the newspapers for more startling admissions that all is not right in Western Hemisphere prehistory and ask your local scholar to provide evidence for the fantastic scenarios that are being passed off as science. You will enjoy watching them squirm and change the subject.

Introduction

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 Indianthe great Sioux tribe to be exact. Growing up in a little border town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, we all knew that we could never understand the complicated theories of science, literature, and philosophy that were common knowledge among sophisticated people in the cities. So we mostly didnt try, simply believing that somewhere all the contradictions were resolved satisfactorilyat least in the minds of those more intelligent than we were.

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 didnt make sense. Bowing to scientific authority, I kept to the premise that brighter people than I understood the complexities of nature and I assumed that no real contradictions existed. Then one daywhile reading Jacob Bronowskis The Ascent of Man , recommended to me by a bevy of noted anthropologists, I came across the following sentence:

Why are the Lapps white? Man began with a dark skin; the sunlight makes vitamin D in his skin, and if he had been white in Africa, it would make too much. But in the north, man needs to let in all the sunlight there is to make enough vitamin D, and natural selection therefore favoured those with whiter skins.

I had encountered the same idea many times before in the publications of a number of prestigious scientific writers, but until then it never struck me as odd. The fact is that Lapps may have whiter skins than Africans, but they do not run around naked to absorb the sunlights vitamin D. Indeed, it is the Africans who are often bare in the tropical sun. The Lapps are always heavily clothed to protect themselves from the cold. Whatever natural selection did, skin color obviously played no part.