Deloria Barbara - Spirit and Reason: the Vine Deloria Jr. Reader

Other Books by Vine Deloria, Jr.

Custer Died for Your Sins

We Talk, You Listen

Of Utmost Good Faith

God Is Red

Red Earth, White Lies

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 L. Cadwalader)

American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (edited)

Frank Waters, Man and Mystic (edited)

Copyright 1999 Vine Deloria, Jr.

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

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Deloria, Vine.

Spirit & reason : the Vine Deloria, Jr., reader / edited by Barbara Deloria, Kristen Foehner, and Sam Scinta.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55591-430-6 (pbk.)

1. Indian philosophyNorth America. 2. Indians of North AmericaSocial conditions. 3. Indians of North AmericaStudy and teaching. I. Deloria, Barbara. II. Foehner, Kristen. III. Scinta, Samuel. IV. Title. V. Title: Spirit and reason.

E98.P5D45 1999

970.00497dc2199-30110

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

0 9 8 7 6 5

Book design: Bill Spahr

Cover art: Flying Pipe, Canupa Kinyan, Yankton Sioux, copyright 1999 Jeralyn Lujan-Lucero/Gathering Flowers Taos Pueblo.

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Golden, Colorado 80403

800-992-2908 303-277-1623

www.fulcrumbooks.com

Foreword

Wilma P. Mankiller

No writer has more clearly articulated the unspoken emotions, dreams, and lifeways of contemporary Native people than Vine Deloria. This collection of Delorias works takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Indian country as Deloria responds to some of the most important issues of the last three decades. Delorias literary gift is amply demonstrated in pieces that are a mix of logic, humor, irreverence, and spirituality. But it is his clarity of thought and stunning ability to express complex concepts in a simple, straightforward manner that captivate the reader.

One of the most compelling pieces in the collection, If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True, reminded me of the phrase coined by Alice Walker, looking backward toward the fut ure. With flawless logic and adroit use of language, Deloria exa mines the way many traditional Native people look at the universe, the connectedness of all living things, and our own insignificance in the totality of things compared to the objective, segmented way scientists in the academy view the universe. Deloria po ints out that everything that humans experience has value and instructs in some aspect of life.... The real interest of the old Indians was not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality but rather to find the proper road along which, for the duration of a persons life, individuals were supposed to walk. This argues that the universe is a moral universe.

In Low BridgeEverybody Cross, Deloria challenges conventional scholarly arguments that Native people in North America are immigrants just like everyone else because they crossed the Bering Strait, albeit centuries earlier than Columbus. Deloria painstakingly takes apart the arguments of proponents of the Bering Strait theory of migration and attributes their motives to a combination of intellectual slothfulness and residual guilt... over the manner in which the Western Hemisphere was invaded and settled by Europeans.

In The Turmoil of Ethnic Studies, Deloria illustrates the acceptance of ethnic studies in the academy with a tongue-in-cheek passage, I realized that some measure of academic respectability had been achieved because I could hardly understand what my colleagues were saying.... That kind of behavior is the best measure of academic respectabilitya professor can talk for an hour and only his closest colleagues can understand what he is saying. In the same playful mood, he wrote A Flock of Anthros to argue in part that anthropology is a field of study with a very dogmatic framework and a nebulous foundation.

Deloria writes poignantly of the struggle of Caucasian people in America to understand why many Native people did not participate in the Bicentennial Celebration, which appeared to commemorate the concept that the institution of oppression has survived two centuries! He goes on to argue in Why Indians Arent Celebrating the Bicentennial that placing our current situation in a historical context but, What is done is done. It is where we go next that is important... so that the next hundred years will not force us to look back on mistrust, arrogance, and injustice.

Although all the chapters in this book are instructive, Higher Education and Self-Determination, an optimistic essay about the future of Indian education, is particularly interesting because it explains in part the reason that some academically qualified Native people simply drop out of college and go home. Deloria says Non-Indians live within a worldview that separates and isolates and mistakes labeling and identification for knowledge.... Indians were completely outside the system and within their own worldview.

There are other equally absorbing pieces, ranging from Alcatraz, A ctivism, and Accommodation to The Religious Challenge. One of the most engaging minds of our time, Deloria gives the reader a rare glimpse into the world of Native people as we grapple with questions that all come back to the central issue of how to retain a strong sense of who we are as Native people as we walk confidently into the next millennium as whole human beings.

Preface