Deloria also believed that tribes should set aside fixed rules and doctrines when seeking to repair the spiritual damage that had been done to them over the centuries. It was fruitless for Native groups to seek a return to precontact tribal life, he argued. “Almost all Indian tribes have been forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and subjected to cultural and religious indignities. . . .” This process, he noted in 1985, “result[ed] in the destruction of ceremonial life and much of the cultural structure which has made ceremony and ritual significant.” Searching world history for a parallel to the Indians’ predicament, the former seminarian pointed to the ancient Hebrews. Their suffering, he argued, had prepared the Israelites to move from a “parochial, tribal religion” toward a broader, more universal conception of their place in the world. “Their exile did not drive them back to their original beliefs, but instead propelled them forward so that they could reimagine themselves as an exemplary society.” While admitting that the comparison was not exact (and acknowledging that he was promulgating a distinctly Christian view of Jewish history), Deloria urged other Indians to discern “the same kind of message and mission that inspired the Hebrew prophets” in “the chaos of their shattered lives.”91
From this broad historical perspective, the challenge for tribes was to organize their communities around the most universal aspects of their cultural beliefs. The most important of these, he wrote in the religious journal Church and Society, were that “all things are alive and all things are related.” (He commented wryly that these two ideas “might be the only general propositions with which all Indians could agree.”) To animate this faith, Indian communities should pursue the ideal of peoplehood, a term he had first used in Custer Died for Your Sins. For Deloria, the term referred to a group’s shared history as well as its commonly shared social obligations, spiritual beliefs, and sacred places. Tribal elders such as the men and women Deloria had met on his childhood visits to Wounded Knee embodied the peoplehood ideal, he wrote. He was aware that tribal leaders convinced of the uniqueness of their own traditions and beliefs would be skeptical of his universalistic rhetoric, but he stuck to his guns. He insisted that Native thinkers should reach for ways to integrate and synthesize indigenous wisdom. “How we accomplish the task of bringing experience, belief, and institutional behavior into line with each other,” Deloria wrote, “may well determine whether or not we survive as a people.”92
During his years at Arizona, Deloria clarified the link between his view of politics and his vision of modern tribal values. He insisted that reviving treaty making and reinvigorating tribal spiritual life were two interlinked aspects of the contemporary struggle to achieve a viable state of modern American Indian peoplehood. Tribes should therefore keep both in mind by, for example, bringing elders into tribal government or infusing reservation courts with traditional Native concepts of justice. “Indian affairs has thus moved beyond political institutions into an arena primarily cultural, religious, and sociological,” Deloria observed in 1984. It was essential, he wrote, that tribal leaders engaged in political questions should also take into account “the profound cultural and emotional energies that are influencing Indians today.” At the end of the 1980s he was still at it. He told one interviewer, “I am trying to shift the progressive people from defense to offense.”93
AN AMBIGUOUS LEGACY
Vine Deloria, Jr., moved to the University of Colorado in 1990 and taught there until he retired in 2000. During this last phase of his career he continued the publishing pattern he had established at Arizona: he produced books for general readers with startling regularity while placing specialized essays in journals and editing collections of essays and historical documents.94 He told an interviewer in 1998 that he now wrote for students, activists, and “educated Indians,” adding, “I have hit the glass ceiling that minority writers eventually hit when American white intellectuals no longer pay attention to them.” 95 Despite his declining public profile, his preoccupations (and sense of humor) remained unchanged. There was no shortage of new targets for his scorn. “American Indians finally have it made,” he wrote in 1995, as tribally owned casinos spread across the nation. “Indeed,” he added, “some tribal chairmen are now well heeled Republicans worried about gun control, moral fiber, and prayer in the schools.” In the introduction to The World We Used to Live In, published a year after his death, Deloria observed that it was now possible for suburban Americans to find “sweat lodges conducted for $50, peyote meetings for $1500. . . . The consumer society,” he added, “is . . . consuming everything in its path.”96
In a world where Indian Americans seemed to have found considerable success, Deloria remained critical of leaders who pursued economic goals alone. He insisted that however wealthy a tribe might become, it was essential to explore and revitalize the central elements of its American Indian identities. These views had emerged during the first decade of his public career, but they grew sharper, and harsher, during his years in Boulder. He charged, for example, that the growing cadre of Native scholars in American universities had been so captivated by academia that they had entered “an intellectual fantasy world where ideology rules over common sense.”97 “Too many people think being Indian is a state of mind,” he declared in 1998, noting that prominent men and women presented themselves as Native but then added that they were also anthropologists or lawyers. “What’s going on here?” he asked. “People are trading their personal identity as an Indian for a professional identity and in effect siding with their profession.” This practice, he warned (in reference to the Supreme Court justice whose conservatism put him at odds with his fellow African Americans), “is simply creating a generation of Clarence Thomases.”98
“Every Indian tribe has a spiritual heritage that distinguishes them from all other peoples,” Deloria declared near the end of his life. Because that unique heritage had been produced by both historical experience and religious faith, tribal identities required personal engagement, not suburban sweat lodges or superficial “walk-through” ceremonies. “We cannot ‘revive’ a religion,” he declared. “What we can do is respect religious traditions and allow them to take us forward into the future.”99
Deloria spent the last years of his career preaching this vision. His loyalty to tribal traditions put him at odds with mainstream thinkers, particularly when he attacked the idea that his ancestors had migrated to America across the Bering Strait. But Deloria took pleasure in their scorn because, he insisted, it proved that they were taking Indian ideas seriously. His goal, he declared, was simply to “provoke discussion.” He reported happily in 1998: “I think I am winning.”100
While Deloria persuaded few scientists that tribal origin stories were scientifically correct, his passionate calls for spiritual renewal and his withering attacks on racial stereotypes and academic paternalism won him considerable support. His insistence that tribal governments define their own identities and political agendas was welcomed by a rising generation of leaders who declared that their sovereign powers entitled them to do far more than simply administer social service programs designed in Washington, D.C. Deloria’s urgent appeal to Native communities to take seriously the pursuit of peoplehood was picked up by writers, artists, and commentators across the continent. By the end of the century his ideas had come to define the American Indian’s cultural and political identity in the United States.101
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SHORTLY BEFORE his death Vine Deloria, Jr., wrote that the power of tribal ceremonies and other cultural traditions should “be applied to our daily lives to enrich our well-being and enhance our understanding of life.”102 It is significant that in the end Deloria appealed for cultural renewal rather than a major new statute or federal policy. Working and writing in an era when American Indians suddenly enjoyed steady, albeit limited, access to government decision makers, cultural institutions, and the media, he continued to believe that Native communities could survive and their unique v
alues could flourish within a modern industrial democracy. His optimism was rooted in the conviction, impressed upon him from childhood, that American Indians need not bow before federal power or the teachings of Western civilization.
Deloria was a worrier and a skeptic. He worried that as beneficiaries of the civil rights and social welfare advances of the 1960s, modern Indians would defer to the American nation-state and settle for a future as detribalized Indian Americans. At the same time, he was skeptical about the struggles of idealistic young Native people to reconstruct an idyllic version of their tribal cultures. From his first emergence into public life in 1964, Deloria had argued that American Indians should take advantage of every benefit they could derive from their status as citizens of the United States but that they should also never doubt the power that flowed from an indigenous heritage whose roots were far older than the nation’s constitution or its laws and whose wisdom could not be contained in a single ceremony or shaman’s aphorism. From the 1970s onward he advocated an open-ended process of both cultural renewal and legal reform. He accepted the contradictions and ambiguity that were inherent in his agenda, and he continued to criticize the activists around him, refusing to provide them with a simple blueprint for the future.
Vine Deloria, Jr.’s constant dissatisfaction with government policy and judicial decision making, as well as his persistent skepticism regarding contemporary cultural practices, often frustrated his colleagues and alienated his political allies. He understood his prescriptions were not always precise or realistic. He also knew that he frequently disappointed former allies who were confused by his barbs and scathing critiques. He seemed perpetually dissatisfied. His steady reply was that American Indians should look beyond short-term victories. Native people should think of themselves as heirs to an immense heritage that propelled them, steadily and creatively, toward the twin goals of protecting and revitalizing Indian peoplehood. Only this constant striving could reinvigorate the nation’s tribes, reignite their values, and truly restore the social and political bonds that had sustained them over the centuries. His legacy was ambiguous because he sought more than a new legal decision or the appointment of American Indians to high offices. His goal was nothing less than the continued survival of Indian people—and an Indian country—within the boundaries of the United States.
AFTERWORD
THIS INDIAN COUNTRY
The activists portrayed in this book represent one thread in the long and complex history of Native Americans. These lawyers, lobbyists, writers, and politicians, together with the many other activists who remained unmentioned in my narrative, chose to oppose the aggressions of the United States with words and ideas rather than violence. Many of these people admired the warriors and military strategists who had opposed the Americans at different times and places, but during their lifetimes they put their faith in a future in which Indians and non-Indians would share the North American continent rather than fight over it. Rooted in a practical assessment of their individual predicaments as well as in humanistic tribal traditions that placed personal relationships at the center of community life, these activists struggled to persuade the invading newcomers to find peaceful solutions to their differences over land, resources, and rights. They insisted that the United States and the Indian country could be one. By the year 2000 it seemed that they had successfully made their case.
The 2000 presidential election was among the most contentious in American history. The November 7 voting, which occurred after months of campaigning and a series of rancorous candidate debates, produced a tiny popular-vote majority for the Democrat Al Gore and a deadlock in the electoral college. The victor was decided in Florida, where a close vote and disputes over recount procedures delayed a final decision on who would receive the state’s twenty-five electoral votes and thereby become the next president. Weeks of maneuvering and tension culminated on December 12, when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to stop a statewide recount of ballots in Florida, effectively awarding the election to the Republican, George W. Bush. No presidential election had ended in as much confusion since 1876, when former Confederates and former Unionists battled up to inauguration day over who would next occupy the White House.
The tensions surrounding the 2000 election could not compare with 1876. Then, only eleven years after Appomattox, talk of rebellion and revenge circulated throughout the country. The atmosphere in 2000 was more subdued, but Republicans and Democrats had spent months insisting that their opponents represented a deeply misguided approach to the future. The previous summer their conventions had produced platforms that attacked the opposing parties’ approaches to health care, taxation, reproductive rights, and environmental protection. Even the platform prologues sounded in different keys. The incumbent Democrats pronounced the election season a time of “prosperity, progress and peace” while the Republicans condemned Bill Clinton’s presidency as “a time of drift.”
In the midst of this divisiveness, however, one policy area was immune to partisan bickering: American Indian affairs. On this topic the major parties agreed. The Republicans pledged to “uphold the unique government to government relationship between the tribes and the United States” while the Democrats declared that the “sovereignty of the American Indians . . . and a strong affirmation of the government to government relationship are basic to our approach to tribal governments.” Nuances certainly were evident—Republicans stressed a desire for “economic self-sufficiency” among tribes while Democrats promised federal assistance to aid “Indians who live in terrible poverty”—but each party assured the public that it was better prepared to protect the interests and autonomy of tribes and the civil rights of Indian people.1
Throughout a bitter campaign in which each side searched for wedge issues that might divide the opposition (and at a time when Indian voters held the balance of power in Montana and New Mexico), this remarkable consensus over Indian policy held firm. There was a brief moment during the summer preceding the election when Democratic activists seized on a statement candidate Bush had made suggesting he would favor states over tribes when the two groups came into dispute. Vice President Gore’s supporters used the statement to question the sincerity of Governor Bush’s support for tribal sovereignty. The attacks quickly ended, however, once Governor Bush met with a group of tribal leaders and promised that his administration would “strengthen Indian self-determination by respecting tribal sovereignty.” He added, “I believe the federal government should allow tribes greater control over their lives, land and destiny.”2
One should hesitate before making too much of this convergence of party platforms and campaign statements. After all, election-year promises are an uncertain indicator of future performance. As president, George W. Bush revealed himself to be an uncertain supporter of tribal claims to sovereign power. On the other hand, considering the many issues that divided Republicans and Democrats in 2000, their agreement on Indian policy, even at the level of campaign rhetoric, was remarkable. Their agreement would have seemed even more surprising to the Founding Fathers who had ignored leaders like Joseph Brant and Alexander McGillivray when making peace with Great Britain in 1782. It would have amazed them that Native people remained significant enough to be mentioned in a presidential campaign two centuries later and, even more remarkable, that candidates for federal office would vie with each other to be the leading champion of government-to-government relationships with the tribes.
Similarly, if the white settlers who had illegally crossed the boundaries into Indian Territory or the Minnesota homesteaders who had trespassed onto the Mille Lacs Reservation had been brought back to life in 2000, they would have been aghast. National political parties now guaranteed the right of tribes to hold communal land and participate actively in national policy debates. They would likely have asked, “Hasn’t the West been won? Didn’t the expansion of the United States across the continent represent the triumph of civilization over savagery?” What
, they might wonder, had forced the nation’s leaders to surrender so completely to the legal and political claims of the continent’s indigenous people?
By November 2000 there was a national consensus in the United States on the future of American Indians and their governments. Indians would be citizens. Their tribes would function as local governments, enjoying most of the privileges granted them in treaties with the United States and negotiating with federal authorities over their status within the nation’s political institutions. The clarity of this consensus is more than a historical surprise. It is also a reminder that the modern government-to-government relationship between tribes and federal authorities did not emerge from some domestic political reform of the Progressive Era or the New Deal but from the work of American Indian political activists. This consensus was pressed on the American majority by eloquent, insistent Native people, and it was articulated with increasing rigor and clarity through decades of argument, suffering, and struggle.
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