Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto Review

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(More customer reviews)So that there's no misunderstanding, I think Vine Deloria Jr is a great man. Not a perfect man, not one who's right all of the time, but a man who means well, and has done great things for Native Americans. My feelings about Custer Died for Your Sins are similar. It's a good book, this Indian Manifesto, and has the power to do great things, still, decades after its publication. But it's not perfect. If you're a Caucasian reader, you're going to get angry. Parts of the book simply aren't meant for you, and those parts that are, are very inflammatory. This is intentional. Deloria is a master of making people furious, in order to make them think. But it's also intentional, I think, because Deloria is, understandably, himself a bitter and angry man, in many ways. The book's passages on people of mixed descent are good examples. Deloria issues the blanket statement that Native/Caucasian people are, in fact, just White people with a royalty complex. He does this to make you angry, and he does this to make you think; he wants you to understand what you are doing when you claim tribal descent or affiliation, and he wants you to be sure you're doing so with the proper respect. But he's also doing it because he's annoyed, and very tired of White people who don't have said respect. He's making a mistake, though, in his implicit assumption that, somehow, being Caucasian is the default, and that to be a Native, one really should be a wholeblood. The book is also tinged with seeming contradictions (like one chapter devoted to the idea that Indians must solve their own problems because they are and should be responsible for their own lives; and then the chapter on how anthropologists are largely responsible for the problems of the modern Native American, a chapter where tribes play a largely passive role), but most of these are resolved when you consider both the complexity of the issue, and the complexity of the book. All in all, this Manifesto is *not* the place to begin one's exploration of Native issues, but it's one that *must* be read somewhere along the way.

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In his new preface to this quality paperback edition, the author observes, 'The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again.' Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists. This book continues to be required reading for all Americans, whatever their special interest.

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