Table Of ContentV I N E
D E L O R I A
J R .
God Is Red
God Is Red
A Native View of Religion
30th Anniversary Edition
VINE
DELORIA
JR.
�
Fulcrum Publishing
Golden, Colorado
Copyright © 1973, 1992, 2003 Vine Deloria Jr.
Forewords copyright © 2003 Leslie Marmon Silko and George E. Tinker, respectively
All rights reserved. No part of this publication 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.
God Is Red was first published by
The Putnam Publishing Group, New York, 1973.
First edition 1973
Second edition 1992
Third edition 2003
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Deloria, Vine.
God is red : a native view of religion /Vine Deloria,Jr.- [Rev. ed.].
p. cm.
"30th Anniversary Edition".
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55591-498-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Christianity-Controversial literature. 2. Indians-Religion. I.
Title.
BL2776.D44 2003
299'.7-dc21
2003006477
Printed in the United States of America
0
9
8
Design by Nancy Duncan-Cashman
Cover photograph: Tulalip Indian Raymond Moses tunes his drum
in the longhouse before the first fish ceremony.
Photograph copyright © Natalie Fobes.
Fulcrum Publishing
4690 Table Mountain Drive, Suite 100
Golden, Colorado 80403-1672
(800) 992-2908 • (303) 277-1623
www.fulcrumbooks.com
CO N T E NTS
..
ForeUJord by Leslie Marmon Silko, Laguna Pueblo,
Author if Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead
VII
Foreword by George E. Tinker, Osage / Cherokee,
Prifessor if American Indian Cultures and
xi
Religious 1raditions at Iliff School if Theology, Denver
Introduction
xv
Chapter
1
Chapter
2
Chapter
3
Chapter
4
Chapter
5
Chapter
6
Chapter
7
Chapter
8
Chapter
9
Chapter 1 0
Chapter 1 1
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 1 5
Chapter 16
Chapter 1 7
The Indian Movement
1
The Indians of the American Imagination
23
The Religious Challenge
45
Thinking in Time and Space
61
The Problem of Creation
77
The Concept of History
97
The Spatial Problem of History
113
Origin of Religion
133
Natural and Hybrid Peoples
149
Death and Religion
165
Human Personality
185
The Group
203
Christianity and Contemporary
219
American Culture
Tribal Religions and Contemporary
237
American Culture
The Aboriginal World and Christian History
257
Sacred Places and Moral Responsibility
271
Religion Today
287
Appendices
297
Bibliography
307
Index
313
v
FOREWORD
By LESLIE MARMON SILKO, LAGUNA PUEBLO,
AUTHOR OF CEREMONY AND ALMANAC OF THE DEAD
No ONE WHO READS VINE DELORIA JR.'S BOOKS remains neutral. Vine's
books influenced our generation and are as important to United States
cultural history as are books by Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe. This will
be appreciated by future generations when U.S. history ceases to be fabri
cated for the glory of the white man. What influenced me as a young
writer was his defiant attitude toward the power elites, whether it be
Christianity or the U.S. military. But Vine's was a special sort of defiance
that depended on the warmth of Indian humor and the rule of international
law-never the threat of violence.
The publication of God Is Red was anxiously awaited by all of us. Vine
was our hero. Courageously and eloquently, Vine expressed what a great
many of us Indians felt and thought. His writing spoke for generations past,
and generations yet to come. It took great personal courage to speak out
like Vine did back then-remember, assassins took down Dr. King and
Malcolm X in those years.
I couldn't wait to see what Vine had to say about Christianity as the
cause of the "great weakness" of the United States. Vine had identified
America's "great weakness" in his 1969 bestseller, Custer Died for Your Sins:
Consider the history of America closely. Never has
America lost a war. When engaged in warfare the United
vii
...
G O D
I S R E D
States has always applied the principle of overkill and mer
cilessly stamped its opposition into the dust . . . . Consider
Vietnam, where the United States has already dropped
more bombs than it did during the last war-a classic of
overkill . . . . But name, if you can, the last peace the United
States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a
successfill 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.
In God Is Red, Vine explains how Christianity is the root cause of this
great \"'y'rcaknc:;:; of the United States
the inability to respect or tolerate
those who are different. Clearly, this weakness of the United States has only
worsened in recent years, with wars against former allies Manuel Noriega,
Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden, and friction with the French and
Germans. Americans would do well to read God Is Red again, to be remind
ed "what happened in the 1 960s and 1970s is that the logic of Western
culture and the meaning of the Christian world view that supported the
institutions of Western culture were outrun by the events of the time."
Indeed, Christianity was so weak, God was dead. The Indian joke on
bumper stickers was "Hey-God is Red-She isn't dead." God has always
been red on these continents called the Americas. And God-Mother Earth
God-and the religions of the indigenous communities of the Americas are
alive and thriving. Vine points out the failure of the Christian conscience:
We conducted a long war in Asia that was prolonged pri
marily for political reasons by two presidents, yet hoth of
these men were apparently Christians in good standing.
Prominent church leaders such as Billy Graham did not call
them to account as being anti-Christian or non-Christians
for the wastage of human life. In the Gulf War some church
leaders did make an effort to prevent bloodshed, but their
religious objections proved irrelevant to George Bush [Sr. ].
viii
F O R E W O R D .to.
God Is Red refuses to let the Christians off the hook:
. . . if the exploiters of old were not Christians, why did not
the true Christians rise up in defiance of the derogation of
their religious heritage and faith? . . . At this point in the
clash between Western industrialism and the planet's abo
riginal peoples, we find little or no voice corning from the
true Christians to prevent continued exploitation.
As accurate and prophetic as it was thirty years ago, God Is Red should
be read and re-read by Americans who want to understand why the United
States keeps losing the peace, war after war. We Indians? We don't disap
pear, but Deloria predicts the end of European expansion in the world and
concludes:
Who will find peace with the lands? The future of
humankind lies waiting for those who will come to under
stand 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.
ix
FOREWORD
By GEORGE E. TINKER (OSAGE/CHEROKEE),
PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN INDIAN CULTURES
AND RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS,
ILIFF SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY, DENVER
COYOTE OLD MAN HAS ALWAYS BEEN A TEACHER, a wily man of the world
who combines perspicuity, vision, and intuition with a sense of the ironic.
Even in moments of feigned foolishness and individualism, Coyote is the
people's teacher and is committed to their well-being. Vine Deloria Jr. is
not Coyote Old Man, yet like Coyote, he is the commensurate teacher
whose sometimes outrageous intellectual gift to the Indian world has and
still inspires young Indian intellectuals today.
At the time of its initial publication, God Is Red both systematized
and gave voice to general American Indian thought. As such, it was and
continues to represent an important first for Native people. It covers a huge
intellectual waterfront, modeling a systematic, coherent Indian response to
the fundamentals of Euro-western historiography, philosophy, theology,
social criticism, and political theory.
But this book is more than a systematized introduction to American
Indian thinking. In large part, God Is Red is a critical reflection on western
thought and culture, an American Indian ethnography of Amer-European
intellectual and religious lifeways, if you will. As a result, the book's greatest
contribution is that it seriously "stirs the pot." Again and again, Deloria
demonstrates the inadequacy of various western modes of scholarship,
offering shocking and almost scandalous new ways of understanding the
evidence. At the same time, he demonstrates that his own hermeneutical
xi
A
G O D I S R E D
reflection, extraordinary though it may seem, is actually no more prepos
terous than the generally accepted solutions offered in western scientific
and social scientific explanations of the world. Suddenly, the explanations
offered by critical biblical and ancient Near Eastern scholarship for pyramid
building in ancient Egypt-memorialized cinematically by Cecil B.
De Mille-seem equally or even more fantastic and implausible than
I )eloria's own. Insofar as these so-called scientific explanations of the world
have been used to signifY American Indian existence in terms controlled
and controllable by the settler-colonizers in North America, Deloria's
hypotheticals stand as a powerful and useful challenge.
More to the point, in God Is Red, Deloria makes minimal concession
to explicit categories of cognition common to those western traditions,
modeling instead the existence and articulation of enduring natural
categorics of Indian cultures thC1TISclvcs that arc foundational for tribal
existence and for tribal intellectual and religious traditions. Thus, the book
continues to be a forceful challenge to the presumed inherent hegemony
of the western intellectual tradition. It is in this very exercise that the book
began and will continue to teach many bright Indian youth-a future gen
eration of Indian scholars-the validity of our own cultures and the
resources, categories of knowledge, and modes of discourse already at our
disposal for reasoned, analytical thought. The book's singular achievement,
for instance, was its systematic and consistent analysis of the distinction
between spatiality and temporality as culturally discrete ways of being in
the world. In a sense, nearly every Indian person had already noticed this
important difference between tribal Native American peoples and the
Amer-European settler population, yet the difference was little discussed in
the literature until Deloria finally and irrevocably named it. Likewise,
Deloria spelled out the communitarian-individualist difference between
Indian and Euro-western cultures. These category distinctions are now the
foundation for any genuine, analytical understanding of any particular
Indian culture and for Indian intellectual thought in general.
In God Is Red, Deloria proposes an etiology for what he sees as a
fundamental philosophical difference between tribal peoples and cultures,
on the one hand, and others whom he describes as "hybrid" peoples. In
typically provocative Deloria fashion, he demonstrates that a historical
xii
F O R E W O R D ...
interpretation that assumes an alien invasion of a superior culture explains
much of ancient Near Eastern (Biblical) history as well or better than the
standard so-called scientific explanations. A wildly outrageous proposition
to some, the point is that these same historical methods are used then by
non-Indian scholars to interpret and explain American Indian realities. To
put the matter boldly from an American Indian perspective, if the assured
results of the historical critical method of western scholars are less than
assured in dealing with their own sacred texts, then perhaps Indians are not
so far off base in thinking that their scholarship about us is also suspect.
Deloria's more philosophical/theological work is not limited in its
impact to Indian people, but continues to be instructive to those who
function largely within the western intellectual tradition. I fully expect that
Deloria's continuing contribution to American Indian scholarship will
become increasingly important to the academy and to the development
and articulation of modern American Indian thought. Outside of the acad
emy, where he taught so many years, Deloria's leadership has been freely
given over time to both American Indian organizations and to non-Indian
groups that have impacted or had the potential to impact Indian people.
The guidance and support he continues to provide to younger Indian
scholars is invaluable.
God Is Red amply shows an Indian intellectual mind at work. Anyone
genuinely interested in the lifeways of American Indian peoples needs to
read and, indeed, study this seminal work.
xiii
