Vine Deloria Jr Passes Away

RMN:

Indian movement icon, educator Deloria dies

Deloria was known for his wit and influential writings.

By Deborah Frazier, Rocky Mountain News

November 15, 2005

Vine Deloria Jr., the revered intellectual, political and spiritual visionary of the Native American rights movement, died Sunday.Deloria, who retired as a professor at the University of Colorado in 2000, was 72.

“Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century,” said Charles Wilkinson, a distinguished professor at the University of Colorado Law School.

Through his books, Custer Died For Your Sins followed by We Talk, You Listen, God Is Red and Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, Deloria laid the foundation for restoring American Indian identity.

“His writing gave Indian young people a sense of personal worth and meaning that they did not have before,” said George “Tink” Tinker, professor of American Indian Culture and Religious Traditions at the Iliff School of Theology.

Deloria’s writings countered centuries of American policy aimed at ending Indian identity, generations of history books that portrayed Indians as savages and decades of movies that demeaned Indian culture, said Tinker.

“He was one of those individuals who really kept Indian people from becoming extinct,” said Rick Williams, president of the Denver-based American Indian College Fund.

Deloria, a Standing Rock Sioux born in Martin, S.D., in 1933, served in the Marines, graduated from Iowa State University and earned a master’s degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago.

John Echohawk, founder of the Boulder-based Native American Rights Fund (NARF), met Deloria in 1969 at a National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) conference.

Echohawk and Deloria were both in law school, but Deloria had already served as executive director of the NCAI, the largest intertribal organization.

Echohawk said he studied Deloria’s work on Indian tribes as sovereign nations, the importance of the treaties, his defense of AIM leaders after the FBI confrontation at Wounded Knee and the repatriation of Indian burial materials.

“He took the treaties and other legal documents to the courts and had them enforced,” said Echo-hawk. “He and his books helped me get into what I do now.”

Deloria, who graduated from the CU law school in 1970, was also one of NARF’s first board members.

He taught at the University of Arizona from 1978 to 1990 before joining the CU-Boulder faculty. He also wrote more than 20 books and challenged Congress on the legality of Indian policy.

“There is not a single Indian person in this country who doesn’t owe Vine Deloria Jr.,” said Glenn Morris, a political science professor at the University of Colorado at Denver.

“I knew of him long before I met him. I was so in awe of him, it was years before I could speak in his presence,” said Morris, a leader in the American Indian Movement.

Deloria was a prolific writer throughout his career, always cutting new ground, including Evolution, Creationism, and other Modern Myths in 2002.

At the time of his death, he had books ready for the presses on Carl Jung and the Sioux, and on the powers of Indian medicine people.

At CU, he taught American studies, law, history, religion and political science.

“Hanging out with him was a roller-coaster ride,” said Patricia Limerick, a history professor at CU. “He was extremely witty and got words to do circus tricks.”

When he was honored with the Center for the American West’s Wallace Stegner award in 2002, he gave a speech on the preparation of fried chicken in rural America, she said.

“He never let any of us off easy,” she said.

“After you’d had an encounter with him, you were cured of the late-19th century notion that the Indians among us were so modern that they were not Indian.”

Deloria is survived by his wife, Barbara N. Deloria, of Golden; his brother, Philip Deloria, of Albuquerque; his sister, Barbara Sanchez, of Tucson; his children, Philip Deloria, of Ann Arbor, Mich., Daniel Deloria, of Moore, Okla., Jeanne Deloria, of Tucson, and seven grandchildren.

Funeral services are pending. A public memorial celebration will take place Nov., 18 at the Mount Vernon Event Center in Golden.

Contributions may be made to the Vine Deloria Jr. Scholarship, care of the American Indian Scholarship Fund, 8333 Greenwood Blvd., Denver, 80221.