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11/24/2005:

"Vine Deloria: Working with wit and wisdom for Native American rights"

The most effective weapon of the Native American historian and activist Vine Deloria, who has died aged 72, was the scathing and sardonic humour in his accounts of white treachery towards his people. He also knew that its novelty helped him to destroy myths, a major objective.
Widely regarded as the 20th century's most important scholar and political voice in Native American affairs, Deloria was at his most formidable when demolishing cliches and stereotypes, and their associated thinking. Anthropologists were an important, and unexpected, enemy, and they suffered such an onslaught in Deloria's first book - for alleged laziness and limited thinking - that, in later references to their own scholarship, they would ask jokingly if it was AD, or after Deloria.

An equal target were Christian missionaries, whom Deloria attacked from a secure position, having undergone four years at a seminary and taken a degree in theology - and later, in law. He once said missionaries had "fallen on their knees and prayed for the Indians" before rising to "fall on the Indians and prey on their land".
The book that made his name was Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), described by one scholar as "the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs". Part of its success was because of Deloria's views. He wrote: "We have brought the white man a long way in 500 years ... from a childish search for mythical cities of gold and fountains of youth to the simple recognition that lands are essential for human existence."

In his next book, We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (1970), he claimed that the destruction wrought by corporate values and its technology was so damaging that a return to Native American tribal standards and culture could be viewed as salvation.

His hatred of General George Custer, until then the white American hero and martyr of the Little Big Horn battle - his "last stand" - led Deloria to more provocative language still. He described the officer as the "Adolf Eichmann of the plains", whose soldiers were tools "not defending civilisation; they were crushing another society".

Deloria wrote 20 books, edited others, and published his memoirs and a two-volume set of US-Native American treaties, all of which make devastating reading because of how many agreements were broken by lies and cheating. He also opposed the anthropological theory that Native Americans only arrived on the American continent from Asia via the Bering Straits - a critique gaining in credibility - and argued that, unlike African Americans, Native Americans did not seek to be equals in US society. They wanted no part of it.

Among his most important works were: Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence (1974); A Better Day for Indians (1976); The Metaphysics of Modern Existence (1979); A Brief History of the Federal Responsibility to the American Indian (1979); American Indians, American Justice (1983); The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (1984); American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century (1985); God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1994); Red Earth, White Lies (1995); and For This Land: Writings on Religion in America (1999).

Deloria was born into a distinguished Sioux family, the son of an Episcopalian clergyman in one of America's poorest areas, then and now, the town of Martin, South Dakota, near the Pine Ridge Oglala Sioux reservation. After a spell in the US marine corps, he got a master's degree from the Lutheran School of Theology, Chicago, in 1963, before taking a law degree from the University of Colorado in 1970. He taught at the University of Arizona from 1978 until 1990, when he returned to Colorado to teach history, political science, law and ethnic and religious studies.

From 1964 to 1967, Deloria was an executive officer of the National Conference of American Indians, where, before the Custer book made him famous, he was a leading spokesman on native affairs in Washington. He often testified before the US Congress at times when civil rights and ethnic identity movements were causing volatile dissension and change in America.

He is survived by his wife, two sons and a daughter.
guardian.co.uk

Abuse payout for native Canadians
Canada has offered to pay more than C$2bn (US$1.7bn) compensation to indigenous people who were abused at government-funded residential schools.

Some 80,000 people who attended the schools over decades are eligible.

About 15,000 of them have begun legal claims against the government and Church, which ran the schools - to be dropped if they accept the deal.

The draft package must still be agreed by the courts but has been welcomed by indigenous leaders.

Thousands of former pupils at the 130 boarding schools have made allegations of physical and sexual abuse spanning seven decades.