Vine Deloria, Jr. Quotes

“Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful 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.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply Ours.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American people
that Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty or
agreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, the
saying went, to be Communists.
Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these
statements. America has yet to keep one Indian treaty or agreement
despite the fact that the United States government signed
over four hundred such treaties and agreements with Indian
tribes. It would take Russia another century to make and break
as many treaties as the United States has already violated.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Who will find peace with the lands? The future of humankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand 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.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Custer is said to have boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation with his Seventh Cavalry, and he was half right. He got half-way through.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian ...”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land - American Indians - and the political owner of the land - American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment; in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“It is this subtle dimension of understanding that marks the southwestern Indian peoples from other religions and separates tribal peoples from the world's religions. Somewhere in the planetary history religious expression changed from participation in the sound, color and rhythm of nature to the abstractions of man outside this context pleading for temporary respite and hoping in the next life to return to the Garden.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a
people.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

If the tribal peoples actually represented Western origins at a much earlier time, it was exceedingly valuable that they should be studied intensely for clues about the nature and origin of human society. Consequently it was an injury to science and human knowledge to allow the military to simply exterminate them.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past
and that past is not as distant as we might suppose.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

“But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages.”

— Vine Deloria, Jr.

Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.

— Vine Deloria, Jr.