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Thinkers

Vine Deloria Jr.

Indigenous · North America · 1933 to 2005

American Indian thinker and lawyer who wrote on Native American rights, religion and the role of Western science.

What it is

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933 to 2005) was an American Indian theologian, historian and campaigner for Native American rights. A member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, he was born in South Dakota near the Pine Ridge reservation, and he is widely known for his 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins.

He was trained as a theologian and as a lawyer, and he published more than twenty books, the first of them in 1969.

The main ideas

  • Taking apart myths. He worked to dispel the pictures white Americans held of American Indians, and his first book challenged the stereotypes of its time.
  • Self-determination. His first book became a centrepiece of the movement for Native self-determination, the idea that tribes should govern their own affairs.
  • A Native view of religion. He wrote God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, a book on religion seen from a Native point of view.
  • Scepticism about Western science. In his later writings he increasingly criticised the role of Western science and its relationship to Indigenous knowledge systems.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone who learned about Native peoples from films and school books. Deloria would ask them to notice which pictures they carry, who drew them, and what changes when Native people are the ones telling their own history. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) drew national attention to Native American issues in the year of the Alcatraz-Red Power events.
  • God Is Red: A Native View of Religion is one of his books on religion.
  • From 1964 to 1967 he led the National Congress of American Indians, whose membership grew from 19 tribes to 156.
  • He served in the Marines from 1954 to 1956, earned a theology degree in 1963 and a law degree in 1970.
  • At the University of Arizona he set up the first master's degree in American Indian Studies in the United States, and from 1977 he served on the board of the National Museum of the American Indian.

Questions and criticism

  • Science and tradition. His criticism of Western science raises the question of how to weigh scientific evidence against traditional histories, and who is to judge between them.
  • Whose evidence counts? If Western science has a history of its own, it is fair to ask how any claim about the past should be tested, and by whom.

Close neighbours

The page on Linda Tuhiwai Smith, another Indigenous thinker who writes about research and colonialism, is a nearby read.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Linda Tuhiwai Smith · Writers on decolonising knowledge, such as Smith, draw on his work. (scholars disagree about this link)

Other Indigenous thinkers

Sources we used

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