Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains references to the oppression of Indigenous Americans.

Conflict between Native people and mainstream white society has undergone many different phases since the first Europeans arrived in North America. During the early years of white settlement, many Native and colonial groups coexisted relatively peacefully, as white communities relied on their Indigenous neighbors for support in an unfamiliar land. Deloria sees this as a major reason why many tribes, especially in the East, readily agreed to treaties with the United States government. The Native communities had helped the newcomers and expected the same kind of fair treatment.

As white settlement expanded, conflicts between Native and European Americans became more and more frequent. The US broke every treaty in some regard and tribes were pushed into smaller and smaller patches of the least desirable land, sometimes hundreds of miles from the areas where their families had lived for generations. Over time, Native people came to be viewed as a relic of the past in need of management and preservation, rather than an active threat to white life. Instead of Army battalions being sent out to quell the “Indian problem,” missionaries, anthropologists, and government officials set out to become “friends” with the Native people. Although the style of oppression varied over time, Deloria argues that the primary goal of the federal government has always been to assimilate Indigenous people into white American society.

Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto was written in 1969 as the civil rights movement in the United States expanded beyond Black activism in the South to include many different groups of marginalized people. Deloria was already a well-known Native American activist by the time he published Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. The manifesto was highly influential to the Red Power movement, a group of youth-led organizations including the American Indian Movement (AIM). The phrase “Red Power” is typically attributed to Deloria. These groups largely promoted unity between people from all Indigenous groups to combat oppression, although many were/are tied to specific tribes. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Native American activists carried out several large-scale events, including occupations of Alcatraz Island, Mt. Rushmore, and Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The latter occupation resulted in the deaths of two activists.

The Red Power movement declined through the 1970s, after achieving several major goals such as more investment in Indigenous-led schools and museums and the passing of the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act, which reversed the tribal termination policies enacted earlier in the 20th century. Although the specific movements that surrounded the publication of Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto have largely subsided, Indigenous rights activists continue to be inspired by these efforts.