Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

In this section of the book, Deloria shifts from the outside forces at work among Indigenous groups to the ways that they have responded to and interacted with these outside influences, underscoring both Native Resistance and Cultural Revitalization and The Benefits and Drawbacks of Tribalism. By examining Native humor, Indigenous motivations during the civil rights movement, and the forces working against up-and-coming tribal leaders, he brings his discussion fully into the contemporary world of the late 1960s. These discussions further his aim of showing Indigenous people as dynamic, adaptable people that have survived against all odds, rather than lowly, old-fashioned relics who will never manage to flourish without outside support. They also set the stage for the final two chapters, in which Deloria gives recommendations for how Native people can use the advantages of tribalism to build a better world for themselves.

The first chapter in this section, “Indian Humor,” is the most widely read of the book’s eleven essays. It is commonly read in college classes, especially in the social sciences. “Indian Humor” seems more directly targeted to the non-Indigenous audience than much of the book’s other content, as it explores a topic that most Native people are likely already familiar with, and it functions largely to break the stoic stereotype of Indigenous people discussed above. Deloria uses this chapter to simultaneously share the history and function of humor within Indigenous culture and explore several different specific historical topics, such as General Custer and Christopher Columbus. In the segment about Custer, he traces the history of the book’s title, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, from its origin as a bumper sticker related to a specific cause to its contemporary status as a common phrase with several different meanings. By choosing the same phrase for a title, Deloria highlights his own place in the tradition of Indigenous humor. In this chapter, the motivations and context behind many of the jokes that Deloria makes in the book become clearer, and his use of irony becomes especially apparent.

Expanding on The History of Indigenous Oppression in the United States, Chapters 8 and 9 both further the discussion of how Indigenous people have been misunderstood by wider society and begin to explain ways that this trend can be broken. On the most basic level, most of this misunderstanding comes down to the common idea in mainstream culture that all Indigenous people are essentially interchangeable. When discussing Indigenous-Black relations and the civil rights movement, Deloria shows that this stereotype often extends to all marginalized people. This was not always the case. As discussed in “The Red and The Black,” many white people in the past saw people of color as essentially separate species. From the 18th to the early 20th century, “scientific” racism was a popular belief system for many white academic and political professionals. Many analyses of racial differences had a basis in agriculture and natural history. Thus, Deloria is not being metaphorical when he points out that Black people were seen as livestock, Asian and Mexican people as other types of domestic creatures, and Indigenous people as wild antelope. Many early social and legal policies, especially regarding Native and Black people, were directly related to the treatment of the animal type with which they became aligned. This formed the basis for many later policies, even after the discovery of evolution confirmed that all humans are members of the same species.

This history contributes to the conflict found in “The Problem of Indian Leadership.” Although Indigenous people have been released from official classification as lesser humans, this idea still contributes to the lack of agency that many Native communities face, the difficulty of being a tribal leader, and the paucity of realistic role models for younger Indigenous people. The focused discussion of Tonto is one way Deloria explains this problem. Tonto first appeared in 1933, and as The Lone Ranger became a defining touchstone of midcentury childhood, Tonto became the core “Indian” archetype for many young Americans. As Deloria explains, Tonto is in many ways the ultimate synthesis of white assumptions about Indigenous Americans. He is uneducated and often comedically stupid but bears a folksy, mysterious wisdom that he uses to get the Lone Ranger out of danger when all else is lost. His look, intelligence, and attitude all convey the wise but old-fashioned, skilled but not self-sufficient “Indian” that many white Americans reflexively assume to be reality.

Effective Native leaders, Deloria argues, must surpass the ability to direct their own communities. First, they must disprove the assumption that Indigenous people are funny, unintelligent, and mostly passive. At the same time, they must not be overly aggressive and must remain relatable to white people to avoid falling into the older stereotype of the primitively savage warrior. Since many spaces in which Native leaders function are overseen by mostly white government committees and supervisory boards, often only people who portray themselves as “good Indians” are invited to become leaders in the first place. Deloria argues that to create truly effective Native leaders, reservations and other Indigenous collectives must be trusted to make their own decisions and activists must consider the history of Indigenous people, specifically when advocating for civil rights. Given its subject matter, the book contributes to realizing these goals, since it gives an account of Indigenous people, history, and culture that undermines these stereotypes while highlighting Indigenous strength and self-determination.