Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“Understanding Indians is not an esoteric art. All it takes is a trip through Arizona or New Mexico, watching a documentary on TV, having known one in the service, or having read a popular book on them.”

This quote reflects Deloria’s view that many white people see Native people as a monolith and rely on assumptions for much of their knowledge of Indigenous life. Knowing even the tiniest amount about Indigenous people often makes white people feel qualified to form opinions about the “Indian plight.”

“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.”

This quote is an example of Deloria’s skilled use of irony. Many politicians and members of the public viewed the Soviet Union as untrustworthy and condemned Russia for treatment that Native people had faced from the United States for centuries.

“To imply that Indians were given land is to completely reverse the facts of history.”

In addition to carefully crafted ironic statements, Deloria peppers his text with sentences like this one. By stating facts like this directly, he shows just how little one must dig under the surface of history to discover misconceptions and outright misinformation. The idea that Native people were “given land” by the United States ignores the hundreds of years of history in which the United States took that land in the first place.

“The betrayal of treaty promises has in this generation created a greater feeling of unity among Indian people than any other subject.”

Deloria spends much of the book discussing the unique needs of various tribes. He is careful to note, however, that some traits are universal among the tribes. Most tribes, at some point, signed at least one treaty with the US government. The US upheld none of these treaties, and whether or not a tribe had a treaty was irrelevant to their displacement and attempted erasure.

“Too often termination has been heavily disguised as a plan to offer the Indian people full citizenship rights.”

This was especially true for small tribes that did not have the manpower or resources to actively negotiate with the government. Things like marriage rights were offered in exchange for a loss of federal services. Often this did not constitute full citizenship rights, and often the promised rights were never granted.

“If America has done to us as it wishes others to do to her, then the future will not be bright. America is running up a great debt. It may someday see the wholesale despoilation of its lands and people by a foreign nation.”

While Deloria is primarily concerned with Indigenous rights and livelihood, he shows concern for the future of the United States as a whole. Someday, he believes, the country will reap the consequences for its poor treatment of the Indigenous population.

“A warrior killed in battle could always go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. But where does an Indian laid low by an anthro go? The library?”

This quote showcases Deloria’s dry style of humor. While he does not literally believe that anthropologists kill Indigenous people, he believes that anthropological work on reservations often does more harm than good. Rather than destroying Indigenous culture in a literal sense, working with anthropologists relegates Native people to a static condition and encourages them to perform “Indianness” for a white audience.

“Academia, and its by-products, continues to become more and more irrelevant to the needs of the people.”

While the book primarily focuses on Native- issues, Deloria often makes statements like this one. He sees the problems facing Indigenous people as a sign of the inherent flaws in the mainstream European social structure.

“Land acquisition and missionary work always went hand in hand in American history.”

Deloria is careful to not assign all of the blame for land theft to the federal government. Churches were equally responsible despite their more sympathetic view of tribes for many years. While the government’s role was to acquire land through war and legal action, church leaders hoped to guide Indigenous people toward accepting a new white life.

“The Reformation had divided the world into two arenas: church and state. Morality of one was not necessarily related to morality of the other.”

Deloria explains the differences between how social systems developed in the Western Hemisphere and Europe. Indigenous American cultures did not live under a hierarchical religious system before European contact. Worship was ingrained into everyday life, and religious practices had specific meaning and purpose. Deloria sees Christianity as unrelated to the everyday lives of many of its adherents.

“People have found it hard to think of Indians without conjuring up the picture of a massive bureaucracy oppressing a helpless people.”

Helplessness is one of the primary stereotypes about Indigenous people that Deloria aims to break with this book. He argues that while the bureaucracy certainly makes it more difficult for tribes to function, the key to solving this issue is to allow tribes to help themselves without white oversight.

“Few people consider what would happen to the Indian people if the bureau were suddenly removed. Indians would be cast adrift in society at the mercy of sharp operators.”

Deloria is adamant that the BIA should not be abolished, as many of his contemporaries argue. He believes that a massive reorganization of the agency and a different system of allocating funds would help tribes, reservations, and Native individuals immensely. Simply taking it away ignores the forced poverty that put tribal people in jeopardy in the first place.

“Over the years programs have been designed to accomplish secretly what cannot be accomplished openly, the de-Indianization of the Indian.”

This quote references the ways that the federal government continued toward the goal of assimilating Indigenous Americans after physical annihilation failed. Deloria believes that many programs aim to “modernize” Indigenous people, but the true goal is to get them to align with white society enough that they stop fighting for the right to live in their own way.

“It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts on Indian Affairs. Rather the image of the granite-faced grunting redskin has been perpetuated by American mythology.”

This quote highlights Deloria’s strategic use of racist imagery to convey meaning with humor. This phrase is used to introduce his “Indian Humor” essay and provides a clear image that he then goes on to subvert.

“When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that that people can survive.”

Deloria is especially disappointed by the white stereotype that Native people are stoic and humorless. He sees humor as an integral part of tribal cultures across the country. Joking becomes especially important when all seems lost and when trying to navigate complex social situations such as interactions with government organizations.

“There has been no way to positively determine in which category Indians belong when it comes to federal agencies.”

Unlike Black people, who were categorically excluded from personhood (and whiteness) for much of American history, Indigenous people experienced both exclusion and forced inclusion into the “white” category. In large part, whether an Indigenous person was considered white depended on how assimilated they appeared when interacting with white leaders.

“Between these two basic attitudes, the apelike draft animal and the wild free-running antelope, the white man was impaled on the horns of a dilemma he had created within himself.”

Deloria uses the metaphor of an animal defeating a white man to highlight the confusion caused by “scientific” racism. As the 19th century wore on, Indigenous Americans were viewed less as animals to be hunted and more as unintelligent people who could eventually become “modernized” if given the proper guidance.

“After the war chiefs had been killed or rendered harmless, Indians seemed to drift into a timeless mist.”

The white view of Indigenous Americans changed rapidly through the 19th century. As the century opened, they were viewed as a threat, prompting the US Army to embark on a genocide. Once tribes were extremely weakened, Native people quickly became romantic historical symbols in the minds of many white people.

“In an undefined sense, Tonto was able to universalize Indianness for Indians and lay the groundwork for the eventual rejection of the white man and his strange ways.”

Tonto is described as the ultimate Native stereotype. In this quote, Deloria suggests that his popularity inspired many Native people to recognize how many white people misunderstood Indigenous culture.

“So assured is modern man that he has absolute control of himself and his society that there is never any question but what Indians are moving, albeit slowly and inefficiently, toward that great and blessed land of suburban America, the mecca for all people.”

One of the major issues with mainstream American culture, Deloria argues, is its own sense of superiority. By using Mecca as a hyperbolic metaphor for suburbia, he underscores how flawed he thinks this belief really is.

“The corporation forms the closest attempt of the white man to socialize his individualism and become a tribal man.”

Deloria never directly defines “whiteness” in the book, but he makes it clear that the concept goes beyond skin color or European ancestry. He offers several key elements of white society, including a strong sense of individualism. He believes that this focus on individualism is only a cover for a core desire for tribalism, as shown through corporations and other groups that, in effect, resemble tribes.

“At present the visible poverty of Indian tribes veils the great potential of the Indian people from modern society.”

In the modern era, Deloria believes that poverty is the main force keeping Native people from performing a larger role in American society. He writes that the only solution to this is to dismantle the bureaucracy surrounding money that is set aside for tribes. If Indigenous people could easily access the funds they need for specific projects, he believes that poverty would quickly be alleviated.

“The famed melting pot, the great sociological theory devised to explain the dispersion of the European immigrant into American society, had cracks in it through which, apparently, Indian tribes were slipping with ease.”

Deloria says that assimilation was not limited to Indigenous people. The “melting pot” concept can conversely be viewed as the dismantling of immigrants’ native cultures in favor of a new American identity. For many years, it seemed that Native cultures would follow the same path. However, the 20th century saw the revitalization of many cultural traditions and social connections once active restrictions were lifted.