Five College Forum; Lecture by Vine Deloria on "The Indian in the Modern World"

This is five college for him today and five college for him. We feature a talk by Vine Deloria author of Custer died for your sins. We talk you listen and of utmost good faith. Mr. de Loria was born in Martin a border town on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He's a Standing Rock Sioux who comes from a distinguished family of scholars churchman and a warrior chiefs. He's the former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. He has been a member of the Board of Inquiry on hunger and malnutrition in the USA and of the national office for the rights of the indigent. He spoke at the University of Massachusetts in September 25th 1972 as a guest of the distinguished visitors program. The subject of his talk was the Indian in the modern world. Here now is Vine Deloria occur. Of the I don't often get into

Pilgrim country so you'll have to forgive me if I don't know some of the local folklore here. I understand the only successful demonstration you people in Massachusetts ever held were you dressed up as Indians. And I understand your town is named after one of our favorite people. Jeffrey M. Hearst who distributed smallpox blankets to the Indians in the Ohio Valley. Of late I picked up theological and anthropological critiques because of my attacks on them. So to shorten the questioning period considerably. I'll make some preliminary remarks on those two brands of humanity and then they won't have to ask me

questions afterward. We've had a ongoing battle with anthropologists for a number of years revolving around two basic concepts one of which is that they continue to act as if the only valid Indians were the first Indians that one of the anthropologist ran across everyone born sense is somehow not quite an Indian because he doesn't conform to their scholarly opinions. And so we've had a running battle with them on that account. At the present time there are very strained relationships between a number of tribes and museums where various anthropologists have gathered this sacred objects medicine bags things pertaining to Indian religions and they've kept them in these museums in an

effort to educate the schoolchildren of this country as to the great American heritage. And we've had battles in the state of New York over the air clay wampum belt the Smithsonian changes their exhibits every time a tribe starts in the museum because they have some sacred masks of the Sunni's that they want to display but they don't want the Sunni's to know they have them. And so you get some very frantic anthropologists running around there. Now I don't say that these people are all bad. I wouldn't want my sister or daughter to marry one. But we found a place for them now in modern society and that is working on the population explosion because if they teach sex education the way they teach anthropology everybody's going to lose interest. And. That problem will be shortly solved.

Speaking in the East you don't run into people the Bureau of Indian Affairs you speak of West half your audience. Yes generally people from the Bureau of Indian Affairs coming to see if you're telling the truth about them so they can report back to the area office. What she said and try and get you in trouble if you're trying for most of you by the Bureau of Indian Affairs a very obscure esoteric government agency. I taught at Western Washington State last fall and the students had a big demonstration to protest the atomic explosion. I went out in the square where we had the rally. And the students were telling me that shooting off this bomb would cause title waves and earthquakes. They said there's no place on earth that safe to set that bomb off. And I said yeah there's one place that's a Bureau of Indian Affairs because nothing's going to shake that

institution. But I've done some research on the Bureau of Indian affairs lately and I come up with the answer and that is that. Before General Custer went to the Little Big Horn he stopped by the bureau and said don't do anything till I get back. Of A. Lately we like to refer to it as a hotbed of inertia. Now 10 years ago these were our chief enemies. And over the last 10 years I think we made considerable progress against the bureau. About three years ago I think most of you finally became aware of Indians when Indian activists took over Alcatraz and then we had a series of activist groups out west landing on islands. I went out

about two weeks after we took out the trash and talked to some of the people out there we tried to set up some lobbyists in Washington so we could get control of the island. And I went back to Washington D.C. in January and tried to talk to people in the Nixon administration about getting the island for an Indian cultural center. And I ran into one very conservative Republican. He shook his finger at me and he said you get those Indians out of that prison or we're going to put him in jail. I never could get the logic to that. But any group that put Rehnquist on the Supreme Court is is not terribly logical to begin with. In recent years I'd say the end of 71 72 Indians appear to have gone out of the fad stages as far as the media goes.

I know New York Times and some others still think Red Fox is 101 year old Sioux Indian. None of us ever did. But the New York Times and several others who really could not face the problems of modern Indians in effect went out and created one that was 100 years old that they could reminisce with. I talked to one anthropologist who had entered anthropology because when he was eight years old. He went to Cleveland Ohio and chief Redd Foxx was ever Tyson sausages and he was so impressed with Chief Redfox he decided to devote his life. To preservation of Sioux culture. And. I think that's the starting position of most people entering anthropologists in one traumatic charismatic moment where they spy another culture. Now I think the reason that Indians appear to

have lost the attention of the media and are not the favorites of Time and Newsweek anymore is that in large measure we've accomplished a great many things that we wanted to accomplish in the last 10 years at the beginning of the Kennedy administration we had a great many very powerful political enemies in Washington D.C. These people were for the most part determined to stamp out all Indian culture all Indian Treaty Rights. They would always come to the reservation to have a war bonnet put on them intellection time. The minute the election was over and you went in tried to talk with them why you were immediately faced with another General Custer or Jeffrey Amhurst. Over the last 10 years a number of Indian tribes become very active in

political events in the West. I'm happy to tell you that two weeks ago we retired Wayne Aspinall of Colorado. Clint Manderson of New Mexico got too old to daughter around interior. We've gotten rid of a lot of staff men who used to be very anti indian. We are not going to apparently play a very big role in the 1072 presidential election. If you read the latest poll Richard Nixon is now ahead by thirty nine point one old Indian told me a society always gets what it deserves and that's why Nixon is that far ahead. No I don't want to explain that remark. The emphasis has shifted rather dramatically from activist events following Alcatraz we had a group planned on Fort Lupton which is a fort

in Seattle. It was about to be declared surplus. We had a group planned at the lighthouse in Milwaukee. They were thinking of taking over the Milwaukee yacht club but they didn't have enough men to occupy both places. I asked them why they wanted to take over the Milwaukee yacht club. They said they wanted to have red suns in the sail set. But they we now have a Indian culture school at the Old White House site in Milwaukee. It's funded through health education welfare funds and it's one of about five or six Indian cultural schools in urban areas that came about as a direct result of the activism. Now if you look at the events of those three activist years almost everything that

happened revolved around the concept of land and it was not simply clarifying titles to land but it was Indian people trying to get specific pieces of land in order to set up cultural centers Indian study centers spiritual centers. And even though these protests were somewhat symbolic. They were able to communicate with Richard Nixon and other people in the current administration so that. We were able to break through in the last two years and. Get a great many things that we've been trying to get for over a period of 50 years. Since 1962 the Indian claims Commission had ruled that the blue lake belonged to Thomas Pablo and United States should return the lake. The senior Democrats in Congress refused to pass

legislation that would return that lake to us. Finally the White House entered. I had to be given Nixon credit for this but he did put a lot of muscle on the Republican Party. So the bill went to the floor of the Senate where they have a very vicious fight over the concept of restoring sacred lands to Indians. The administration Bill carried by a wide majority and. Approximately 40000 acres of sacred land that was sacred to Taos Pueblo was transferred to them. Since then we've gotten 12 12000 acres that included Mt. Adams in the state of Washington which was a shrine of the Acme Indians of that state last Thursday. The Nixon administration returned sixty one thousand acres to the Warm Springs tribe before again. And they're presently writing up a

bill to give the Tonto Apaches 85 acre reservation in Arizona recognized them as a federal tribe. And these were major items on the Indian agenda at the beginning of the 1960s. Almost everything that you would read or hear about. Your relationship to contemporary Indian problem revolved around the concept of land restoration. Now through the 50s and up to 1966 it was extremely difficult for us to advocate and communicate the desire. To restore tribal lands particularly tribal lands that had sacred shrines on them and. I believe the reason that it was difficult. Is that when you come into. The value structure of American Indian people you're talking about religious and philosophical ideas that are directly opposed to

Western culture to Christianity and the whole tradition of the West. It consequently raising the issue of sacred lands appears in one context politically. When you transfer the ideas behind that over into another context I think you find American Indian stand directly opposed to the interpretations of what this world is that have been shared by non Indian people of the United States. And this involves the concept of death. The concept of creation concept of animal and plant life. The concept of what the universe consists of. I think what you're seen at the present time in in the virtual disappearance of Indian activism is the beginning of a struggle on a very new level.

That is a lot of activists who had up to this time can been rather content to land on islands addressed audiences on the subject of racism and third world revolution. A lot of these people have dropped out the activist movement. They're back on the reservations and studying under the religious and holy men of the tribe. A lot of the ceremonies are being renewed. There's a tremendous sweeping undercurrent going through Indian country that involves traditional religion. I think this will surface in four or five years and I think this time instead of. A civil rights movement starting on the basis of equality with the dual problems of segregation integration community power all of the things we've experienced in the last 20 years. If you're going to see a whole new phenomenon of social questions raised

and as I say I don't think it will be for another five years I think what we're seeing now in this lull. As people storing their psychic energy in their emotional batteries getting ready for another run at an attempt to define what America is. And if you look into the religious and political traditions of the European white man as he's coming over here. You find that this man for fifteen hundred years has been in a religion that taught him. That the original man on earth bit into an apple and thereby damn to creation all of the life species of creation. All of the men who could ever live in that creation. Their religion taught him that the universe was completely alien to him. He had no relationship with it whatsoever. For fifteen hundred

years Christians proclaim they were in the world but not of it. Consequently no responsibility was ever felt to the world. Since the interest and interest come along in going to any bookstore and get thousands of anthologies and they usually put Chief Joseph's surrender speech right in the middle of the book because that's always the high point of the anthology Gerti selections continually speak of the paradise that existed on this continent and how stunned the early explorers were and Indian tribes kept treaties without demanding a piece of paper to take in to a law court. They had no jails nor for me just. That in a great many ways Indian society was almost a garden of Eden society.

It is not and of course cannot be that today because we are so involved with a number of things we've had to adapt to so many forces from the outside but in the original concept as the original explorers found the American Indian tribes. That religion emphasized the unity of life. The kinship of all living species to one another. Over a period of three hundred years. The continent was systematically settled. In many instances almost totally destroyed. And in many ways irredeemably destroyed. If you go to the Appalachian Mountains today you realize no matter how many ads Peabody calling Kennicott copper running Time magazine that land will never be the same

as you look through the various anthologies you find over and over again. The various Indian tribes say we cannot sell this land because this land contains the bones of our fathers and grandfathers. This is where our spirits are this is where people have always been. You find throughout these anthologies. Various Indian chiefs saying that we cannot sell this land because you have to dig down three feet before you reach the Earth because the rest of this is the dust of our ancestry. In 1926 Luther Standing Bear of. The Sioux tribe. Predicted there would be continual psychic dickered disruptions. Continual conflict and continual confusion because he said the white man can never dig his roots into the soil of this land and take root.

In the Christian religion you're taught that there is physical resurrection of the body. Consequently when you die as a Christian your body is put in a water proof air proof rustproof casket stuck into the ground and the stone is put there waiting the day of the Second Coming. And at no point is there any intention that you or your spirit or your body become part of the Lamb. You're segregated in a cemetery very close to the Church of the devil can't get your spirit in every way possible your bodies are preserved so that they'll be ready for the resurrection and consequently there is no point in the Christian religion here which the people can relate to the land and all that they are

continually alienated from. What we have fought for the last 10 or 15 years is to bring this Indian concept of religion into the courts into public consciousness into the intellectual struggle to define modern America because it was substantial number of Indian people would think this is not only a vital concept it's a crucial concept for contemporary America because what we have going on at the present time you can go into almost any state and see this. The Christian concept of Mandela unity from Nature has been given a beneficial veneer and that is called a tax exemption or tax deductible items that land in this society in the animals and plants living on it have

value for the society in so far as you can put them on your income tax form every year. Depreciation of land lands a good investment if you capitalized amortizing goes through all of these other things that you go through and a great many people own land and never see it because what they see is a piece of paper that describes the location of this thing. Consequently there is no way in present day America for a community or even a very small group of individuals to relate to any particular piece of land and where no one can relate to it. What has been a very beneficial concept of individual ownership becomes a very demonic thing because what law then does is protect

one man's right to use his land to the detriment of everybody else in that society. I didn't realize how drastic the situation was telling when down in Appalachian this last spring when the coal companies get through with Kentucky. All you're going to have is the Kentucky Derby grounds and the interstates going through the state and everything else will have been strip mined. Kentucky was once one of the most beautiful places on earth. In the far west we're fighting a very drastic fight against the Interior Department. Simply to allow the wild animals to live on federal lands. Some of the newspaper items that you frequently come across are these battles out there to allow the Mustang and Maverick courses that run through I mean in Utah allow them to live one more year

as wild animals as animals who have a right to exist. Against that are the combined forces of the stockman the cat and dog food manufacturers. The oil companies want to get into the shale and here you're opposing two different ideas. An Indian concept or creation that a living being or a living species has the right to exist in and of itself. And not because it is economically feasible for another species or because it happens to fit into an overall plan of development. Department of Interior every year. Puts a substantial budget into what they call predator control. He walked through the Rocky Mountains today you don't hear the voice of any living thing. The only thing that you will occasionally hear is a jet plane going overhead or a superhighway in the distance.

If predator control is based on a mythological interpretation of what internal revenue cost depreciation and what allowable losses. While many in Colorado parts of Montana and Utah used to have considerable wildlife on the internal revenue code was changed to allow Shipman and cattlemen to deduct the losses taken by predators every year. I don't know how far along go that was but no cow or sheep has died a natural death in those four states ever since that section went in. Because if. A sheep would die a natural death in Wyoming it could not be deducted from income tax. If the sheep is killed by a mythological eagle and it becomes a tax deductible loss and is carried on the books to be balanced against income over the last 20 years you have the number of sheep in Wyoming going

down. The number of lambs killed going up. In the number of eagles killed going up. So the story is that there is one eagle out there someplace that's averaging something like a thousand lambs a day. The current move toward ecology in attempting to build. A new type of social understanding of what we're talking about is social movement. In this last year I've been in a number of political controversies and at almost every point we have conservationists pitted against minority groups conservationists pitted against the rural poor. We have a corps of engineers in the Bureau of Reclamation standing back and choosing sides between the people involved in the controversy and ending up getting their programs put through regardless of what the ultimate value of the

project is. And consequently it is not going to be easy to come out of the post-civil rights post Vietnam protest days and talk about coalitions for social movements that are based on what are really old concepts. And that is that you stack all of the interest groups on one side of the scale and hope you get 51 percent. And if you get 51 percent you think you can carry it politically. But what you're talking about is the emergence of fundamentally opposed views. That is the traditional Western view that nature is dead that nature is bad. And man is an alien in this world. And what is basically the American Indian view that nature is alive. Nature is good in that we don't care whether there's another world or not.

We're too busy. I keep quiet finding out with this one. I think these are the two points of view that inevitably must come out of all the social confusion that we see today. We've had sporadic instances of women's liberation movements in the Indian country in many traditional tribes. It's the men who need liberation and not the women. In Indian country many tribes the clan mothers choose who will be the leaders they choose who will be the religious leaders. They make almost all of the decisions the tribe makes. Women's liberation is a concept that Indian people can relate to but relate to in a far different cultural context. Because in our tribal history the various distinctions that are made within the Indian community are definite

definitions of roles. There is not a primary interpretation which is either masculine or feminine in there but more of a cooperative communal sense. It's very difficult to begin to lay the guidelines for what a lot of us think could be the social movements of the 70s in 1954 when the Supreme Court came down with the Brown versus Topeka Board of Education which was the primary case that laid the groundwork at least legally and politically for the civil rights movement in that same year. Congress passed something like 14 terminations actually and began systematically destroying the tribes of this country. Throughout the early 60s we were talking about the

necessity of developing new concepts of what capital is what capital can do for communities. I recently did a study on the Lummi tribe western Washington the Bureau of Indian Affairs set up their reservation night in 1872. It was 12000 acres of virgin cedar wood the best cedar on the West Coast. The Bill of Indian Affairs at the direction of the president the United States in 1870 to cut and burn the forests because everyone knew that the Indians had to become farmers like the rest of America. Once a forest was cut and burned they taught the Indians how to plant potatoes. No one ever told anybody in Washington D.C. that the average rainfall is something like forty five inches a year in western Washington. And for nine months a year

when you the minute you remove that tree cover what you're talking about just want. And every ten year period in the history of that tribe you can see some directive come out of Washington DC. If you trace the ideology back ideology goes back to the inevitability of Western history that certain groups of people should do certain things. We have to prepare these people to live good Christian lives so that in the afterlife. They can have equal civil rights where we cannot give it to them. Now all of the other mythologies that have always defined America out of that 12000 acres by 1960 the Lummi tribe had as its sole asset. Five hundred acres of title flats title flats. And some of you know the land exposed between high and low tide. It's hardly a place that you can put

a motel. Believing in affairs came and took a look at the Lummi reservation decided in the way of Western culture at 16:00 Lummi should start arts and crafts project because Indians are good with their hands. We can create a tremendous industry here to help these people adjust adjust to modern life so they long the tribe $30000 they created the Lummi knitters. The money weavers and the Lummi carvers building in affairs ran the program for six years. The most successful component was the Lummi netters. The women worked all year around and they have reached two hundred seventy two dollars a year income.

The other programs were much worse. Lummy carvers average $15 a year income per person. After six years to build Indian Affairs threw up their hands. Issued a paper blasting the Lummi is lazy unmotivated dirty ignorant Indians that they would never have anything to do with under any circumstances. The Bureau of Indian Affairs people began a boycott of the Lummi reservation the minute they were gone the Limeys rushed up to western Washington state and they said once you people come down take a look at this what we've got left and tell us what to do. Marine biologist came down took one look at it and they said well yes but I suppose you could set up an aquaculture if you really would like to do that. Lummis been traditional fishermen started discussing the idea and decided to attempt to build an aqua culture. They had only been at this point

one other aquaculture on the West Coast. And the marvelous thing about the mummies is the Bureau of Indian Affairs was mad at them. With the exception of one or two marine biologist. Nobody in the universities would talk to them because they are such that they were lazy and unmotivated. Nobody in the foundations would talk to them and nobody at the local county level would talk to them. So you had an Indian tribe that for once in its life was left alone. Nobody to give them any advice nobody to talk them into making bolo ties or anything. Now it's four years later. Let me see have created a seven hundred fifty acre pond on their title slide. They've raised from government and private sources five million dollars within within five years they will control oyster seed production in the Pacific basin. They have

upwards of 60 tribal members now trained as marine biologist. These people are able to take any kind of fish apart to tell you exactly what it's made of what its problems are how you can adapt it freshwater to salt water and back. They're raising 20 million oysters every four months. They've converted freshwater Donalson trout to seawater. They're able to take them back and forth. They're now going all over the southeast to the atolls as advisors on the aquaculture. Bill of Indian Affairs came out took one look at the mummy project. They said well you guys got away from us but we'll get you back under the fold sooner or later and we're never going to let another tribe get away with what you got away with. It consequently as we talk about social issues in the 70s that is the type of

reaction our best projects have gotten. That's the type of attitude that we've had to face. A large reason why we had Alcatraz and the activist event is because we have been dealing with an American society that does not think for itself. Therefore we like other minority groups had to go out and find a symbol that would be easy for people to identify with to be able to sway the public opinion to be able to change the conditions and policies that were affecting us. There are a lot of specific things we can and should be done in Indian affairs. Before I close I'm going to name three or four projects that we desperately need help. But these are short term projects. These are easy political

things. These are things where you know you're not required to think you're not required to meditate you're not required to examine your own values so you're required to do is write letters gain adherents to the cause develop political pressure. But the situation in the United States is getting so serious not in terms of revolution. And I said this some years ago. At us we go in all of the long hairs bood me because revolution is popular. But I thought at that time and I still think at this time America is going to bore itself to death before it does anything else. Because it seems to me the we have a conglomerate of people who either cannot or will not examine the fundamental principles upon which they make their decisions upon which they place their values.

It seems to me this stems directly back to your religious heritage. Your religion preaches that you have face which you know practical context means you believe what we tell you and you don't question. And I think that's been drummed into question man into a Christian man for so long that all he can do at the present time is react. All you have to do is wave a symbol in front of him and he jumps to be across American facts like a black fish to a dollar bill. Whatever it is. It seems to me that we're not going no matter how much social movement we get in no matter how many new groups we organize no matter how many presidential candidates we support until there's a fundamental re-examination of the

premises upon which people make their decision of how they view the universe how they view human beings how they view their relationship to other forms of life. How they review their communities. All we're going to see is a continual spend spend spend. And the unfortunate thing is I think whether American Indians are ready to take the responsibility or not the only people standing in the way we total intellectual collapse of American society are those traditional Indian people who say no the universe is not dead. I as an Indian holy man can talk to trees and rocks. If you would get off your jet planes and go out there and listen to rocks would talk to you and you could talk with them. The people who from the traditional religions say you cannot kill a

coyote you cannot kill the species as bad as a species may appear to human beings. It was created by the same Creator who created the rest of us and it has an inherent right to live whether we live wanted to live or not. I think that point of view is the only point of view that is truly philosophically and religiously raised as an alternative to what we see in the United States today. Whether American Indian people want to accept this responsibility or not. A certain percentage of them are going to have to speak out and say these things no matter how much your cemeteries mean to you in terms of your religion. There's a fundamental question of how your cemeteries say what you are that your whole lives and even after death you could not relate to the land that you lived on

even after you were dead your relatives were afraid to give you that land. And consequently By what right do you call it your land. Only by the right that you have guns at the present time to keep it but your spirits are not there your bones are not there and you are not. I think all of these issues are going to be raised in one way or another in the next five years. The thing that I greatly fear the irrationality of the white man who is has to think about the way he makes his decisions. I've tried to raise this question in a number of contexts where they were Christian clergymen who had doctors degrees in theology. Apparently educated men who could examine alternatives in all I

got was either irrational response that I was going to hell and listen if I had to play harps with Billy Graham and Orville Roberts endlessly I'd go to Atlanta. All those guys down the Cotton Bowl don't realize what they signed up for let me tell you that. You have Kris Kristofferson thinks he's going to write those kind of songs in heaven he's got another thought. But I think that. This is really the fundamental questions that have to be raised. Indians have to raise and those of you who are post Christian or non-Christian choirs I Christian have got to raise these questions in your universities in your schools. In every way you

can. Now I would predict a very very exciting five years coming up. More so. Than perhaps anything happening in the 50s and 60s. In 1950 a book called Worlds in Collision was published by menu of Velikovsky. Academic establishment turned on this man and ripped him to shreds went so far as to write predictions that the man was crazy and that if his theory was right they said if Emmanuel Velikovsky story is right Venus would have to be 800 degrees in temperature. Well 12 years later they found out it was one of your friends from the Harvard astronomical.

Group there said that many of the McCaskey is crazy if he's right the sun has. I think it's a positive charge of ten to one thousands power and three or four years later an Australian astronomer proved that the Sun had a positive charge of 10 to the one thousandth power. What a man of the McCaskey did was take the religious myths and folklore of people all over the globe that described certain types of celestial phenomena. A lot of this phenomenon were cloaked in what had been regarded very superstitious pagan legends that a bird and a dragon fought in that all of these things happen. And he showed that the solar system we live in is hardly a stable solar system that Jupiter is in all probability a star

that this star ejected Venus as a comet and Venus nearly hit the earth several times in the which you have described in the Bible in Exodus the fall of Jericho all of these things were actual events that people witnessed and lived through. I mention this because on the west coast students have taken up the cause of this man and all they've asked is for the people in the universities to give him a hearing. Not for anybody to lose their scholarly reputation by. Supporting the theory but simply to give it a hearing. I've talked with some of the best archaeologist in Colorado and they gave me a very scientific statement. They said I would not read the man because he's crazy. And I said well how do you know he's crazy unless you've read it. And they said Well anybody who would write anything like that must be crazy and I said anything like what. Because you admit that you haven't read the book.

They said well we wouldn't read anything like that. And I think that again all relates back to the situation we face today. I'm terribly disappointed at the Evan guard Christian theologians that couldn't see that if the Bible incidents were true this put their religion on a very high plane. I was very disappointed in jail two days ago in Chicago when I brought this up to a offish companion. I thought I would have a lot of chance to communicate with a priest companion because they're very liberal people. They believe that the knots in the Ten Commandments were later additions by conservatives and. This guy in particular was a very high church liberal man.

And he tell me that religious leaders even if the idea was correct that they could not consider it because this would place all of the creation stories of the various religions on an equal basis and would do away with the Christian doctrine of creation. And I said you should be most thankful for Emmanuel Velikovsky because somebody ought to do away with the Christian doctrine of creation because that's why we're in the mess that we're in. Consequently I have no doubts in my own mind that this man's theory is going to carry the remaining decades of this century. He's going to open up all of the sciences even pseudo sciences like anthropology. He's going to give us a new vision of what the experiences of mankind were. Now one of the fundamental opening points that has blocked Indian religions from being considered as valid tribal

valid religions for mankind is the Indian creation stories. The Navajo the Hopi man Dan all of them refer to a world catastrophe where the people should revive the underground and then a friendly spiritual being showed them the way to the next world. When you put these legends in the cosmology of this man religion becomes an entirely different thing and each religion must stand on its ability to produce something today and not on the fore ordained idea of history. We have systematically issued a challenge to Christians and other religions if they can go out to Arizona and after the Hopis have made it rain. If they can get down on their knees and dry it up. They get equal time. If they can't and we know they can't.

Then they've got to step back and listen. And I think these are a number of very serious issues that we're confronted with today. They're entirely different and the issues that we've had to face in the 60s entirely different than the issues in 1068 and different and political issues today they require the same seriousness the same examination the same thoughtfulness the same commitment. If we don't do that and enter undertake a complete examination of all the values fundamental beliefs of western civilization and judge them on their merits we are going to continue to have American presidents who are against abortion because they believe in the sanctity of human life and who can continue a war in Southeast Asia for four years and call both those actions Christian

and see no schizophrenia in that type of belief. And I think I think those are the issues we've got to deal with. Whether you like it or not. It's my belief that eventually you will have to confront and make a choice. Between traditional Western values traditional values of American Indian tribes and their conception of life which I think we are your opponents for the next decade. And I think we're going to win a. If you have any questions please step up to the microphones that are in the yards.

Let's go Oh OK. OK. OK. I was in Washington D.C. today wrestle me and threaten to sue the Washington Redskins and I was I was on the fence about this. I went back to Seattle and I was going to oppose Russell on this point and say what difference does it make. I got back I read the Seattle Post Intelligencer which is a misnomer in the state of Washington there not any

intelligence not state. One sports writer said this is terrible the Indians are protesting this he said. Any day I expect my office to be filled with lions and tigers and bears. Well not quite obviously. He and other sports writers regard Indians as a species of animal and consequently if that's the interpretation it's given that I'm 100 percent against. I am glad to see the Braves move out of Boston because Boston people never were that brave except at the Tea Party. See. Since you're thinking of changing your name here in Amherst named after Lord Geoffrey Amhurst you could call yourselves the smallpox or some of the genocide years. For. CNN and cheerleaders say all you want to do generally is just kill him.

But now the cheerleaders can advocate wiping out all of the school not just the football team told me annihilating the other. I think it was initially not a sensitive point with Indians but the reaction because I think a lot of Indians thought well they're really not. They really don't think of us this way. And someone raised the question and all of a sudden everybody started saying well my God if we change a name for you then. And if the Lions and tigers come into our office we'll have change for them. So obviously Indians all along had been considered a species of man. And so for that reason I'm totally against the red man or whatever. Today on five college form you have heard a talk by Vine Deloria titled The Indian in the modern world. It was delivered at the University of Massachusetts on September 20 5th 1972. Mr. de Loria is the author of Custer died for

your sins. We talk you listen and of utmost good faith five college form is produced by the five college public radio station in Amherst Massachusetts w o f c r.