Vine Deloria Jr. > Quotes

“Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Never has America lost a war ... But name, if you can, the last peace the United States won. Victory yes, but this country has never made a successful peace because peace requires exchanging ideas, concepts, thoughts, and recognizing the fact that two distinct systems of life can exist together without conflict. Consider how quickly America seems to be facing its allies of one war as new enemies.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Before the white man can relate to others he must forego the pleasure of defining them. The white man must learn to stop viewing history as a plot against himself.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“Until America begins to build a moral record in her dealings with the Indian people she should not try to fool the rest of the world about her intentions on other continents. America has always been a militantly imperialistic world power eagerly grasping for economic control over weaker nations.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Some years back Richard Nixon warned the American people
that Russia was bad because she had not kept any treaty or
agreement signed with her. You can trust the Communists, the
saying went, to be Communists.
Indian people laugh themselves sick when they hear these
statements. 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.”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Religion, as I have experienced it, is not the recitation of beliefs but a way of helping to understand our lives. It must, I think, have an intimate connection with the world in which we live, and any religion that promotes other places—heaven and so on—in favor of what we have in the physical world is a delusion, a mere control device to allow us to be manipulated.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“But there was no question in Jung’s mind that psychology had replaced theology. Indeed, he believed that twentieth-century man had devised a psychology precisely because theology no longer provided any explanation of the world or any comfort for the soul. Jung”
― Vine Deloria Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions

“The first and great difference between primitive religious thought and the world religions, therefore, is that primitive peoples maintain a sense of mystery through their bond with nature; the world religions sever the relationship and attempt to establish a new, more comprehensible one. Foremost”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“New Swedens, New Frances, and New Englands flourished, and one glance at the map of New England will indicate how thoroughly the new settlers wished to relive their former lives in familiar places. No comprehensive theory of human existence, no profound religious insights, and no universal political ideas came to these shores initially. Rather the ideas that came with the first settlers were the perverted ideas that had failed in Europe; the psychological walking wounded brought with them an irrational fear of the unknown that was slightly less emotional than the fear of extinction that they had known in Europe. All”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“discovery and settlement of the New World resulted in: “a dietary revolution unparalleled in history save possibly for the first application of fire to the cooking of edibles.” He continued, “Picture the long centuries when the Old World existed without white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn and the many varieties of beans, and you have some notion of the extraordinary gastronomic advance. Add, for good measure, such dishes as pumpkins, squashes, turkeys, cranberries, maple syrup,”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The argument between nature and our species is certainly not restricted to measurements of the physical universe. It includes the great variety of possible human reactions and responses to nature that the social sciences and humanities have also described. The manner in which the argument is now being conducted is less a struggle for control and more a desire for participation. Western peoples have previously believed that scientific knowledge could indefinitely provide them with techniques to control and understand nature. They partially accomplished this goal by reducing the phenomena of nature to objects valuable only because they could be measured and modified. Even while technological progress continues, scientists are retreating from an absolute stance that purports to explain everything in theoretical terms. “The primary significance of modern physics lies not in any disclosure of the fundamental nature of reality,” Ian Barbour writes, “but in the recognition of the limitations of science.”31 If we have knowledge of nature at all, we must conceive it as a “modest, sharply delimited sector of, and extract from, the multiplicity of phenomena observed by our senses,”32 Heisenberg argued. Complete knowledge of the world, either in the scientific or philosophical sense, would require the reintroduction of factors previously omitted from consideration. The metaphysical task that brings together all facets of human knowledge”
― Jr., Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

“One little, two little, three little Indians” is not simply a familiar children’s nursery rhyme, it is also a celebration of North American genocide. This little ditty, many Indian militants argue, captures in lyrical form the belief held during the last century by most in­formed Americans that Indians were vanishing from the face of the earth. This view was popularly symbolized earlier in this century by a small figurine showing an exhausted warrior on horseback, head slumped over and bowed, entitled “End of the Trail,” which adorned the mantlepiece of many white homes. The”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The argument, therefore, that the Europeans brought the great conception of civilization, conceived as a sedentary agricultural enterprise, to the New World is absurd on its face. That”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Western science, following Roger Bacon, believed man could force nature to reveal its secrets; the Sioux simply petitioned nature for friendship. — Vine Deloria, Jr.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions

“I strongly doubt that American Christianity has the foresight or flexibility to embark on new paths of action. It has always been torn between being good and being real and generally chosen to be good.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“Because the Negro labored, he was considered a draft animal. Because the Indian occupied large areas of land, he was considered a wild animal.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“Preconceived standards of conduct are unimportant and the assumption of the innate sinfulness of human is impossible, for the individual is judged instantaneously by his or her fellows as as useful or useless according to his or her degree of participation in community affairs.
-God is Red”
― Vine Deloria Jr.

“Experts paint us as they would like us to be. Often we paint ourselves as we wish we were or as we might have been.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

“Even if there is a general consensus that reduces the figure from one hundred million to fifty million—and some qualified investigators concede that we could hardly settle for less than that number—we must now accept the fact that the dismal story of Indian depopulation after 1492 is a demographic disaster with no known parallel in world history. We must also acknowledge that the catalyst of all this was undoubtedly the European invasion of the New World.1 The estimate of the aboriginal population of the New World not only has important consequences for American history, it may also force us to draw some very unpleasant parallels with contemporary events in Central and South America.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“In evoking the figures of the devil and the divine, Jung interpreted the trickster figure in comparative terms that made sense to European psychologists and scholars, but which had little to do with American Indians. His misreading should caution us about the dangers of this kind of comparative work. Indeed, having laid this base in Western theology, Jung found it hard to stop, and he found himself arguing that the trickster is: a forerunner of the saviour, and, like him, God, man and animal at once. He is both subhuman and superhuman, a bestial and divine being, whose chief and most alarming characteristic is his unconsciousness.23”
― Vine Deloria Jr., C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions

“Feyerabend’s work is critically important for non-Western and post-Western peoples because he stands within the Western tradition yet has mastered many of its social and political barriers so that he can speak meaningfully and critically to its less intelligent proponents.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“in one major synthesis would seem to be the next major step in understanding that our species must take.”
― Jr., Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

“Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“syrup, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, crab apples, chest-nuts and peanuts.”7 Schlesinger concludes, “In the four and a half centuries since Columbus blundered into the Western Hemisphere the American has not developed a single indigenous staple beyond those he derived from the Indians. Today, it is estimated, four-sevenths of the country’s agricultural output consists of plants (including tobacco and a native species of cotton) which were discovered with the New World.”8”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The multiple and dissident lifestyles emerging in the 1960s also indicated to Revel that the United States had more internal flexibility to tolerate change than did any other country and that this diversity would produce sufficient human vitality to make the United States a society of experimentation in new expressions of human experience. But the most important quality Revel found in Americans was their willingness to admit collective guilt in the treatment of racial minorities. Pointing out that the educational system of the Western nations from the time of the Greeks until the present had been designed to justify crimes committed against humanity in the name of national honor or religion, Revel noted that “the Germans refused to admit the crimes of the Nazi; and the English, the French, and the Italians all refused to admit the atrocities committed during their colonial wars.”4 The United States, as Revel saw it, was the first nation in history to confront seriously its own misdeeds and to make some effort to change national policy to make amends for acknowledged wrongs. This manifestation of a collective conscience indicated a greater sensitivity to human needs and an ability to empathetically deal with foreign cultures and values. This was the vital characteristic needed to provide a stance of moral leadership to support a planetary transformation of cultures. Rather”
― Jr., Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence

“Three books”
― Jr. Vine Deloria, Custer Died For Your Sins

“An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“THE PROCESS OF LIFE The Greek conception of the kosmos was not simply that of a world of atoms, metaphysical ideas and numbers, and random energies. It also consisted of plants and animals, the life-forms of the biological world, including the human species, considered as observable phenomena. We would be remiss if we based any critique of culture and civilization on the discoveries and theories of modern physics alone. Of more importance to the layman are the principles that seem to describe and govern activities in the world of which they are a part. Therefore we must investigate other fields of knowledge to see if some of contemporary interpretations of the world can be made compatible with the discoveries in the field of physics, thereby extending the possibility of our metaphysical search into a broader perspective. The”
― Jr., Vine Deloria, The Metaphysics of Modern Existence