Thursday, January 15, 2026

Vine Deloria Jr - Custer Died for your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

When Custer Died for your Sins was first published in 1969 it came out in the midst of the growing and radicalising Civil Rights movement. It is an angry read, a rage against the American system that condemns Native Americans to poverty, disease and racism and offers a powerful manifesto to alter the imbalance of power and wealth. As such it is also a very contempory book. If many of the demands of the manifesto are now dated or too specific, the framing of the book and the context of which it sets itself remains highly relevant. The source of the book's infamous title is a bumper sticker produced by the organisation that Vine Deloria organised through - one that parodies and rejects the politics and actions of the Christian Churches that are tasked with "helping" the Indians. The title also reflects the humour and rage that makes this such a powerful read nearly sixty years after first publication.

Running through the book is the influence of the US Civil Rights movement. Deloria writes
Indian Affairs today suffers from an intellectual stagnationl that is astounding. Creative thought is sparse. Where the younger black students were the trigger to the Civil Rights movements with sit-ings in the South, young Indians have become unwitting missionaries spreading ancient anthropogical doctrines which hardly relate to either anthropology or to Indians. The young blacks invented Black Power and pushed the whole society to consider the implications of discrimination which in turn created racisl nationalism. Young Indians  have barely been able to parody some black slogans and have created none of their own.
If this seems, in hindsight, a little unfair, it is a reflection of the author's frustration. Timing was everything. As Deloria was writing the book the American Indian Movement which famously took control of Wounded Knee in 1973 was just being formed. Movements take time to grow and generate politics and ideas of their own. The Civil Rights movement was clearly an impetous that would grow over time. Nonetheless there are some important insights that Deloria offers, centred on one of his great hates - anthropologists. He writes positively of the Apaches, who "don't worry about what type of Indianism is 'real'" and counters this other young Native Americans who
attend workshops over and over again. Folk theories pronounced by authoritative anthropologists become opportunities to escape responsbility. If, by definition, the Indian is hopelessly caught between two cultrues, why struggle? Why not blame all one's lack of success on this tremendous gulf between two opposing cultures? Workshops have beomce therefore, summer retreats for non-thought rather tahn strategy sessions of leadership enhancement.
But, this was not unique to the Native American movement. It was also true of those whose response to US imperialism, inequality and racism was to "tune in and drop out" and form hippy communes. But Deloria is making a point about the need for a movement that struggles for demands and poltiics. Indeed he argues that it is not enough to "talk of Civil Rights", because this "lessens our chances of understanding the forces involved in the rights of human beings... we should begin talking about actual econoic problems; and in realistic terms we are talking about land".

Deloria argues that 1968 represented a crisis for the Native Americans and the Civil Rights movement. The murder of Martin Luther King and the explosion of riots, Deloria says, meant simply taking a colour TV. "America, rioters seemed to be saying, is a colour TV and this is what we want from here". This is a crude analysis that mirrors what the mainstream were saying, but it arises, Deloria argues out of a contradiction about what was wanted from "Civil Rights":

When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majorty of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it . A socio-economic rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal.

Indeed, Deloria is frustrated that while King made a turn in 1968 toward economic issues he lumped "all minority communities [together] on the basis of their economic status." But the "real issue for Indians - tribal existence within the homeland reservation - appeared to have been completely ignored". Native American poverty was awful, but alieviating it required a more radical approach.

Deloria ends the book hopeful. While his manifesto contains much in the way of detailed suggestions about politics, land control and the US government, he has as an amibition a wider aim - the protection of Indian space within US society. Here he celebrates the story of the Tiguas, a tribe in Texas that won recognition as an Indian tribe after having seen a steep social and economic decline. The fact that they had protected their culture meant that a campaign was able to win a protected reservation and recognition for them and "a chance to build a sound economic base for the future". Deloria says:
Ever since Indians began to be shunted to reservatiosn it has been assumed by both Indians and whites that the eventual destiny of the Indian people was to silently merge into the mainstream of American society and disappear. The thought of a tribe being able to maintain traditions, socio-political structure, and basic identity within an expanding modern American city would have been so preposterous an idea had it been advanced prior to the discover of the Tiguas, that the person expounding the thesis would have been laughed out of the room. 
Deloria hoped this would lead to a great revival of Native American culture and life. Ultimately however, he wants the "recolonisation" of "the unsettled areas of the nation by groups of Indian colonists".  With this Deloria hoped/expected that "traditional Indian customs will come to predominate" within the communities. Indeed there is a hope that this would go further and lead to the rejection of capitalism:
Where ordinary white corporations serve to produce income from capital invested, corporations will not do so in the new Indian scheme. Rather they will serve to coordinate community life. Earnings will be used to provide services ordinarily received from various governmental agencies. As economic independence becomes greater, independence in other areas of life will follow. Indians can thereby achieve a prosperity not seen since the landing of the white man.
Sixty years later this has not happened. Indeed Native American reservations remain some of the poorest parts of the United States. Racism, imperialism and the politics of settler colonialism continue to divde and rule and keep the Native Americans in poverty. Part, perhaps of the problem, was that the Native American movement was too separated from wider Civil Rights struggles. Deloria himself repeatedly seems to reject radical and revolutionary (he says "violent") struggles. But it was Wounded Knee in 1973 when Native Americans literarily took up arms and fought of the US state which helped shift the narrative (and the occupation of Alcatraz). Nonetheless his agenda is assuredly against the system. Nick Estes has written recently that "Deloria's calls for peoplehood... were a step toward national self-determination: Black and Indigenous peoples taking charge of their own lives and destinies. To do so first required the restoration of Indigenous governmnce and territories, a project long in the making, as well as the abolition of the colonial system". It is an inherently revolutionary project.

Is the prospect of Native American reemergence within wider "white" society possible still? I would suggest it is, but it will require the dismantling of US capitalism. In winning this Native Americans will surely fight alongside all the poor and oppressed people of America. 

Custer Died for your Sins was enormously influential (not least among shamefaced anthropologists). It forms the base for much later theoretical and revolutionary work and those interested in Settler Colonialism, as well as Native American struggles, will get much from reading it. I found it hard to get hold of a copy in the UK, but I recommend that you try.

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