Post by mdenney on Jun 29, 2007 13:06:31 GMT -5
On September 9, 1974, the weekly news magazine Time reported that a survey of religious leaders and scholars had produced a list of eleven "shapers and shakers of the Christian faith," including Vine Deloria, Jr. It remains one of the most unusual honors Deloria has received in his long and distinguished career as activist, author, and educator. Interchurch Features, a New York-based consortium of Christian periodicals published in the United States and Canada, sponsored the poll; they asked survey participants to identify the most promising religious figures in the modern world, the "Theological Superstars of the Future." Named to the list along with Deloria were five Roman Catholics and five Protestants including theologians Hans Küng and Jürgen Moltmann and evangelist Billy Graham. Time identified Deloria only as a "Sioux Indian Lawyer" who "says flatly that he is no longer a Christian at all," though he offered evidence that his sense of humor had not wavered when, in another context, he described his religious affiliation as "Seven Day Absentist."
Why would influential representatives of North America’s Christian establishment choose such an iconoclast–and an apostate one at that–for their roster of religious luminaries? Writing in The Christian Century, one of the periodicals that sponsored the Interchurch Features survey, columnist Martin Marty suggested that some degree of liberal tokenism was involved in the process; the list also included one Latin American, one African, and one woman, three demographic strongholds of modern Christianity that are still under-represented in ecclesiastical leadership and theological scholarship. American Indians have always occupied a special place in the colonial psychology of European immigrants, though many Indians have been less than enthusiastic about their involvement with those immigrants’ religious communities. As a seminary graduate and one of the most prominent Indian leaders since the mid-sixties, Deloria likely seemed an obvious and convenient choice. Even more important, however, were his critical writings on the contemporary American predicament, which had not gone unnoticed in the nation’s pulpits and pews. Five books published in as many years, including his provocatively titled works Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and God Is Red (1973), aimed to disrupt the self-serving laziness of any tokenistic gestures. Apparently anticipating the objections of their more conservative readers, the Interchurch Features editors justified Deloria’s inclusion on the list by pointing out that he "offers North Americans a stirring call for society’s repentance and reform."
If Deloria’s selection as a "Theological Superstar of the Future" seemed an appropriate recognition at the time, it was not a particularly good predictor of his subsequent impact as a "shaper and shaker of the Christian faith." All of his fellow luminaries went on to distinguish themselves as religious leaders and scholars and today are among the most influential figures in their particular corners of the Christian world. Yet Deloria has never been listed in Who’s Who in Religion (through four editions, 1975-92) or among the 550 individuals included in the Dictionary of American Religious Biography, and the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience and The Encyclopedia of American Religious History also contain no reference to Deloria or his writings. Mircea Eliade’s definitive, sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion includes only two brief mentions of Deloria’s work: a quote from his introduction to the 1979 edition of Black Elk Speaks, and a bibliographic reference to God Is Red. And although many American Indian leaders and American Indian studies scholars regard Deloria to be one of the most influential Indian figures of the twentieth century, he is best known today for his contributions in political and legal affairs, not for his critical insights on religious matters. How should we account for this turn of events? Was Deloria a theological superstar or only a meteor, a charismatic streak of light in the religious firmament?
Like several of his fellow luminaries, Deloria’s intellectual energies have been divided between religious affairs and other pressing concerns for much of his professional career. His continuing involvement in the persistent political struggles facing American Indians has precluded the kinds of theological contributions made by prolific European scholars such as Küng and Moltmann. And unlike all of the other ten superstars, Deloria has dissented from the Western religious mainstream by maintaining a non-Christian stance, not relying on any Christian institutions for bureaucratic legitimation. His writings have elicited very little critical response from scholars of religion, perhaps because his ideas are simply too far outside the bounds of prevailing academic sentiment, which is still burdened by an unfortunate intellectual parochialism. Only a few scholars of religion have responded in print to the criticisms and proposals contained in God Is Red and Deloria’s other early writings. Many have been put off by his polemical style or his incisive approach to contemporary conflicts.
The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that despite the demands of his political involvements, and despite a lack of critical response to his religious publications, Deloria has not stopped thinking and writing about religion. In dozens of occasional pieces published during the last three decades, he has offered substantive and persistent contributions to understanding the complexity of religion in America. Some of his provocative essays have been written for scholarly journals or religious periodicals, while others have suggested perceptive interpretations of contemporary religious affairs aimed at a more general audience. Many readers assume that Deloria has offered a definitive statement of his views on religion in God Is Red, but this supposition overlooks a wide-ranging body of work articulating insightful perspectives on controversial religious issues. These occasional writings document an abiding concern for the religious dimensions and implications of human existence. Deloria’s intellectual sensibilities developed out of his family background and organizational commitments; these essays are best understood in the context of his personal and professional experiences, which have framed his discursive intentions.
An American Life
Vine Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin, South Dakota, on March 26, 1933; he entered the world at the edge of the Pine Ridge Reservation and on the brink of a new era in Indian affairs. He seemed destined for a life spent straddling other kinds of frontiers as well, the first child of a prominent Dakota Episcopal missionary priest and his Anglo-American wife. Deloria inherited a number of important dispositions from his forebears including an appreciation for disciplined education, a commitment to community life, a healthy suspicion toward colonial institutions, a preference for reformist activism, a sense of religious purpose, and the articulate voice of a prophet. These and other personal qualities have made him an effective advocate in a variety of contexts, sustaining a family tradition of leadership.
The family name Deloria is an anglicized form of the name of Phillippe des Lauriers, a French fur trader who settled in a Yankton community and married the daughter of a Yankton headman. Their grandson Francoise (whose Christian name the Yanktons transformed into Saswe) had a visionary experience at the age of eighteen that paradoxically granted him powers as a medicine man, predicted he would kill four Sioux men, and committed his descendants to serve as mediators with the dominant society. He went on to become a respected healer and leader of the White Swan community on the Yankton Reservation, where he settled in 1858. Saswe welcomed Presbyterian and Episcopal missionaries when they arrived, sending some of his children to day schools and having all of his children and grandchildren baptized. He attended church regularly himself but was not allowed to make any formal affiliation because he was married to three Sioux women. After one wife died and another returned to her home reservation, Saswe finally received Christian baptism in 1871, and disturbing visitations by his four victims ceased.
Saswe and his first wife Siha Sapewin, who was from the Standing Rock Reservation, had their first son in 1854. Saswe favored him and symbolically bequeathed to him his spiritual powers by giving him the name Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge), which had appeared as an important element in his original vision. Tipi Sapa assisted Saswe in his work as a medicine man and was his father’s apparent successor as leader of the White Swan community. But at the age of sixteen he decided–with his father’s encouragement–to pursue an academic education and to fulfill his religious vocation by becoming an Episcopal priest, in hopes of helping his people adjust to the changing circumstances of reservation life. He was baptized Philip Joseph Deloria on Christmas Day and left home soon thereafter to attend an Episcopal mission school in Nebraska and, later, a military academy in Minnesota. Committed to religious leadership but dismayed by denominational competition among Congregational, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic missionaries, Philip was one of three young Dakota leaders who in 1873 founded Wojo Okolakiciye (The Planting Society), an organization promoting ecumenical fellowship that later became known as the Brotherhood of Christian Unity. After completing his education, he served as a lay reader and was ordained as deacon in 1883 and as priest in 1892, then appointed to supervise all Episcopal mission work on the Standing Rock Reservation. He held this position until his retirement in 1925, by which time he had secured a national reputation as one of the most devoted and respected priests in the history of Episcopal missions to Indians. His cultural reminiscences were collected in a 1918 book titled The People of Tipi Sapa, and he is one of only three Americans included in the ninety-eight "Saints of the Ages" carved behind the altar of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Philip married Mary Sully Bordeaux and together they raised a family of six children as adopted members of the Hunkpapas living at Standing Rock. Their only son Vine Victor, whose Dakota name was Ohiya (Champion), was born in 1901. Mary died when Vine was fifteen and he was sent to a military academy in Nebraska to complete his secondary education. He excelled on the playing field, attending college in New York on an athletic scholarship and envisioning a career as a professional athlete, but instead agreed to follow his ailing father’s footsteps into the Christian ministry. In 1931 Vine graduated from an Episcopal seminary in New York City and was assigned to St. Katherine’s Mission and other parishes on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He served there for seventeen years, then spent three years at the Sisseton Mission and three years at an Anglo parish in Iowa. In 1954 he was appointed to the National Council of the Episcopal Church as Assistant Secretary for Indian Missions, the first Indian to serve as a denominational executive. He later recalled his time on national staff as the most frustrating experience of his career. Church leaders were unwilling to take his ideas and suggestions seriously, and he left after four years and returned to another Anglo parish in Iowa. He was soon appointed to be archdeacon of the Indian parishes in South Dakota and occupied that post until his retirement in 1968. Vine admitted to growing more critical of the institutional church in his later years, and the seeds of his eldest son’s radicalism are evident in the fierce cultural pride and acute sense of justice Vine occasionally allowed to surface.
Vine and his wife Barbara had their first child in 1933 and bound him to his forebears by naming him Vine Victor Deloria, Jr. The junior Deloria attended off-reservation schools in Martin and occasionally traveled to tribal dances, held openly once again after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. He once described a visit to the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre as the most memorable event of his early childhood, and his father often pointed out survivors still living on the reservation. As a child he also participated in the rich communal and ceremonial life that has long characterized the Sioux Episcopal Church, which reaches its fullest expression in the annual Niobrara Convocation, now in its 126th year. Deloria left home in 1949 and finished his high school diploma during two years at the Kent School, a private college-preparatory school in Connecticut. He spent the next five years exploring technology, first spending his University of Colorado freshman tuition money on a used car, later studying geology for two years at the Colorado School of Mines, and eventually enlisting in the Marine Corps Reserve where he was certified in telephone repair. In 1956 he enrolled at Iowa State University, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in general science and met his future wife, Barbara Jeanne Nystrom.
They were married in the summer of 1958 and a year later moved to Illinois so Deloria could attend a Lutheran seminary in Rock Island. He had considered pursuing the ministry in his younger days but had also watched his father struggle with the denominational bureaucracy in more recent years. Instead of training for a Christian vocation, Deloria spent the next four years studying theology and philosophy by day and earning a living as a welder by night. He later wrote that "seminary, in spite of its avowed goals and tangible struggle with good intentions, provided an incredible variety of food for thought but a glaring lack of solutions or patterns of conceivable action which might be useful in facing a world in which the factors affecting human life change daily." In 1963 he received a graduate degree in theology and accepted a staff position with the United Scholarship Service, a church-supported educational philanthropy based in Denver, Colorado.
Why would influential representatives of North America’s Christian establishment choose such an iconoclast–and an apostate one at that–for their roster of religious luminaries? Writing in The Christian Century, one of the periodicals that sponsored the Interchurch Features survey, columnist Martin Marty suggested that some degree of liberal tokenism was involved in the process; the list also included one Latin American, one African, and one woman, three demographic strongholds of modern Christianity that are still under-represented in ecclesiastical leadership and theological scholarship. American Indians have always occupied a special place in the colonial psychology of European immigrants, though many Indians have been less than enthusiastic about their involvement with those immigrants’ religious communities. As a seminary graduate and one of the most prominent Indian leaders since the mid-sixties, Deloria likely seemed an obvious and convenient choice. Even more important, however, were his critical writings on the contemporary American predicament, which had not gone unnoticed in the nation’s pulpits and pews. Five books published in as many years, including his provocatively titled works Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and God Is Red (1973), aimed to disrupt the self-serving laziness of any tokenistic gestures. Apparently anticipating the objections of their more conservative readers, the Interchurch Features editors justified Deloria’s inclusion on the list by pointing out that he "offers North Americans a stirring call for society’s repentance and reform."
If Deloria’s selection as a "Theological Superstar of the Future" seemed an appropriate recognition at the time, it was not a particularly good predictor of his subsequent impact as a "shaper and shaker of the Christian faith." All of his fellow luminaries went on to distinguish themselves as religious leaders and scholars and today are among the most influential figures in their particular corners of the Christian world. Yet Deloria has never been listed in Who’s Who in Religion (through four editions, 1975-92) or among the 550 individuals included in the Dictionary of American Religious Biography, and the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience and The Encyclopedia of American Religious History also contain no reference to Deloria or his writings. Mircea Eliade’s definitive, sixteen-volume Encyclopedia of Religion includes only two brief mentions of Deloria’s work: a quote from his introduction to the 1979 edition of Black Elk Speaks, and a bibliographic reference to God Is Red. And although many American Indian leaders and American Indian studies scholars regard Deloria to be one of the most influential Indian figures of the twentieth century, he is best known today for his contributions in political and legal affairs, not for his critical insights on religious matters. How should we account for this turn of events? Was Deloria a theological superstar or only a meteor, a charismatic streak of light in the religious firmament?
Like several of his fellow luminaries, Deloria’s intellectual energies have been divided between religious affairs and other pressing concerns for much of his professional career. His continuing involvement in the persistent political struggles facing American Indians has precluded the kinds of theological contributions made by prolific European scholars such as Küng and Moltmann. And unlike all of the other ten superstars, Deloria has dissented from the Western religious mainstream by maintaining a non-Christian stance, not relying on any Christian institutions for bureaucratic legitimation. His writings have elicited very little critical response from scholars of religion, perhaps because his ideas are simply too far outside the bounds of prevailing academic sentiment, which is still burdened by an unfortunate intellectual parochialism. Only a few scholars of religion have responded in print to the criticisms and proposals contained in God Is Red and Deloria’s other early writings. Many have been put off by his polemical style or his incisive approach to contemporary conflicts.
The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that despite the demands of his political involvements, and despite a lack of critical response to his religious publications, Deloria has not stopped thinking and writing about religion. In dozens of occasional pieces published during the last three decades, he has offered substantive and persistent contributions to understanding the complexity of religion in America. Some of his provocative essays have been written for scholarly journals or religious periodicals, while others have suggested perceptive interpretations of contemporary religious affairs aimed at a more general audience. Many readers assume that Deloria has offered a definitive statement of his views on religion in God Is Red, but this supposition overlooks a wide-ranging body of work articulating insightful perspectives on controversial religious issues. These occasional writings document an abiding concern for the religious dimensions and implications of human existence. Deloria’s intellectual sensibilities developed out of his family background and organizational commitments; these essays are best understood in the context of his personal and professional experiences, which have framed his discursive intentions.
An American Life
Vine Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin, South Dakota, on March 26, 1933; he entered the world at the edge of the Pine Ridge Reservation and on the brink of a new era in Indian affairs. He seemed destined for a life spent straddling other kinds of frontiers as well, the first child of a prominent Dakota Episcopal missionary priest and his Anglo-American wife. Deloria inherited a number of important dispositions from his forebears including an appreciation for disciplined education, a commitment to community life, a healthy suspicion toward colonial institutions, a preference for reformist activism, a sense of religious purpose, and the articulate voice of a prophet. These and other personal qualities have made him an effective advocate in a variety of contexts, sustaining a family tradition of leadership.
The family name Deloria is an anglicized form of the name of Phillippe des Lauriers, a French fur trader who settled in a Yankton community and married the daughter of a Yankton headman. Their grandson Francoise (whose Christian name the Yanktons transformed into Saswe) had a visionary experience at the age of eighteen that paradoxically granted him powers as a medicine man, predicted he would kill four Sioux men, and committed his descendants to serve as mediators with the dominant society. He went on to become a respected healer and leader of the White Swan community on the Yankton Reservation, where he settled in 1858. Saswe welcomed Presbyterian and Episcopal missionaries when they arrived, sending some of his children to day schools and having all of his children and grandchildren baptized. He attended church regularly himself but was not allowed to make any formal affiliation because he was married to three Sioux women. After one wife died and another returned to her home reservation, Saswe finally received Christian baptism in 1871, and disturbing visitations by his four victims ceased.
Saswe and his first wife Siha Sapewin, who was from the Standing Rock Reservation, had their first son in 1854. Saswe favored him and symbolically bequeathed to him his spiritual powers by giving him the name Tipi Sapa (Black Lodge), which had appeared as an important element in his original vision. Tipi Sapa assisted Saswe in his work as a medicine man and was his father’s apparent successor as leader of the White Swan community. But at the age of sixteen he decided–with his father’s encouragement–to pursue an academic education and to fulfill his religious vocation by becoming an Episcopal priest, in hopes of helping his people adjust to the changing circumstances of reservation life. He was baptized Philip Joseph Deloria on Christmas Day and left home soon thereafter to attend an Episcopal mission school in Nebraska and, later, a military academy in Minnesota. Committed to religious leadership but dismayed by denominational competition among Congregational, Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Roman Catholic missionaries, Philip was one of three young Dakota leaders who in 1873 founded Wojo Okolakiciye (The Planting Society), an organization promoting ecumenical fellowship that later became known as the Brotherhood of Christian Unity. After completing his education, he served as a lay reader and was ordained as deacon in 1883 and as priest in 1892, then appointed to supervise all Episcopal mission work on the Standing Rock Reservation. He held this position until his retirement in 1925, by which time he had secured a national reputation as one of the most devoted and respected priests in the history of Episcopal missions to Indians. His cultural reminiscences were collected in a 1918 book titled The People of Tipi Sapa, and he is one of only three Americans included in the ninety-eight "Saints of the Ages" carved behind the altar of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
Philip married Mary Sully Bordeaux and together they raised a family of six children as adopted members of the Hunkpapas living at Standing Rock. Their only son Vine Victor, whose Dakota name was Ohiya (Champion), was born in 1901. Mary died when Vine was fifteen and he was sent to a military academy in Nebraska to complete his secondary education. He excelled on the playing field, attending college in New York on an athletic scholarship and envisioning a career as a professional athlete, but instead agreed to follow his ailing father’s footsteps into the Christian ministry. In 1931 Vine graduated from an Episcopal seminary in New York City and was assigned to St. Katherine’s Mission and other parishes on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He served there for seventeen years, then spent three years at the Sisseton Mission and three years at an Anglo parish in Iowa. In 1954 he was appointed to the National Council of the Episcopal Church as Assistant Secretary for Indian Missions, the first Indian to serve as a denominational executive. He later recalled his time on national staff as the most frustrating experience of his career. Church leaders were unwilling to take his ideas and suggestions seriously, and he left after four years and returned to another Anglo parish in Iowa. He was soon appointed to be archdeacon of the Indian parishes in South Dakota and occupied that post until his retirement in 1968. Vine admitted to growing more critical of the institutional church in his later years, and the seeds of his eldest son’s radicalism are evident in the fierce cultural pride and acute sense of justice Vine occasionally allowed to surface.
Vine and his wife Barbara had their first child in 1933 and bound him to his forebears by naming him Vine Victor Deloria, Jr. The junior Deloria attended off-reservation schools in Martin and occasionally traveled to tribal dances, held openly once again after the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934. He once described a visit to the site of the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre as the most memorable event of his early childhood, and his father often pointed out survivors still living on the reservation. As a child he also participated in the rich communal and ceremonial life that has long characterized the Sioux Episcopal Church, which reaches its fullest expression in the annual Niobrara Convocation, now in its 126th year. Deloria left home in 1949 and finished his high school diploma during two years at the Kent School, a private college-preparatory school in Connecticut. He spent the next five years exploring technology, first spending his University of Colorado freshman tuition money on a used car, later studying geology for two years at the Colorado School of Mines, and eventually enlisting in the Marine Corps Reserve where he was certified in telephone repair. In 1956 he enrolled at Iowa State University, where he completed a bachelor’s degree in general science and met his future wife, Barbara Jeanne Nystrom.
They were married in the summer of 1958 and a year later moved to Illinois so Deloria could attend a Lutheran seminary in Rock Island. He had considered pursuing the ministry in his younger days but had also watched his father struggle with the denominational bureaucracy in more recent years. Instead of training for a Christian vocation, Deloria spent the next four years studying theology and philosophy by day and earning a living as a welder by night. He later wrote that "seminary, in spite of its avowed goals and tangible struggle with good intentions, provided an incredible variety of food for thought but a glaring lack of solutions or patterns of conceivable action which might be useful in facing a world in which the factors affecting human life change daily." In 1963 he received a graduate degree in theology and accepted a staff position with the United Scholarship Service, a church-supported educational philanthropy based in Denver, Colorado.
