Vine Deloria, Jr. passed away on
November 13 at the age of 73. Deloria authored over 20 books, including his best seller ''Custer Died for your Sins'' (1969). He made important contributions to several Native American organizations and institutions over the years, including serving as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. He also was a professor of history at the University of Colorado.
For the past year, I've kept Spirit & Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader on my bedside pile of books. When I can't take another bullet of digitalized news or printed page of politics, I turned to it to read one of his essays about things larger than the latest outrage. His writing has helped clarify my own thoughts on first peoples and "being Indian." His philosophical and religious writings are deeply provocative.
Deloria wrote in the essay "If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True":
The movement towards a "science of wholeness" depends in large measure on the ability of philosophers and scientific thinkers to move beyond their comfortable and presently accepted categories of arranging and interpreting data -- to glimpse and grasp new unities of experience and knowledge. ... Even with the flexible scientific paradigm of relativity and indeterminacy, there are strong indications that we have reached a dead end in many sciences and perhaps need new insights derived from other sources. So why not tribal knowledge? ... One reason that scientists examine non-Western knowledge on an ad hoc basis is the persistent belief by Western intellectuals that non-Western peoples represent an earlier stage of their own cultural evolution -- often that tribal cultures represent failed efforts to understand the natural world (the Inca's had wheels, why didn't they make cars?). Non-Western knowledge is believed to originate from primitive efforts to explain a mysterious universe. In this view, the alleged failure of primitive/tribal man to control nature mechanically is evidence of his ignorance and his inability to conceive of abstract general principles and concepts.
Deloria goes on to discuss how the Indian perspective and the Western perspective differ. At one point he brings up the purpose for which the Indian person gathers knowledge. It is a moral reason:
The real interest of the old Indians was not to discover the abstract structure of physical reality but rather to find the proper road along which, for the duration of a person's life, individuals were supposed to walk. This colorful image of the road suggests that the universe is a moral universe. That is to say, there is a proper way to live in the universe: There is a content to every action, behavior, and belief. The sum total of our life experiences has a reality. there is a direction to the universe, empirically exemplified in the physical growth cycles of childhood, youth, and old age, with the corresponding responsibility of every entity to enjoy life, fulfill itself, and increase in wisdom and the spiritual development of personality. Nothing has incidental meaning and there are no coincidences.
The wise person will realize his or her own limitations and act with some degree of humility until he or she has sufficient knowledge to act with confidence. Every bit of information must be related to the general framework of moral interpretation as it is personal to them and their community. No body of knowledge exists for its own sake outside the moral framework of understanding. We are, in the truest sense possible, creators or co-creators with the higher powers, and what we do has immediate importance for the rest of the universe.
I cannot adequately articulate the impact of Deloria's words on me, but it is of importance.
Thank you Vine. May you travel well the trail of spirits.
buffalo and sunflowers