Vine Victor Deloria Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005, Standing Rock Sioux) was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights.
He was widely known for his book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969), which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement.
Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and in Washington, DC, on the Mall.
He became Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona (1978–1990), where he established the first master's degree program in American Indian Studies in the United States.
His father studied English and Christian theology at St. Stephen's College and became an Episcopal archdeacon and missionary on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
In 1971, they sought to form a national taxation defense strategy to fight federal, state, and municipal governments' attempts to impose taxes on various aspects of tribal and individual economic life.
[14] Beginning in 1977, he was selected as a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which established its first center at the former United States Custom House in New York City in lower Manhattan.
[4] In it, he addressed stereotypes of Indians and challenged white audiences to take a new look at the history of United States western expansion, noting its abuses of Native Americans.
[17] Nicholas Peroff wrote that "Deloria has rarely missed a chance to argue that the realities of precontact American Indian experience and tradition cannot be recognized or understood within any conceptual framework built on the theories of modern science.
"[18] Deloria controversially rejected not only scientific understanding regarding the origins of indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also other aspects of the (pre)history of the Western Hemisphere that he thought contradicted Native American accounts.
For example, Deloria's position on the age of certain geological formations, the length of time Native Americans have been in the Americas, and his belief that people coexisted with dinosaurs were strictly at odds with the empirical facts from a variety of academic disciplines.
[20] Deloria was criticized for his embrace of literalist interpretations of American Indian traditional histories by anthropologist Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and English professor H. David Brumble.
[9] Reflecting widespread change in academia and the larger culture, numerous American Indian studies programs, museums, and collections, and other institutions have been established since Deloria's first book was published.
[9] In 2004, Deloria turned down an honorary degree from the University of Colorado in protest of the school's poor response to a sexual assault case on its football team.