ABSTRACT

Vine Deloria, Jr., is the most significant voice in this generation regarding the presentation and analysis of contemporary Indian affairs, their history, present shape, and meaning. He has a command both of the English language and of information about the “legislation” pertaining to Indian affairs from Pope Alexander VI’s Inter Caetera bull of 1493 (in which the good pope did “give, grant, and assign forever to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, all singular the aforesaid countries and islands…hitherto discovered… and to be discovered…. together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances of the same” [God Is Red, 274-75]), to the 1978 demise and renewal of the Indian Claims Commission and the controversies over varying interpretations of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1976. No other voice, Indian or white, has as full a command of the overall data of Indian history and affairs, and no other voice has the moral force, the honesty, to admit mistakes and to redress them, or the edge to bite through the layers of soft tissue, through the stereotypes, myths, and outright lies, to the bone, to the bone marrow, of Indian affairs.