Transcripts For CSPAN3 Native American Activist Vine Deloria 20240713

Four centuries what might happen there. While we would never want to accuse either harvard or the university of michigan of theft it is an indisputable fact this upsurge in good fortune was ours before it was theirs. Phil deloria received his bachelors degree from the university of colorado in 1982. Wanting to observe and understand humanity from many different angles, he then taught band at A Denver Metro high school. Having observed High School Music performance to satisfaction he returned to cu for journalism and mass communication. Thats when we remembered what to call the program before it became an acronym that is it different every time i say it. One of the most gracious acts of kindness to me, phil took my western American History course, which i believe then was called the early year, the not so early american frontier as part of his journalism program. In that course students were required to write about an adventure they experienced. It launched me on a western add ven tuture of my own. I had 50 students but wounded up 51 papers. So i poured over the class registration list comparing the names there with the names of students who had submitted papers. This did not solve the mystery but it did give it a little more definition. A person named hank gomez had turned in a paper, a particularly lively paper, i should note, but something had gone awry with hank gomezs relationship with the University Bureaucracy and his name did not appear on the course list. You have probably figured out where this is going. From time to time as a student phil deloria doubled his work load. He would write an impressive and very capable paper and submit it as the work of phil deloria and then a very different version of the paper, colorful and irreverent, contrarian, full of vitality and submitted it as the work of hank gomez. [ laughter ] i cant believe youre telling that story. Harvard already has it on their website or something. No. No, its not on harvards website. Moving on. Its now public record. Thats good. Hank gomez and phil deloria were, in my opinion, both a students. But i never suggested that hank gomez apply to the yale american studies ph. D. Program, still, i did write a letter of recommendation for phil deloria. A week ago i had an impulse to find the recommendation letter i wrote some three decades ago but phil will now sigh with relief to find i did not find the time to perform this exercise in pack rat resource management. And now im moving fast to get out of the way and let phil deloria, perhaps with the assistance of hank gomez, stand before you. But first, he is the author of two influential books, both with a rare combination of intricacy and clarity, original insight and grounded common sense playing indian published in 1998 and the other in 1994. He published a book becoming mary sully bringing welldeserved and longdelayed attention to an extraordinary indian artist, also his greataunt, and that caused widening and deepening our understanding of what that means, American Indian art. Continuing his quest, phil has served as president of the American Studies Association and will be the president of the organization of american historians in 2022. I see this as continuity from the band teaching chairing that board and noting there was quite a bit more harmony at work in the High School Band classes than there sometimes is in those circles. True. Phil is also a trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian where he chairs the repatriation committee, a role of Public Service that seems to be something of a family tradition. It was in that world where vine got us all writing articles about white mens hats in American History. I dont know what route youll take on that. I know it will be creative and happing gomez will be a coauthor probably. Phil deloria served as associate dean where he was as much an innovator in teaching and mentorship of the young as he has been in research and public engagement. He has relentlessly specialized in a route to understanding. He instantly incorporates that specialization into his world and introduces it to other areas of special days that had been waiting for decades to get to know each other. And finally phil deloria is the son of vine deloria jr. He and i had had memorable you may have these every day. You were at the Yale Art Gallery and we were giving talks on a panel about an exhibit that was at the art gallery and in our audience, unknown to us when we began speaking, was the goofiest white lady either of us had encountered. The goofiest white lady put herself on record very fast in a question and answer period. She looked at us as a panel and said it was intolerable that Yale University would have a session on western american art without a native american participating. So, i dont know i was not her fan, i will say that. I was not her fan and will not become that. I didnt know what to do. Maybe i would reach in there, but then saw this masterful taking on that challenge, phil said to the white lady through considerable bewilderment, a paraphrase, we cant be absolutely certain on the dates here but some time probably in the 17th century french traders named deloria came into the area we now know as north dakota. And this lady has a, what does this have to do with anything . Moves along and that is indeed a story of his origins, and she shut up really fast. I dont recall her joining us at the reception, so that was fine, too. Shes a smarter woman today. We know that. So all of us here today are lucky beyond any possible estimation to hear the talk that phil deloria is about to give on his father and his fathers lively and longlived book custer died for your sins. Phil deloria. Thank you. Well, im so happy to be in this room of extraordinary people, generously gathered together to celebrate the 50th anniversary of custer died for your sins. We were just talking about the morning session and confessed to a certain set of emotional moments, right, as we were remembering this book and my dad. I had a few of those going and i suspect there will be a few others. Im thankful for you coming here today, the native American Indigenous Studies Program for hosting the celebration, patti for putting it together and the most revealing introduction. I feel i cant begin without a couple of preperatory notes. My mother had her second Knee Replacement just over a month ago. While shes doing fine, in fact doing great, she decided it was a little too early to start traveling around so greetings and thanks to you from her, my brother dan, sister jeanne and the extended deloria family. Second, i wanted to say a word about humility. As was mentioned early is a great virtue. As i tell my students its the precondition for knowledge. To be humble is to admit not only our ignorance and thus the possibility of our learning but the possibility of other perspectives and other possibilities, things we might debate, discuss. I knew my dad as a son knows his father, as a colleague here at the university of michigan as he was closing out his academic career as i was beginning mine. We were just down the hall and in his last year of teaching shared the same office. Convenient when we were short offices was to ask us to share. Ive studied his writings and ive known him in other ways as well. Others of you have known him through different experiences, as a teacher and collaborator, as a colleague, as a mentee or mentor, detailed historical analysis, as a friend, as an inspiration, as an author that youve read. He was a complicated man, active in many different spheres of life. Patti quite xlcomplimentary sai im interdisciplinary. He was much more so than me, religious studies, law, ethnic studies, history and probably a few others i cant even remember. I never failed to learn something new about him when i meet people who knew him or who have engaged his work. I want to thank everyone for sharing the learning. The third caveat is a practice in which native critics can and should engage with more vigor and energy than in the past with sincere engagement and willingness to ask tough questions. Custer died for your sins is not a perfect book, right. Its greatness derives from the arguments advanced about relationality, for the way it cat a liit modeled for those who came off. All these things are super important about the book. To see and name and perhaps to even discuss about its imperfections is not a sign of disrespect. These are gifts any book gives us. We do so with humility and respect. It was a respect my father would appreciate. He did not shy away from a tussle and made verbal combat a part of the dinner table and competed at monopoly like a marine to the point he would bring my brother and sister and i to tears as he was gleefully destroying us. And i do feel it incumbent since so many people told stories about his relationship to do one of my own which is that my favorite moments my dad who loved the film the godfather and watched it many times, he would watch a film before he would sit down and white. Write. He record this had message on our answering machine. If you came to me before, even now the scum who did this to your daughter be suffering this very day. And that really captures some essence of him as a prankster, a guy with an incredible sense of humor. Enough of that. For american native people of his generation, custer died for your sins was a critical and sometimes the catalyzing text and called out to an audience with a critical voice and demand for accountability and action. Five decades later, it is still relevant. And we can begin with some of the obvious reasons, some of which were already talked about this morning. The book codified and institutionalized a biting critique of anthropology that generated sessions, a delicious defensiveness on the part of margaret med, and in the end as we heard this morning a real transformation of that discipline. It may be the most visible although not its most significant but visible. A tradition that had been dominant for over a decade, not entirp ly entirely to the detriment of native people. The book took that pummeling to new heights and a new audience. It was an ethnic bestseller when no indian texts had a voice in the market. Paired with scotts house made of dawn 1969 was a moment of native presence to be followed by alcatraz and then by the American Indian movement, and everything after. In 1969 white americans, and other americans saw native people in their faith in way that is were new to the 20th century. Many of the reviews and the writings claimed my father as the voice of red power and thats how the story is told and remembered. This was reviewed in the New York Times. Reading the book now, one is struck by a very different configuration of radicalism and problem solving. I think of it in the context of the present moment. In an interview my father framed himself a bit apart as being newly sympathetic to the young radicals. He was frustrated at the failure of the federal government to respond to the 20 points, a document authored by hank adams that accompanied the trail of broken treaties which emphasized the renewal of treaty rights and the restoration of treaty relationships and he was more frustrated by what he saw as the failures of Tribal Councils to really press home that argument. Reading custer in that light one might recognize what came before that sympathy that he was not exact exactly a young radical. He was in many ways a fundamentally institutional person. He claimed no membership in the American Indian movement. Though he provided strategy and testimony. He seems to have paid dues but wasnt all that closely associated with most members or the strategies of its young intellectuals and activists. He named the National Congress of American Indians as the most hopeful institutions for the future. At the conclusion of his 1971 addition of red men in the new world drama he provides a list of the major indian groups at work today. One finds the same gesture in custer and encourages readers to go and promote and support these particular groups. I think theres nothing illogical about this. He grew up in the shadow of the indian reorganization act which helped create a culture of Politics Around Tribal Councils and working to beat back the termination policies of the 1950s and 60s which sought to eliminate those tribal governments. So the critique of the native American Youth council, Tribal Council he is and National Organizations seemed to him capable and competent or at least potentially so or mostly so once you understood the dynamics and how you might navigate it. He had a powerful faith in the future of indian people and tribal nationalism was one of the cornerstone bases. He contrasted with militancy and he framed it as the more challenging and ultimately the more productive route. He criticized hippies for narcissistism and on occasion praised counter culturalists forgetting it kind of right. He had an open mind on this question. He even tried to see as we heard erltier the corporation as a modern form of tribalism failing to launch the requisite critique of capital and profit under conditions of capitalism. Although i think, dan, youre right this was an open question and an intriguing one. I think he was interested in a slightly different question about the rights of different entities and how to think about them in bigger and broader terms. His definition of tribal nationalism were usefully imp imprecise. In relationship to other governments, thats a bit of the nationalism. Another bit came out people had distinct, and i want to emphasize, distinct and those forms crucially were tribal. Relationship, interdependent, responsible, spiritual and highly developed over time. Someone used the word mature this morning and this is a word that mattered to him. That things developed over time and they could reach a certain level of maturity. Trial and error and experience does produce certain kinds of results. In a way the radicalism of the book which i think reads as differently radical in retrospect, comes from how much optimism and faith he had that indian people when given control over their lives would do well and would develop new forms of viable nationalism, a model for changing social relations across the board. This is the tone and affect as i read the book this sum theyre struck me. How much faith he had. This is a critique but a futuristic book of things that can and do happen. Theres nothing crazy about this either. The same moment of the i. R. A. Was one of intense paternalism and effective tribal selfmanagement. The possibilities for Strong Administration were real for him and he was a personal admirer in the 1950s and 60s he characterized as an excellent cohort of leaders rising to daunting challenges. So i find myself at this moment thinking in parallel about the career of his friend and ally which will be celebrated next week at the National Museum of the American Indian. One thing thats striking about her career and revealing about his is the sheer numbers of indian leaders she partnered. This was and is no small closed off world but cohorts of hundreds of leaders and political workers. Its not difficult at all to locate powerful work being enacted in institutional kind of settings. Today we often point to a. I. M. As the high water mark. The critique of Tribal Councils serves as red power as the beginning and a. I. M. I think its worth remembering that is not the story in this book. As he sat down to his typewriter in 1968 those narratives had no traction for him. Front and center in his mind the triumph over udalls omnibus bill, one of his shining moments, offered a linchpin less remembered today. As he wrote alcatrazs takeover had not happened. Its kind of uncanny that the reviews were november 9, 14 and 18, alcatraz, the takeover november 20th. Its all unfolding in november of 1969. The trail of broken treaties, those things are not quite imaginable at that particular moment. And soap in the book he surveyed the landscape as robert warrior recount 1970 to imagine the kind of plan of confederation. The niyc would recruit and train native youth to form the next cohorts of leadership. They would coordinate policy across stripes. They would Lobby Congress and the administration and a. I. M. Would press the politics of the street. Its actually a pretty good vision for how things might have unfolded. They didnt unfold that way but not to say it wasnt a good vision. To trace the origins of the book in the institutional political activism would be to focus in on the three years my father served as direct oor of the National Congress of American Indians to the end of 1967. And custer presents what he frequently offered as a standard origin story for his appointment as a scholarship recruiter he found himself escorting a visitor during all indian days when he wandered into a meeting in political struggle and uncertainty and somehow when the dust cleared he was the director, the young guy that everybody thought they could push around. It was pointed out my father came with a slogan, a platform, something of a plan, and a competitor he needed to outdebate. So here one could see a dynamic that is central to his career, planning and strategy and forethought with situational awareness, good timing. He was situational and he had a longterm kind of set of visions. His first months were taken up by administrative things. A power struggle who refused to give up the records and the checkbook. This was a time of intense fiscal stress and then a period of learning on the job in which my grandfather who conducted a massive church for the Episcopal Church played a major role in helping him think about Indian Country as a diverse whole. I think some part of his training was traveling around with my grandfather, his father, going into the different communities, being there but another part of it was drawing on what my grandfather had done. He was an allamerican Honorable Mention Football Player in 1922. My grandfather kind of schooled him in many ways and in this interestingly my father and my aunts was deeply structured by her Fathers Network of church and kin and the introductions he provided for her. Every time i show the deloria men in this way i feel i should show the women. One of the things thats cool theres a painting of my greatgreatgrandmother done by alfred suly who would be the sort of father of her child. Mary sully. So the Institutional Capital was administrative but it also was at its core based in native relations. The book bares traces of learning. Attending the directors position, frustration with the participation, the predictable, unpredictability of indian politics. The first half of the book is really, i think, razor sharp as other folks have mentioned as it takes critical aim at stereotyping legal and political history, the government, churches and, of course, the anthropologists. The second half is a little bit more meandering, moving through different themes, Race Relations and civil rights, native leadership, possible futures. These are essays. They are thought pieces rather than a sustained book length kind of argument. Indeed it seems likely that his editor put them in the sequence we encounter when we read the book today. I want to pull out a couple chapters. Since patti came into this through humor and people have talked about humor, i want to talk about a couple hinge chapters and think on them with you for a little bit for consideration of the legacy of custer today. So the humor chapter, the one i liked best as a kid when the book came out and you could take it and read it as a standup routine, as a set of jokes, has an important but light veneer of argument. Indians are not stoic people. And so when youre reading through the book its easily read as the equivalent of sitting around telling jokes. It could be an easy chapter. This was my experience reading it. This was the easiest chapter, the legible chapter for me. A kind of taking of breath as you come out of those tough chapters in the beginning before launching into the rest of the book. Ive been inclined to read it as his style and a problem he confronted as a writer, which is a relationship between style and argument. In my fathers writing theres a tension between the two. Argument is sometimes sublimated to style. Sometimes his style allows him to coast through arguments that might be stronger. But style is oftentimes married to argument in ways that are incredibly strong. Feeling the tensions between those things has been interesting in terms of reading and style carries meaning and content in and of itself. Style matters. With the humor chapter suggests to me, its not just him. Were talking about something larger, a native sense of style which he embodied, he pulled together, and he modeled. To explore this dynamic between style and argument, i thought we might linger for a moment on two of the most famous passages, the introduction to the takedown chapter on anthropologists and i will let you read these quickly for a second and then talk about them quickly. Its delightful to hear you chuckling. More chuckling is good. So in staking my claim to be an interdisciplinary person, patti, i will coast on that for a while. Literary methods are interesting and important to me. Kind of one of the things that allowed me to convert into an art historian with this project. Ive tried to digest the sentences a little bit. I want to make an argument this passage is one where style doesnt support argument as well as it might. Fine, cool. This sets the parameters to what will happen. We have a couple specific kinds of things. This, of course, is something that is very time sensitive. I had to look this up, it was a fighter jet that was supposed to be procured that would serve all the branches of the military that didnt quite work. But the edsall is this yeah, i dont know. Churches possess the real world. Interestingly when this was published in playboy that sentence was moved by some copy editor and replaced by american politics has george wallace. Which makes much more sense, right . You can see how it comes together at the end, the hyperbolic claim in all of world history, right, indians have been cursed more than any other person and the triviality is what gives it its power and humor and its style and its great. The punch line comes. What we forget is the setup to this could have been better done, right . Contrast that with this which is one of my favorite passages. A friendly opening. Hey, gentle white reader, people are always interested in you and your plight. The framing of plight tells us something is coming. Other groups have problems, quandaries, et cetera, et cetera, indians have a plight that set native people apart and it tells you theres a break thats going on here that he wants to Pay Attention to. And then, bam, this incredible critical, sarcastic sentence, our foremost plight like this is serious, deadly serious stuff, our foremost, our transparency. People can tell just by looking at us what we want, what should be done to help us. This is like me, what captures the style here. This is funny, witty, sarcastic, totally and analytically doing things. And then he keeps going, right . Indian life as it relates to the real world to not disappoint people who know us. You forced us to live our lives according to what you think and then the killer, the kicker at the end, this does damage. This is harm. These are the hurts of history and we have suffered. So this is a piece of rhetoric, right . Its fantastic because its the analysis and the wit and the humor and the irony all happen at once and so much of his writing functions like this. Such that we can escape the other because the other works, too. This is where the power lies. The anthropology riff relies on style. This more devastating makes style do the labor of argument. At work is irony, metaphor, inversion and sequence and timing. Read for this kind of writing across time and you can see as my friend reminds me the same kind of scathing irony in generations before all the way back to william apas reframed in custer to articulate with the sensibilities of the 1960s reader. Defines his own writing and offers a model that generations of producers will emulate, look at cool, funny stuff on youtube and you see the young generation has the same voice, scathing irony, analytical stuff going on. Scott was reframing another literary style we could call super serious indigenous modernism that is why the two are so important in that moment. Irony requires intelligence and selfawareness and the conversion of historical ironies into humor requires something even more. A transcendent awareness, which was what my dad was trying to do, both a sympathetic Awareness Among white readers and a forward looking meta selfaware intelligence sense of self among indian readers and future indian writers. That selfhood would produce new ways of thinking closely and critically tied to old ways of thinking. He was a product of the 1960s, the groovy 60s, imagining a new age that would be built on indigenous foundations. I woint you to this. No progress has been made in developing new concepts for us. Its ideas adequately phrased for depression america cannot now express the realities of a space age indian community. Thats not from custer but captures his sense there was an intellectual and political project ahead for native people. And, damn, if that new thinking has not come to pass. The red and the black which marks his first effort at placing native concerns in relation to an africanamerican dominated civil rights movement. He felt it important to indicate a clear sense of histories, goals and methods visible in the new struggles for justice and if the chapter is sometimes clunky, insensitive and didactic, indian people needed to deal not only with White Supremacy but with ways the civil rights narrative and arguments, between the individual and the state, also posed a problem for arguments in treaties, tribal sovereignty and collective rights. As it does so often custer lays down a marker for the future, one he took up in greater perhaps more sensitive detail in we talk you listen and in subsequent rightings. A cultural currency publicly embraced by a significant sector of americans. Native peoples face a similarly counter intuitive challenge that is africanamerican struggles have come through the coopting efforts and effects of white liberalism to stand for all histories of oppression even as they rightly demand a National Accounting on their own terms of which we can be wholly and completely supportive. A more specific origin story for custer might begin with the 1967 book by stan steiner the new indians billed as a translation of young activist philosophy to the mainstream. Steiner featured a verbal group along with deloria, shirley hill wit, willie hensley, Mary Lou Payne and bob thomas. Publishers sensing a market aided by steiner recruit add number to write books. My father was able to make it happen though i think not so easily. He had a 500 advance and after three months and two laborious chapters he was convinced the writing was no good and wanting to stall the inevitable rejection. To his surprise his editor liked it and pulled out a copy edited page. It was covered with red ink. To the extent that my father realized as he said with great delight, he only half wrote his own prose. There was both editorial help and copy editing ahead for him as well. He told me about this page a couple times. I was struggling writing long form argument. According to my mom after that meeting he relaxed and began a much quicker pace of writing. Custers chapters organized and arranged many of the speaking points and talk tracks. My moms memories of the actual writing process and i had a delightful time sitting down and having a conversation with my mom about the writing of custer and how it went down from her memories. Her memories are that he didnt really need to do Extensive Research for this book. He sat down in the evening after wed all gone to bed and let it rip. My grandparents were poorer people in the way of the underpaid rural clergy of the Episcopal Church who failed to build wealth, unable to build wealth and then came with too little too late. I was able to watch my parents climb from this working poor to where they started in the upper class. We lived in denver, colorado. I was tempted to drive by it yesterday actually. Its kind of by d. U. I went to University Park Elementary School and its in walking distance of there. My brother and i shared a pass through to my parents tiny bedroom. My sisters krcrib was harry potteresque. There was a tiny kitchen that was the only place my dad had to write. This began his lifelong hand of writing sitting cross legged which helped destroy his back if you imagine the leaning over you would have to do. No one slept because we could hear the typewriter. He was not a super studious student as he oftentimes conf s confessed but he would study a bit and then go back and write all night. The book reveals a relatively beginner struggling to learn the craft. Its at its best when you can hear the oral language when the writing reflects everyday speech patterns. That means the funny, ironic, sarcastic bits. This was the world he operated verbally. Its perhaps not at his best in his thinking language, not practiced or fully confident of what he was trying to say. Churches have the real world or did you mean the tribe and the corporation were close echoes of one another. It reads uncertainly or half bakedly today. The bit in the red chapter shows him uncomfortable writing about race and racial formation. You can see the early thinking for books later to come. The chapter on treaties clearly the later book behind the trail of broken treaties. Foreshadow and the met physics of modern existence. Custer could be the first draft for subsequent write toino come. He was lucky with mcmillan as the press and the book jacket. Im going to show you not the red oklahoma version but the green version which features this scary, deadeyed Eagle Holding a tomahawk in the beak and notice where the color comes in and the tie dye thing on the blade. The design was by jason mcwherter. He was a designer with a push pin studios which was the definitive studio in new york for 20 years between the mid1950s and the 70s and beyond. A number of young guns graduated from the school of visual arts. One of my dads happiest moments was getting a letter from some native soldiers who took the eagle with the tomahawk and made it into a patch for their flight jackets. They sent him a couple of them. This was so emotional and meaningful to him. Whats interesting some of the ways this reflects the late 60s design kind of thing, you see a textual conversation between his boss and mcwerten. They partnered together on jacob javits Campaign Buttons and then he clearly went back to the 1967 design. For the cover of we talk, you listen, over on the righthand side. Both reflect push pins and here is the life magazine. This is as 60s as it gets. They rejected the narrative design. Norman rockwell stuff. And focused on communicating concepts and ideas. Often through surreal pop art. You can see when they take this visual photograph and put it over this 60s psychedelic thing. Both covers are fantastic examples and is well served. And i want to do a quick shoutout, also whoops, maybe i dont. Its later. Sorry. It is worth noting and going back to the question mcmillans publicity machine did a really good job with the book. My understanding they placed the anthropology chapter in playboy and into New York Times magazine. They pushed all those reviews. They cultivated pete hamill to embrace the book for a couple months before it even came out. So here is the playboy magazine. If rob williams was here, he would do this riff where he pulls out a medicine bag and the object which is the playboy magazine. I just want to second what robert said earlier that playboy was at this moment a place where some pretty intense political writing took place. This goes on for pages and pages and pages. I highly commend it to anyone who is interested in king and kings legacy. It is incredibly revealing and king speaks extemporaneously on this. These playboy interviews would take place over the course of two or three or four days to the point where what they said they want to break down the subject, pass all of the obvious things that they say and get them to say other things which are more interesting. So you can see this is just a very partial list. Theres an incredible interview with ramsay clark, the attorney general at the time. As a kid when did you sort of first find playboy . Well, for me it was my neighbor, the smiths family and my neighbor buck smith who lived just down the way from south monroe street, working class guy. He worked on the line at coors brewery, subscribed to playboy, looked at the pictures. But i also saw him reading the articles and so that familiar joke i just get it for the articles maybe turns out to be true and reaches a different audience. I dont know how far down the road i want to get with that. I dont want to sort of displace the kind of gender violence playboy also represents so its important to put those things in a complex sort of context. Once he finished custer, he never looked back. He assembled a working office in the basement. We listened as over time he developed a writers routine, a cup of cold coffee left over from the morning, cigarettes, an hours worth of shol tear as he organized his thinking. A writing dog at his feet. Yeah. First just dog, j. D. , and we were imaginable about our dog names then marlo and bob. Later the stereo with songs cycling over and over and over again. Many nights i spent listening to they say dont go and then the song finished and you think, thank god thats over. There we go again. Why he did this, i dont know but he did. He churned out we talk you listen of utmost good faith, wrote god is red and several others, a regional case study and the indian affair. He did curious projects like revision of red man in the new world drama and behind the trail of broken treaties. Not that the others arent important but he capped off with metaphysics he cranked out more in a decade than most do over a full career. And now i want to do a shutout to Fulcrum Press that has taken my dads legacy and writing and really done a fantastic job. Bob, are you here . Thank you. Thank you. [ applause ] and it ties back to the covers because they never fail to have an amazing cover on these books. Theyre just beautiful, beautiful books. I think we can all be grateful. Over those years he grew confident as a writer though it was perhaps the more fragile thing than he let on. Robert, i think you and i could have interesting dialogue on this, he felt he couldnt get comfortable writing in arizona where my parents moved in 1978, when he was respected as a writer. He struggled through three drafts to finish his book on kyle young. These are worries that confront all writers. There was a heady and wonderful moment when custer defined him anew as a writer. He talks about finding his way through the lions head bar in new york city shortly after custer and being embraced by a set of writers who occupied the place. So here he is talking about his first night coming into the lions head and ill just let you read. So on this magical first night he stays on after pete hamill lead. Joel oppenheimer comes in, they talk and then they walk over to oppenheimers apartment so my dad can autograph his copy of custer. The night shift is arriving. And this is what he said over and over again, the topics would switch from one illusion to another. This was the moment of just smart people back and forthing constantly. And its no coincidence, robert, that he met you there. As he then went on to recollect the head became an obsession to me. I would get to the hotel, tip the bus boy. We did a lot of behindthescenes work and he talks about the lion hid but talks about my dad being at the lions head and how much he loved it. Yeah i dont think deloria ever came to new york city without going straight to the lions head. As i was making my way through my 20s, my dad told me this, deloria men dont figure out their lives until they are about 30. It will all come together. He was 29 when he started his first job. 31 director and 36 when custer came out. Its a bit emotional to read these auto biographical pages and the selling off of the memorabilia that was there. Imagining him in the moment when custer opened up a way in Indian Affairs and as a writer. In the ways he enjoyed and loved and embraced that. His final reminiscent is worth pausing on and then ill move to the conclusion. So in many ways custer died for your sins was also a justification for him leaving the National Congress and he concludes the book with another one of these just so stories. If he was just wandering aimlessly around the convention in 1964, in 1968 he was struck by the need for lawyers. The university of Colorado Law School was inspiration and grounding for him but also a form of refuge. He saw custer as a book that burned a few bridges as i think weve talked about earlier. Has placed me in a certain position in Indian Affairs i shall not be able to retreat at least not very soon. One reason i wanted to write it was to raise issues they have not been raising for themselves and to give idea to white people of the unspoken but often felt antagonisms and the reasons for such antagonisms. Here is the doubleedged critique. The institutions he targeted while at the same time questioning the strategies of the young militants and pushing for his version of tribal nationalism. They had their moment and had responded to his critique. You could also argue that the activists revealed to him the failures of the Tribal Administration in which they put such faith. Another way they affirmed his predictions it might jumpstart new politics but would it be able to sustain a lasting movement . And finally he felt confirm in his belief a steady but aggressively bold work in law and policy, militant in its own way, i think, offered the best path forward through the confusing landscape of the 1970s best exemplified by the rise of organizations like the native American Rights Fund and new legal cases, laws, administrative rulings and challenges. Thats one Important Message of behind the trail of broken treaties his last piece of indian writing for some years. Martinez in his new biography calls the deloria tetrology, god is red, and behind the fall of the treaty. One might actually expand that canon to a hexology or heptology, which i had to look those up. I havent often gone back to of utmost good faith but when i do im struck by several things. Its the documentation collection that a just finished law student might put together. Its worth returning to the framing he put around each one of these exercerpts but an impassioned plea to Pay Attention to history and learn, followed in many cases by a smart and pointed interpretive conclusion. The final conclusions on indian leadership and dealing with indians are as contemporary as custer. Just as powerful, especially in his elevation of the voices of joe gerry, and robert lewis. And its also worth noting that the publisher, Straight Arrow press, chose to release it in both hardback and paper with a trade press cover aimed at a popular audience. That tells you, i think, about the impact of custer that a document collection might actually masquerade as a trade book in this case. Then theres the curious case of his rewriting of jennings wises the red man in the new world drama, an obscure book published in 1931 which is not still part of the canon of writing about indian issues. Why care about this book . This has been fund meblgtsament mysterious to me. Throughout his writing career, my dad understood change understood in attitudes drawn from his aunt ella who was highly sensitized to cultural politics. We talked custer and ulis is began with ay teak of not stereotypes but the master narratives that cling to indian people that underpin. The stodge y quite stodgy language of red man and the new world drama offered him Something Interesting and important. Not a critique. He had already done that. With but another counternarrative that consistently centered Indian Agency and revealed colonial domination, cheats, lies and brutality. In its in the tradition of Helen Hunt Jackson where d. Brown, it starts at the very beginning. Starts with the norse and ends with the present moment. Its a long and deep kind of history. So, if bury my heart at wounded knee had not become a best seller, imagine this as a counterfactual with me, perhaps this longer history might have become a best seller and done some important cultural work offering white readers an indigenous counternarrative. What if this seized the market in 1971. Finally, theres the treaty book project he he did under the auspices for the development of indian law. Lots of tribal members could have quick access to their treaties. These were the books my brother and i painstakingly collated in our basement. To save money, my dad had them printed but not collated or bound so we had hundreds of boxes of treaty texts and spent at least a year assembling them book by book by book. So as our contribution to the cause, he paid us a nickel apiece. As we celebrate custer at 50, its perhaps important to remember it as a great world historical Landmark Book and. For my grad students who look at vine deloria, i think thats an important and comforting kind of idea and all the better for being true. Its also clear custer died for his signs needs to be seen as an introduction and master key to a tremendously full body of work. Heptology or hexology, as you choose, or five or six years that would further develop over a long career. And into our present. I think its important sthoen see custer not only in terms of his famous books but now the ones fallen just a bit by the wayside to say nothing as robert has cautioned, sort of asked us to think about all the articles, reviews, introduction, the whole body of this other work which is extraordinary. It shows us custer was not only a singular intellectual object but part of a broader effort to bring new narratives and create political and legal thought structure for indians and nonindians. Ive tried a bit to personalize the book in its processes. It matters to me how these kinds of texts get written. Theres trial and error. There is work. There are missteps, plans, unexpected contingencies. It matters my dad was attending law school and writing at night. Or that he had a thing about music. I want to sort of share these pictures with you of the young vine deloria with his guitar. He had a thing about music which was visible in his willingness to turn custer into a record but om if Floyd Westerman got to be the artist. For those who dont know this album, its really good. And the song custer died for your sins is a great song. And it shows off floyd as an excellent singer. Rick williams and i were talking about this last night. His ability to go, custer died for your sins and go up a bit, custer kid for your sins. A new day must begin. Then he goes like this custer dies and it is so low. Its like under water. Its this gravelly, rangy, beautiful, beautiful thing. I commend it to you. These things matter. It matters that he was also, i just have to show you his favorite picture of himself in this regard. It maetters he was a serious ma and pranking trickster, he was willing to experiment in venture, he had his networks of friends, dogs, family, student, colleagues, readers, all these different kind of things. All these folks. Heres bob the dog. His good friend bobby bridger, floyd. Here he is being the master of ceremony at a Music Festival at winter park. He was a risk taker. He was a guy willing i wouldnt do that. But he did. Its easy to look at this book and all the other books from a distance and assume he had some kind of master plan. I dont think he did or i dont think he had much of one. Custer was responsive to its moment and context. As is so often the case, it was in the act of writing itself that he started to see the lines and directions, threads and webz that would come to make up the body of work first constituted between 1969 and 1964 and would be pursued over the course of his career and would 50 years later take on a thematic coherence with an echo and impact and words, living words that carry strongly into our own moment. Thank you all so much. [ applause ] this is American History tv on cspan3 where each weekend we have 48 hours of programs exploring our nations past. Thinking about participating in cspan student cam 2020 competition but youve never made a documentary film before . No problem. We have resources on our website to help you get started. Check out our Getting Started and downloads pages on studentcam. Org for producing information and video links to footage in the cspan library. Teachers will also find resources on the teachers materials page to help you introduce student cam to your students. My advice to anyone that wants to compete this year is to find a topic that youre truly passionate about and pursue it as much as you can. This year were asking middle and High School Students to create a Short Documentary on the issue that you would like the president ial candidates to address during the 2020 campaign. Cspan will award 100,000 in total cash award prizes and a 5,000 grand prize. Get a camera, a microphone and start filming and produce the best video that you can possibly produce. Visit studentcam. Org for more information today. Next on American History tv, justices ruth bad er ginsburg ad sonia sotomayor, part of an allday conference commemorating the 30th anniversary of oconnors senate confirmation. The Ronald Reagan president ial foundation and institute hosted this program. Good evening, everyone. On behalf of the Reagan Foundation institute, thank you for joining us this evening. I have the pleasure of introducing our two panelists and ted olsen in a moment. We have a number of distinguished guests with us