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But even labeling a site as astronomical is an improvement, since it partially sidesteps the old stereotype of Indians being primitive and ignorant savages.

Vine Deloria Jr.

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Vine Deloria Jr.
Age: 72 †
Born: 1933
Born: March 26
Died: 2005
Died: November 13
Author
Historian
Military Officer
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Martin
South Dakota
Vine Victor Deloria
Jr.
Even
Indians
Stereotype
Savages
Site
Primitive
Improvement
Astronomical
Ignorant
Labeling
Since
Partially

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These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt. Most of us dont fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating
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Culture, as Indian people understood it, was basically a lifestyle by which a people acted. It was self-expression, but not a conscious self-expression. Rather, it was an expression of the essence of a people.
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Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.
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The bottom line about the information possessed by non-Western peoples is that the information becomes valid only when offered by a white scholar recognized by the academic establishment in effect, the color of the skin guarantees scientific objectivity.
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Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?
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Custer is said to have boasted that he could ride through the entire Sioux Nation with his Seventh Cavalry, and he was half right. He got half-way through.
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As time passed I became an avid reader of popular scientific books, wanting to know as much as I could about the world in which I lived. Gradually I began to see a pattern of nonsense in much scientific writing. Scientific explanations given regarding the origins or functioning of various phenomena simply didn't make sense.
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Before any final solution to American history can occur, a reconciliation must be effected between the spiritual owner of the land - American Indians - and the political owner of the land - American Whites. Guilt and accusations cannot continue to revolve in a vacuum without some effort at reaching a solution.
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Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.
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The future of mankind lies waiting for those who will come to understand their lives and take up their responsibilities to all living things.
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Like almost everyone else in America, I grew up believing the myth of the objective scientist. Fortunately I was raised on the edges of two very distinct cultures, western European and American Indian.
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If the tribal peoples actually represented Western origins at a much earlier time, it was exceedingly valuable that they should be studied intensely for clues about the nature and origin of human society. Consequently it was an injury to science and human knowledge to allow the military to simply exterminate them.
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To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.
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Not only did secular scientists rout the Christian fundamentalists, they placed themselves in the posture of knowing more, on the basis of their own very short-term investigations, than the collective remembrances of the rest of humankind.
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This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
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With the collision of the Shoemaker comet into Jupiter, the era of uniformitarian orthodoxy must come to an end. Minds that have been closed for nearly half a millennium can now be opened to see what really has happened to our planet in the past -- and that past is not as distant as we might suppose.
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If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.
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Every society needs educated people, but the primary responsibility of educated people is to bring wisdom back into the community and make it available to others so that the lives they are leading make sense.
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When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply Ours.
Vine Deloria Jr.