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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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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.
Modern
Society
American
Sense
Real
Unreal
Indian

More quotes by Vine Deloria Jr.

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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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For some unknown reason, this [antiabortion] branch of Christianity cherishes the unborn and hates the living person.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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Western civilization, unfortunately, does not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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This country was a lot better off when the Indians were running it.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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If you want to be sovereign, act sovereign.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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Royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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Do certain sets of circumstances lie ahead of us wherein we change the world radically by the choices we make?
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.
Vine Deloria Jr.
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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.