Vine Deloria, Indian historian and activist, dies at 72
Mr. Deloria, who taught at the University of Colorado from 1990 to 2000, died Sunday in Denver of complications from an aortic aneurysm, his family said. He lived in nearby Golden, Colo.
"Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century — one of the most influential Americans, period," said Charles Wilkinson of the University of Colorado School of Law and an expert on Indian law.
Mr. Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, "Custer Died for Your Sins," that brought him to the nation's attention.
In 2002, Wilkinson called it "perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs" and described it as "at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical."
The author's disdain for Gen. George Armstrong Custer never wavered.
"Soldiers were nothing to him, except tools," Mr. Deloria told the Los Angeles Times in 1996, describing Custer as a psychopath. "The soldiers were not defending civilization. They were crushing another society."
Publication of the powerful "Custer" book followed Mr. Deloria's 1964-67 tenure as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. His leadership in lobbying Congress and setting forth American Indian rights issues in speeches and op-ed and other articles during the 1960s is widely credited with forcing a turning point in Indian policy.
Among Mr. Deloria's other books were "We Talk, You Listen" in 1970, "God is Red" in 1973 and "Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties" in 1974, about events leading up to the confrontation between American Indian activists and federal authorities at Wounded Knee the previous year. As an expert on Indian treaties, Mr. Deloria was a key witness for the defense in the Wounded Knee trial in St. Paul, Minn.