God Is Red by Vine Deloria Jr.: An Honest Review

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What This Book Is

Grosset and Dunlap published God Is Red: A Native View of Religion in 1973, four years after Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins had made him the best-known Native American writer in the country. Revised editions followed in 1992 and 2003, and an anniversary edition adds critical essays by Philip Deloria, Suzan Shown Harjo, Daniel Wildcat and David E. Wilkins.

It is a work of argument rather than description. Deloria is not surveying tribal religions or explaining ceremonies, and he is deliberate about not doing so. He is making a structural claim about what religion is, using the difference between two families of religion to expose an assumption that Western readers do not know they hold.

Space Against Time

The thesis is a single sentence and the rest of the book unfolds it.

Christianity is a religion of history. Its claims are claims about events in a sequence: a creation, a covenant, an incarnation at a datable moment, a crucifixion under a named governor, a resurrection, a second coming still to happen. Its truth is temporal, and because time is the same everywhere, the religion is portable. It can be carried to any territory without loss, and its natural mode toward other traditions is conversion, because a temporal claim excludes rival temporal claims.

Native religions, Deloria argues, are religions of place. Their truth is located in specific land. A ceremony belongs to a particular mountain, a particular confluence, a particular stretch of ground where something happened and where the relationship with what happened is maintained. The question such a tradition asks is not what happened in history but what happens here.

Deloria's point is not that one is superior. It is that they are different kinds of thing, that Western scholarship has consistently mistaken the second for a defective version of the first, and that almost every practical conflict between them follows from the mismatch.

What Follows From It

Deloria's method is to take the distinction and run it through American history, and the results are uncomfortable in the way good arguments are.

Removal was religious destruction. If a people's religion is tied to particular land, moving them off that land ends the religion, whatever nominal freedom of worship they retain afterwards. American law has protected belief and practice without ever protecting place, and so the legal framework is structurally incapable of recognising what was done. Nobody had to ban a ceremony. They only had to move the people away from where it belonged.

Sacred site law does not work. The same mismatch runs through every case about a road through a burial ground or a telescope on a mountain. A court asks whether an individual's exercise of religion is substantially burdened, and the framework assumes religion is portable. A tradition that says the mountain itself is the thing has no way to phrase its claim in a language the court is built to hear.

Universalism is not neutral. The assumption that a real religion should be available to everyone everywhere is a feature of one family of religions being treated as the definition of the category. A tradition that says this ground is ours and not transferable looks parochial by that standard, and Deloria's reply is that the standard is not neutral ground.

The Christianity Chapters

Deloria writes about Christianity with the accuracy of someone raised in it and the anger of someone whose people were on the receiving end of it. Both are present and both matter.

He goes at the mission history directly: the schools, the suppression of language and ceremony, the collaboration between churches and federal policy, and the theological framework that made conquest describable as a benefit. He goes at the doctrine used to justify claims on land in the first place. He goes at the eschatology, arguing that a religion whose real interest is a future beyond this world has structurally little reason to care what happens to the ground.

He is also sharp about the churches of his own day, which in 1973 were speaking a great deal about liberation and had not returned anything.

The Ecological Argument

Written in 1973, this part of the book has aged into prophecy.

Deloria connects three things: a theology in which the human being is categorically separate from and set over the rest of creation, an economics that treats land as a commodity with no standing of its own, and an accelerating environmental crisis. His claim is that the second follows from the first and the third from the second.

He contrasts this with a framework in which other beings are relatives with their own standing, in which obligations run to places and to species rather than only between people, and in which a claim on land carries duties rather than only rights.

The argument has since been made many times, sometimes by people who arrived at it independently and sometimes by people who had read this book. It appears in environmental ethics, in the legal-personhood-for-rivers movement, and in a large popular literature. Our overview of indigenous knowledge systems covers the wider field, and readers who found Robin Wall Kimmerer moving are reading a warmer descendant of this position.

The Chapter on Death

One chapter deserves separating out, because it is the most personal thing in the book and the part readers tend to remember longest.

Deloria takes up what the two frameworks do with death. A religion of history, on his account, has to make death a problem to be solved, because a linear time ending in personal judgement puts an enormous weight on the individual life and on what happens after it. The result is a tradition preoccupied with the fate of the single soul and with securing an outcome.

A religion of place, he argues, treats death differently because the person is not the unit. The dead remain in relation to the living through the ground they are buried in and the community that continues there. Continuity is carried by the place and the people rather than by the persistence of an individual consciousness, and the anxiety about personal survival that drives so much Western religious thought simply has less to work on.

He then turns this on the treatment of Native remains, and the chapter becomes something else. Skeletal material taken from graves and held in museums and university collections is, on his framework, not an academic matter about specimens. It is a rupture in a relationship that the burial was maintaining. The argument he makes here fed directly into the repatriation politics of the following two decades.

The Man Making the Argument

Vine Deloria Jr. lived from 1933 to 2005. He was Standing Rock Sioux, and he came from a family that had produced Episcopal clergy for three generations, including his father. He took a divinity degree and then a law degree, served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in the 1960s, and taught for many years at the University of Colorado.

That combination explains the book. A man with a seminary education arguing about the structure of Christian theology is arguing from inside. A man with a law degree writing about removal and sacred sites knows exactly which doctrines the courts will and will not entertain. And a man from a clerical family taking this position was breaking with something.

He wrote more than twenty books and was, for thirty years, the most consequential Native American intellectual in the United States. He was also combative, and he became more so.

Where the Book Goes Wrong

An honest review has to take up the material on origins, and it is the part readers most often skip past.

Deloria rejected the account of the peopling of the Americas from northeast Asia, arguing that it served a political purpose by making Native peoples immigrants like everyone else, and noting that no tribal origin account describes such a migration. In later editions he extended this into scepticism about evolutionary biology and geological chronology, and he pursued the whole line at length in Red Earth, White Lies in 1995.

That book was received badly by scientists. The anthropologist John Whittaker of Grinnell College described it as a wretched piece of Native American creationist claptrap, which is representative of the tone of the response rather than an outlier.

Two things need saying and both are true.

The core scientific finding stands. Genetic, linguistic and archaeological evidence for an origin of Native American populations in northeast Asia is extensive and mutually corroborating, and Deloria's rejection of it does not survive contact with the data.

He had a real target. The specific model he was attacking, in which a single migration crossed an ice-free corridor at a late date and Clovis was the earliest culture in the Americas, has since been substantially revised by archaeologists themselves. Coastal migration routes are now taken seriously, pre-Clovis sites are accepted, and the dates have moved back considerably. Deloria was right that the model was being defended with more confidence than the evidence supported, and wrong about what should replace it.

Why the Core Still Holds

Fifty years on, the central distinction is everywhere in religious studies, usually unattributed.

It is the reason scholars now distinguish between religions organised around narrative history and those organised around land and locality. It is behind a large literature on sacred geography. It is the frame most often used to explain why disputes over particular sites are so intractable. Our article on Eliade's Sacred and the Profane covers the comparative framework Deloria was arguing with, and it is worth noticing how much more useful the place-based analysis becomes once you stop treating it as a stage that religions grow out of.

The argument also travels beyond North America. Shinto is a religion of specific places with shrines attached to particular kami and particular ground, and the same structural point applies to it. So does a good deal of pre-Christian European religion, where the deities were attached to springs, groves and hills that can still be located. Deloria's distinction is not about a continent. It is about two ways religions can be built.

Which Edition to Read

Take the most recent anniversary edition. The critical essays that accompany it are the reason.

Philip Deloria is a historian and Vine Deloria's son. Suzan Shown Harjo has spent decades on exactly the sacred-site and repatriation questions the book raises. Daniel Wildcat has extended the ecological argument. David E. Wilkins works on federal Indian law. Four people engaging the book seriously from inside Native scholarship is a far better apparatus than the reader could assemble alone, and it includes disagreement.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you are interested in what religion is, structurally, and want a comparison that does something rather than listing similarities.

Read it if you want to understand why sacred-site cases keep failing, since the reason is in this book and is not primarily about who wins.

Read it if you have absorbed a good deal of popular Native spirituality and want a serious Native intellectual on the subject, including on that market.

Do not read it for descriptions of ceremonies, which it declines to give. Do not read it for the origins material. And read Black Elk Speaks alongside it, noticing the difference between a Lakota man interpreted by a white poet and a Native writer arguing in his own voice.

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