THE RED POWER OF VINE DELORIA, JR.

THE RED POWER OF VINE DELORIA, JR.

Had the tribes been given the choice of fighting the cavalry or the anthropologists, there is little doubt as to whom they would have chosen ... A warrior killed in battle could always go to the Happy Hunting Grounds. Where does an Indian laid low by an anthro go? To the library? -Vine Deloria, JR.

THE nineteen seventy-one DIG in Welch, Minnesota, was going pretty much like all others, mostly dust and discouragement, but the students still felt lucky to be there. They slaved for weeks, learning to move dirt scientifically. They dug in square pits, wrote detailed fieldnotes, and took routine photographs. They screened everything, picking out even the tiniest bones and artifacts. They catalogued and classified, looking for clues to what life had been like in the ancient Indian village that once stood here.

Then the Indians showed up. Representing a new protest group called "AIM"-the American Indian Movement-they confiscated excavation equipment, burned the fieldnotes, and backfilled the excavation trenches. Clyde Bellecourt, their leader, announced that the Indians of Minnesota were deeply offended because archaeologists were disturbing graves of their ancestors. No more digging would be permitted.

Then, like the dress-up Mohawks at the Boston Tea Party, the Indians from AIM offered to pay for any damage caused by their protest.

The archaeologists, shocked and irritated, complained about "five weeks of work down the drain." Tears welled up in one student's eyes as she explained how careful they had been. Another excavator, preparing for a career in archaeology, said that the activists had made her lose respect for all Indian people and that these citified Indians were simply ignorant about their own past. A third said that the Indians just did not understand-archaeologists are "trying to preserve Indian culture, not destroy it." The AIM radicals did not care what the archaeologists said. They couldn't see how archaeologists were showing respect to Indian people by digging up their dead ancestors.

Russell Means, the self-described "most controversial Indian leader of our time," remembers his first glimpse of AIM Indians. "I couldn't help notice the way they were dressed and their haircuts-parted on one side and combed into waves falling across the other side, the way Indian boarding-school students had once been forced to wear their hair. They wore beaded belts, sashes, chokers, moccasins, headbands, and lots of Indian jewelry. I thought, what are they trying to prove? Those guys looked ridiculous, all dressed up like Indians. I asked somebody, 'Who are those guys?' They're from the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis,' he answered."

Unlike the Boston Tea Party, the Minnesota protest was staged by real Indians- dressed up like real Indians. Their mostly peaceful acts of civil disobedience illustrated a deep dissatisfaction with the Federal government and their own lack of representation. In the nineteen seventy-one Minnesota confrontation, the Indians of AIM were reestablishing claims on their own heritage, showing the world that Indians were very much alive.

DID CUSTER DIE FOR YOUR SINS?

Any of the Minnesota students with a current issue of Playboy stashed under the mattress could have spotted the next incoming round. Those who were mystified that protest against white domination targeted an innocent archaeological dig would soon have the mystery cleared up. Vine Deloria, JR., a Standing Rock Sioux law student had just published an extract from his soon-to-be-released blockbuster, provocatively entitled Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. Deloria's book exploded on the scene in nineteen sixty-nine-trashing academics, missionaries, Congress, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and most other non-Indians who frequented Indian Country.

Particularly stinging was Deloria's Chapter Four-"Anthropologists and Other Friends"-a humorous, take-no-prisoners indictment of anthropological research in Indian country. In Deloria's hands, the term "anthro" became a clever slur, soon to be picked up by angry young Indians across the land (some of whom had never actually encountered an anthro first-hand). To Deloria, the Anthro-American was a meddlesome academic who "infests the land of the free, and in the summer time, the homes of the braves."

"Indians," Deloria teased, "are ... certain that Columbus brought anthropologists on his ships when he came to the New World. How else could he have made so many wrong decisions about where he was?" He also suggested that, like religious missionaries, anthros were "tolerably certain that they represent ultimate truth" when they set themselves up as the authoritative sources on tribal cultures. He questioned how they had become the custodians of the Indian past.

Deep down, said Deloria, anthros are motivated mostly to climb the academic totem pole. "Reduction of people to ciphers for purposes of observation apparently appears to be inconsequential to the anthropologist compared with the immediate benefits he can derive, the production of further prestige, and the chance to appear as the high priest of American society, orienting and manipulating to his heart's desire." Archaeologists carted off Indian bones and artifacts to faraway museums and wrote complex ethnographies and site reports that were intrusive, irrelevant, and insulting to Indian people. All "amateur" inquiry-research that did not fit this absurd world and therefore was not sanctioned by the academy-was frowned upon and derided.

Furthermore, Deloria argued, anthropology's commitment to "pure research" had forced Indian tribes into unfair competition with academics for funding from private foundations and federal agencies. Anthropological research was especially wasteful, he said, because the "scholarly productions are so useless and irrelevant to real life." Deloria's anthros dwelt only on the past, seeking "authenticity" and ignoring the interests of modern Indian people. Archaeologists in particular were perpetuating myths and images that had structured white perceptions of Indian people for centuries. For them, the only good Indians were the dead ones. He challenged anthropologists to "get down from their thrones of authority and pure research and begin helping Indian tribes instead of preying on them."

Deloria was infuriated at the anthropologists' silence during those critical days in nineteen fifty-four, when Congress was terminating federal services to Indians. Why, he asked, should Indians maintain an ethnographic zoo for the professional pleasure of academics that had so miserably failed to support tribal interests? After decades of "pure research" on the reservations, why couldn't the anthros have said something in support of Indian rights?

Deloria clearly expressed his view that the so-called "alliance" between anthropologists and Indians had long been imbalanced and contradictory. He brought up anthropology's long-term colonial associations and scoffed at the anthropologists' claim of scientific objectivity. Deloria branded archaeologists as exploiters of Indian people, accused them of perpetuating long-standing Indian stereotypes, and asked them to stop digging up his ancestors.