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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER: (SINGING) Hai, he, hai, hai, ha, he, hai.

DICK DALY: John Anderson, chairman of the Indian Studies Department at Duluth's College of St. Scholastica, using a traditional song of welcome taught to him by a Winnebago to open a five-part lecture discussion series on American Indian rights and public policy. The series, co-sponsored by the University of Minnesota Duluth and the Indian Chemical Dependency Program, is supported by a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Commission. The first session dealt with Indian-white conflicts in historical perspectives. And Scholastica Indian Department Chairman John Anderson introduced the main speaker.

SPEAKER: (SINGING) Ay, yah, yah, heyah, hey.

JOHN ANDERSON: Vine Deloria hails from the Standing Rock Reservation. He has written several books, the first of which brought to the attention of all America some of the happenings which have occurred historically which have made the Indian what he is today. And this book, of course, is Custer Died for Your Sins. He followed that up with another book which was published called We Talk, and You Listen. Another book which he wrote was Of Utmost Good Faith and last but not least, a book called God Is Red.

To take you back a few years. I remember the Chicago conference. I remember Clyde Warrior very well. I've been on the Standing Rock Reservation, and I happen to know that therein resides the champion teepee creeper of all time. And his name is Red Gates, and he's from Fort Yates. I don't know if you know Red. Do you? Which way is North?

When we first had our powwow here at St. Scholastica, Clyde Atwood and I were standing there with the peace pipe. And Clyde says, you want me to light it for you? And I says, no, I'll light it for you. So I lit it for him. And he stooped over as I am short. And he says to me, which way is North?

[LAUGHTER]

Black Elk, in his book, points out that it is from the East, where comes the power of wisdom and understanding and the morning star, which helps us greet each new day. We ask from you tonight, Vine Deloria, to help us to find which way is North so that we can grasp the understanding which Black Elk had and which we all seek. My pleasure, my honor to introduce to you tonight, Vine Deloria.

[APPLAUSE]

VINE DELORIA: Thank you, John. Looking at the last 10 years, I think that's about the nicest and most dignified introduction and most traditional thing I've experienced. I'd like to thank you for it.

I was really worried flying up here when I got off the plane. Because last time I was in Duluth, you had a couple of Quonset huts out in the field. That was the airport. And we pulled up to this gigantic building. And I thought, oh my god, I've got to Bemidji instead of Duluth.

[LAUGHTER]

Boy, I have to get Jordan out of bed and get him to drive me over here. But Don explained that you've had urban renewal and everything else. Well, just a year ago, I was up here. And only one airline, I guess. But you've got new airport, so I'm not quite as worried.

This is really difficult starting off a-- starting off with the first lecture of what's going to be a series of lectures. Because you have to develop, I think, a total context so that any of you who do come to the completely forced series will see that I think all of the speakers who will be in this series are really dealing with the same thing, only maybe a different points of view.

So I can introduce my topic in the part of the series that I'll be dealing with by telling you an experience I had in August, which illustrates, I think, the conflict that has really gone on in 400 years of relationships between Indians and non-Indians. And I'll try and approach it with kind of a dignified air. I understand this is going out over the radio. I'm used to have an FBI tape on me, but I've never tried it with a live audience. In fact, I have a great following in South Dakota, the FBI and CIA.

[LAUGHTER]

And just there last week and made some remarks about Senator Abourezk. And they called a friend in Washington. And I said, I can tell you when the South Dakota papers for Wednesday are going to hit DC. And I said, it's probably going to be about 10 o'clock tomorrow morning. So call me at 11:00, and I'll tell you who's called from Washington, who's mad.

Well, she couldn't get through till 1:30 because there were all these senatorial assistants that were calling in saying, why are you attacking Abourezk and McGovern? And I said, I'm not attacking them personally. But for people to sit by and let 200 people die of violence on the Pine Ridge Reservation, say, well, we really can't do anything about this, I said, it's not even a human thing to do.

And I think somebody should start talking up and saying that there's got to be solutions in the Pine Ridge situation. That's all I did in South Dakota. And if they want to take offense at that, to me, it's a measure of those people.

So just as a prelude to anything else I might say today, the situation at Pine Ridge is extremely serious. And I wish that we could bring more attention to this situation. And I hope each and every one of you would get a hold of your senators and get them to start putting some pressure on the South Dakota senators.

We could put a bill through Congress in two or three days. It would set up a neutral trusteeship and take over all the functions of that reservation, both government and tribal functions, and put it in a receivership that would straighten it out and allow people there to stop the brutality and violence on both sides and straighten out who the people are on that reservation, what their tribal enrollment is, who owns the land, all of the problems that are causing controversy in Pine Ridge.

I think it's absolutely ridiculous for South Dakota senators to say they will replace FBI with federal marshals or that instead of providing jobs or providing any investigation of what's going on there, they will build another, bigger, better jailhouse and will provide more people to go around and find out who's committing crimes. It seems to me that the majority of the crimes committed on that reservation are crimes by federal officials who are violating the federal law.

And so it's extremely serious situation. I really don't know what to do other than to ask every place I go, if you just spend a dime and take an envelope and a piece of paper, write your senators and say you understand the situation is extremely serious, and you want them to get over to the South Dakota senators and really put some pressure on to stop that situation. But the situation is at the point of absurdity now, and I hope all of you will do that.

Now in talking about conflict between Indians and non-Indians in history, I was on all-night talk show in Denver in August. And I had one of the most amazing calls that I think I've ever tried to field. And a lady called in. She wanted to know how the Indians celebrated Christmas before the coming of the white man.

[LAUGHTER]

Now you've got to think about what that means.

[LAUGHTER]

And I told her we used to hang the stockings out in the teepees and--

[LAUGHTER]

Yeah, so we'd sit there in this sleigh, and the reindeer would come over. And this voice would say, you're not Christians.

[LAUGHTER]

And for 20,000 years, this guy in the red suit just kept going by.

[LAUGHTER]

But what does a question like that say, really? And it says that the culture and history and religious viewpoint of a tiny portion of human beings is considered to be the normal, universal, average, and real condition of all other human beings. And so when you approach from inside that group, any other group that you deal with, then you interpret all those outgroups is really below average, semi-human, incapable of doing the things that you're doing. And you blow up to an incredible point your own accomplishments.

Now, Monday, we had a holiday. And what do we celebrate? We celebrated the fact that 500 years ago an Italian got lost.

[LAUGHTER]

When you put on a planetary basis, you say, what is this? I'm going to call a bicentennial in that Chicanos came and wanted money for the Dominguez-Escalante trail. Now Dominguez and Escalante, at first I thought was one guy. And I thought he was probably a Spanish bronc rider or something.

But it turned out it was two Catholic priests who left Santa Fe and tried to get over to California, but they got lost. And they wandered around in a Four Corners area for seven months and finally ended up in Santa Fe. And this is the 200th-- next year will be the 200th year to commemorate that.

And so there's tremendous pressure in Colorado-- not pressure, but I'd say support to make this a big thing to celebrate the Spanish heritage. And I said, I'll vote for it, but I want you to understand a planetary viewpoint, an Indian viewpoint, that, first, in our culture, a trail leads someplace. I said, if you get a trail, it goes from one point to another. It doesn't just wander around.

Second, if you people consider the fact that two Chicanos got lost for six months in the Four Corners area 200 years ago is a historic event, I think Indians would be the first ones to pat you on the head and send you down the road and say, OK, celebrate it. But I said the real thing that you should celebrate is if you could ever find a time when an Indian was lost in North America, and that would be a historic event.

And so you've got to put the thing not simply in traditions coming out of Western Europe, but what I would call a more or less planetary situation, where you begin to recognize that in order to make statements of meaning and universal application, that you really have to consider other people's viewpoint and other people's history. And you have to take it as seriously as you take your own.

And the last two years, I've worked off and on with the people in the Wounded Knee defense, particularly on the treaty issue in trying to, first, present the Indian side of the treaty issue and, second, to anticipate what the government might ask us that we didn't know. We had to go into almost every area, every subject field that might possibly relate to the major idea, what was the status of the Sioux Indians when they signed the '68 treaty?

And so the government was making the contention in some of their briefs that they had jurisdiction over Indians because of the doctrine of discovery. In other words, that a civilized nation can go floating by the planet. And wherever they happen to light, if they regard the inhabitants thereof as really not citizens-- or not civilized and particularly not Christian, then they have exclusive right to take the lands away from those people.

And so we prepared testimony. And it was given down at Lincoln, first, that Indians discovered America and, second, that there was a sufficiently sophisticated civilization among American Indians so that you couldn't say they weren't civilized. Getting into that, then we had to show not only that the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho might have been among those people crossing the Bering straits, but be prepared in case the government would ask any of our witnesses, be prepared to show that they had come over prior to the tribes around the Pacific Coast.

So in doing that, I read quite a few of what in the white man's academic setting they call Indian myths. And these are traditions passed down by different tribes in Pacific Northwest. And finally, in the 1850s to about 1910, they're occasionally put down on paper. So you actually have fairly early versions of some of the tribal traditions.

And I noticed an amazing correlation between some of the stories of the Klamath warm springs, Wasco, Yakima, Puyallup, and geologic events that had occurred in the Pacific Northwest within a time period in which you can be fairly certain of dating something geologically, for example, the explosion in lava flow at Crater Lake, Oregon; the destruction of the gigantic prehistoric volcano that today forms the Three Sisters' area; the volcanic explosion in creation of the volcano that forms Mount Saint Helens; and the collapse of the natural bridge over the Columbia, which resulted maybe 200 years later in the formation that they know that they called the Dalles; and in the creation of Mount Rainier and some of the other volcanoes going toward the Canadian border.

And if you took all of those Indian traditions and took a blackboard and drew out the sequence of what they said happened, then you get a sequence of events. Take the case of Crater Lake. It starts out with rumblings of the two gods that are in Crater Lake and Shasta, and they get mad at each other, and they start throwing thunderbolts back and forth.

And pretty soon, they're starting to blow their top. Lava is coming. The people are frightened and have to take refuge in the rushes in the waters in Crater Lake, which is, I think, 30, 40 miles-- or in Klamath Lake, which is 30, 40 miles to the southeast of Crater Lake. A gigantic duel ensues with thunder and lightning.

And finally, Crater Lake blows its top. And there's tremendous rain and fog and precipitation and a whole series of atmospheric catastrophes. When the whole thing clears, the Crater Lake is being filled by absolutely incredible rain. And the people go up, and they see that the god who lived in the Crater Lake, his doorway to the underworld is collapsed and blocked now.

If you take the sequence in each step of what they're saying happen, you can do this with Crater Lake or some of the others I mentioned, and then you take geological reports on how geologists today say that those things are probably formed, you see that what the mechanics of the situation, what the geologists say happened and what the Indian tradition says happened is almost one-to-one correspondence.

And from that, an examination of several of the myths, we were able to at least be prepared to argue that you could date the Northwest tribes anywhere from 30,000 to 7,500 BC in that particular area. And if the explosion of Crater Lake is figured at 7,500 BC, then we would argue that the Klamath tradition and the continuous occupancy of the Klamath lands stems from 7,500 straight forward, which gives one particular group of people with one culture and one language a continuous occupation in an area of something like 9,500 years.

Now the problem that we have in thinking out what is the relationship of Indians to non-Indians, it seems to me, is the unexamined assumption that the non-Indian coming over from Europe has this great cultural tradition behind him, centuries and centuries and centuries of making pottery and building cathedrals. And this is simply not true.

If you can pinpoint the Klamath at Klamath Lake at 9,500 as an established settlement with culture, language, art, and everything else, then go around the rest of the planet and say, what other people can you pinpoint at a particular area at 7,500 BC? And it's damn hard for any of the European peoples to come up with anything better than 700 BC.

And when you start taking the Indian tradition and laying it out on a universal basis, I think that the most profound statements about what the origin, perhaps even of the human species is, really have to be made with reference to the Indian traditions in North America, that you have a very extensive and well-developed view of the world and culture very early over here, where people in Europe are still running back and forth, trying to figure out how to put Stonehenge up without getting blisters.

[LAUGHTER]

But unless you have in your own mind and emotionally come across that realization, then you still have what I call an extremely narrow viewpoint, which most whites, I think, really have of that relationship between Indians and whites. And you get the really absurd statements that the federal government uses to support its policy and that a great many people look at as real definitions of the truth.

And then Friday morning, we're arguing the Circuit Court of Appeals. And the government makes this statement in its brief that it had jurisdiction over all Indians because the United States always owned the land. Well, that's totally absurd. In our response to it is a sentence that reads, Custer's grave stands as testimony that you did not have complete jurisdiction.

But you see what happens in the minds of the people who we're trying to relate to in solving Indian problems is the idea that because the United States made a claim with respect to Great Britain, France, Spain, and Holland, that everyone on the rest of the planet understood the claim the United States was making with respect to those nations. And it was automatically assumed by an Indian tribe signing a treaty that the United States had the right to do this and that, in fact, that was what was happening.

When you get into the actual documentation, not only is that claim false. But in many instances, things that have been accepted right up until the present time simply are not true. The traditional explanation of why the '68 treaty is signed is that Red Cloud really bluffed the peace commissioners out and refused to leave the Poudre River area before the government pulled the forts out. And even people like Ralph Anderson, Dee Brown, and Josephy give that as a traditional explanation of how that war got resolved.

But if you get into additional documents, I think, very few people have looked at, one of which is Father De Smet's diary, and he's a Catholic priest that got along fairly well with the Northern Sioux, Red Cloud was able to make demands because about 40 miles north of him was a camp of about 7,000 Ames, who wanted to sweep everything from the Rocky Mountains clear into the Mississippi. And they were so militant that the only person that the peace commission could send up was Father De Smet.

And you read in his diary-- and he and his party are riding along the prairie. And he says, all of a sudden, the whole horizon started to move. And they couldn't figure out what it was. And it was the Northern Sioux warriors as far as the eye could see in any direction that way.

The whole horizon was a gigantic line of Sioux warriors riding as fast as they could to find out who these people were that were in Sioux country. And they come screaming down the hill and stop about a half a spear point away from Father De Smet. And they said, you seem to be in somebody else's country and we'd like to know what you're doing here.

And they have a parley. He explains to them what the government wants, and then they agree to send people down to Fort Rice later to sign the treaty. And they tell Father De Smet, we're not talking about simply the Bozeman Trail. We don't want steamboats on the Missouri River. We don't want any forts. We don't want any relationship whatsoever to your people. You get back across the Missouri, and you stay out of here. And if you don't, we'll kill you. And it becomes a very simple point blank situation like that.

That type of document and that understanding of history, it seems to me, first, you have to find the documents that tell about those types of incidents. But second, you have to work with the non-Indian mind and the non-Indian conception of history so that what have become abstract explanations of what the relationship between Indians and non-Indians is is not allowed to cloud what are the actual historical facts of the situation.

And the government today is arguing in these Wounded Knee trials that the Indians understood the United States had jurisdiction over them. And what they're doing is taking modern legal theories, modern abstractions of who Indians were and what Western history was and the inevitable march of progress, all the ideas you run into, if you go to historical conventions or if you talk with people working in interpretation of history.

And they're taking these doctrines. And they're projecting them back 100 years, sometimes 50, sometimes as few as 30 years. And they're saying, because we in '75 believe these doctrines to be an interpretation of history, therefore, we maintain that Indians at the time things happened looked at history the same way we look at history. And therefore, this is why we interpret all the things that have happened in this way.

I think if you look at 400 years of sometimes good, mostly bad relationships between American Indians and whites, that you find that the white person very rarely understands who he is or what his situation is because he's looking at things through-- he's looking at his own experiences and previous experiences through all these doctrines, as if his understanding of the world is the only understanding that a normal human being can have.

And what does that result in when you go back into American history? It results in the fact that the Swedish colony on the Delaware imported food for 30 years because they didn't know how to grow anything in the United States.

Now that's absolutely astounding. It's not simply a desire to have religious freedom. It is a total inability to cope with the new situation. Because the minds of those people were that the old situation is the way normal people look at the world. And consequently, how do you get food when you come over to this new land? You have to import it from Europe.

Now that's the most absurd thing in the world-- importing food from Sweden over the United States. And what happens? The first 300 years that the white man had the tomato, he thought it was poisonous. And it was a garden plant. It was not something that came out of his cultural or agricultural tradition in Europe. He thought it was poisonous for 300 years. And then somebody said, no, it actually increases sexual prowess.

[LAUGHTER]

And it's been a national vegetable of Italy ever since.

[LAUGHTER]

And can you imagine a pizza without tomatoes? And I think you can go into any number of areas. And when you get down into this situation and not only start looking at firsthand data, but ponder what you've learned and begin to ask a question that I think a lot of historians overlook or short circuit, and that is not simply what happened, but why do people do the things they do in the present time and what were the motivations for people doing things in past time. And I realize Erik Erikson and some people are going quite a ways into this, but I think that it's a very valid question to be asked when interpreting the history of conflict between Indians and non-Indians.

Now, since Bob Burnett will be here in about another month and he's talking on religion-- I know he'll do a good job. But there are a number of things that I'm working on in the field of religion that I would like to mention, because it's part of the misunderstanding of the worldview.

And that is, I think that in the next 10 years, it will come to be recognized that the religious worldview of American Indians is probably the most sophisticated, the worldview, that peoples of any continent have produced, that it has dominated the way the Indians have dealt with non-Indians.

And as non-Indians approach Indians in a treaty signing situation, when they set up trade relationships, even today, when you're dealing with people in the BIA or the poverty program or other areas, that the Indian religious worldview, even if you're dealing with the tribe of Indians that is predominantly not churchgoing or predominantly Christian, there is always this Indian worldview in the background where you never really anticipate that the other people are going to do something crooked to you.

Because your people are all together. And you figure, well, we've got to take these people on face value. And they say they're going to do something for us. And we've got to trust them. And it's this worldview of continuous, credible, innocent trust that prepares the way for an awful lot of conflict and crookedness in American history.

I can speak to that out of my own experience 10 years ago when the Arizona tribes were lined up to fight the Bridge Canyon Dam. And then somebody from the interior department went over and told the Hualapai that they were going to name the dam Hualapai Dam. And Hualapai switched sides. And they said, yeah, we want to have that dam, because how many Indian tribes have a dam named after them?

And if you put that in simply political theory, it's the most god-awful reason to change your mind about building a dam anyone's ever seen. But if you understand it in the Indian religious worldview, that there can be no higher, better relationship than to honor each other, and that that thing came crashing through 400 years of mistrust between Indians and whites and became the prime consideration that those people made.

And you say, well, this is a unified worldview that hangs on in spite of the fact that many times, when Indians spontaneously come out of their world to deal with people not of that world, that it proves the most destructive thing anybody can ever imagine. And yet, the thing persists.

And working on a book now where I'm trying to take some of the Indian experiences in the concrete situation and compare them to key points in Western history to see what we're really talking about when we talk about how people form their view of the world. And there's a famous line by Pope, I believe. It is, lo, the poor Indian whose mind sees God in the stars and hears his voice on the wind.

Well, if you dig back into various parts of Western European history, you find that Martin Luther was coming home from market one day. And lightning hit a tree next to him, stunned the hell out of him. And when he got home, he decided to become a priest instead of a politician or merchant. And for the rest of his life, he's traumatized because he thought, by god, striking this oak 10 feet away from him, that was an indication that God wanted him to be a religious person.

And I can only note that if you put that in the Indian tradition, Black Elk and a great many other Indian religious leaders are very friendly with the lightning. They don't get freaked out when a lightning hits. They talk to the lightnings. They have a relationship in nature, more sophisticated and on a deeper level than the Western European.

You go into the major formation of some of the creeds of the Christian tradition. In the Trinitarian creed, the emperor, after 80 years of listening to the bishops argue, he calls them all together. And he said, this is the way it's going to be. you people are too disruptive of the empire. And therefore, the creed of the Trinity will be Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. And we're not going to have any more discussion of formulas. And that becomes the definition of the Trinity in the Christian tradition.

Now, when that tradition then is filtered through 1,500 additional years of Western culture, people come out here. And they see the Indian religious tradition. They see medicine men doing all kinds of things. They said, these are works of the devil, because we had this revelation that God is three persons, and you can't really jump out of the Trinity. Or you can't say anything other than what our traditions have told us. We have a special revelation that is not given to anyone on the planet. And therefore, what we define as reality becomes reality.

You can see this in the lawsuits where they are trying to put through railroads over Indian land in the 1880s, '90s, and 1900s. And one very famous case involving the Northern Pacific where the judge simply says, Christian peoples are not bound to keep their word to non-Christian people. And so if that is a statement of a federal court, a Supreme Court set up under the United States constitution, guaranteeing separation of church and state, what does that say about how the main portion of non-Indians have understood the world they're living in? Again, you have an unexamined premise that our group is right and that any deviation from that is abnormal, subhuman, or whatever.

And so I think that is where the major area of conflict has been and continues to be. And I see today a great movement of non-Indians over to try and understand various aspects of Indian life. But I think that because non-Indians and people of the Western tradition have not looked at things on a planetary basis, they get to a certain point of understanding what Indians are talking about, and they never really get beyond that point.

If you look at conservation and environmental theories today, you preserve the Grand Canyon because your grandparents, your grandchildren, and great grandchildren might want to drive down there and take a picture of it. Now that's a deep appreciation of a landscape. But that isn't still in the Indian ballpark.

Because what you're talking about in the Indian context is that through our experience and through revelations, this area we know is sacred because we've been there and it has said something to us. And therefore, we don't touch that part of it. And we come and go as we're allowed to come and go with respect to that particular place.

And I think until you see the real distinction between those two areas, we're not simply talking about appreciation of land. And we're talking about going on over and breaking out of that ethnic and cultural tradition to see the other tradition and understand what they're talking about.

It's been very pleasing to me in Colorado this year that after hearing all the specialists in land management and timber management for years, Russia fire squad to every place somebody drops a match, now, they say, the Indian method of keeping the forest under control by selective burning off of underbrush is really the way to do it and we're going to let some of these fires burn. After 80 years of managing forest the other way and getting less of a yield, finally, they've revolved 180 degrees. And we're going to look at the Indian way of doing things.

And it's when the major things that I've mentioned to people in relation to the fight we've got going over in Nevada with Battle Mountain. And maybe those Shoshones can't tell you exactly what's going to happen if you destroy all those pinyon trees. But those people have been there thousands of years. And they know what they're talking about, about what that land is.

It may be a great theory to tear all the trees out so cattlemen can have more grass. But you're talking about one tradition that I think is very narrowly restricted as to what land and animals and people are and another tradition where you can very easily show continuous occupation for thousands and thousands of years. And consequently, it seems to me that you got to come out of Western European rigidness and go talk to those people.

There is an old Shoshone tradition, and I think Indian members of the audience will really dig it. Of the day, they went up to the Snake River to look at the iceberg. And it's a very simple story that says, a guy came from the North and told us there was a lot of ice up at the Snake River.

So we packed everything up and went up the Snake River and looked at it. And sure enough, there was ice there, a great big glacier. And we stayed there a couple of days and looked at it. And then we went back down home.

Now you Indians know, that's the most authentic thing that is going to come out of an Indian tradition, that this thing isn't supernatural or anything else. It's a nice way to spend a week before we have to go out hunting again. And when you read that tradition, you know damn well those people went up there and took a look at that iceberg and maybe chipped off a little ice and had a nice feast and then went home again.

I mean, there was no something new coming into their experience. It's not going to shake these people at all. And it certainly didn't give rise to tremendous stories about the end of the world and all kinds of things that it might have in other traditions.

And so I think it's extremely hard to define where conflict originates. And in the last five or six years, there have been very popular to place all the discussion on the area of racism. Different races hate different races for different reasons.

And I think you can document that and make cross accusations and carry on your discussion in a very satisfactory level. The problem is I think that then you don't introduce new ideas back and forth between peoples so that you can work on the basic causes of racism and economic deprivation and discrimination. And it seems to me to really solve some of this conflict, it's going to require a very aggressive, low-key, responsible, continuous effort by Indians to call into question the worldview and values and manners in which the non-Indian looks at the world.

And we can't sit by any longer and listen to any type of non-Indian thinking, which assumes that because they have constructed these doctrines, that they're always right. But I think it's past the time when we just stand up and scream at them and say, you're wrong because you're whites and because you did stuff to us in the past.

And I think if you look into your own traditions, that you can get up and deal with any group of people that you're going to meet in white society. And if you know your own tradition, I think, fairly responsibly, that you can introduce some really hard-nosed, sensational changes of attitude.

And one of the things that impressed me in the last two years, John mentions that Black Elk talks about any number of things, including the wind. But he's talking to horses and animals in not only some of his visions, but in-- well, when they're hunting and other times. And I always looked at that as, well, this is probably a really poetic Indian way of saying that he had a hunch.

But then having a chance to talk to John Lilly, who does dolphin research and can talk fairly well in the dolphin language and points out dolphins are probably four and a half times smarter than human beings, it came to me that what happens if you take those Indian traditions seriously? What If those animals really did come over and talk to those people? And what if they did tell them the only way to grow certain plants is to grow them together because those plants have a spiritual relationship and they supplement each other and you'll make out all right?

You see, that's what the Senecas did in corn and beans, and they never wore their land down. And you have a real question of where that knowledge came from, if it didn't come from the plants and animals in their relationship with humans themselves. And I think that's the type of questions that we should have as Indian people. And we should start a very close dialogue with the people who want to discuss things with us in a non-Indian society.

We have devoted reams of paper to this damn Wounded Knee thing, simply educating the people on the other side as to what the sequence of history was, just to get them to realize 1851 comes before 1868. Therefore, if you're going to talk treaties, you talk about the first treaty first and the second treaty second.

And so I think when we're talking about conflict, we're talking about the fact that there is really not intellectual and emotional understanding, and there has not been. And out of that misunderstanding then has come all of the physical conflicts and other violence that marks American history. But I can't think of very many instances, if you go back in the history of any Indian tribe, where there was not tremendous misunderstanding simply because the non-Indian couldn't conceive that his values and his understanding of the world was not the norm of what all human beings should measure up to.

And to put it in absolutely clear perspective, a year ago, one of the assistants to the commissioner of Education called me up. And he said, I've just been at a bilingual conference in Florida, and we made a really great breakthrough. And I said, well, what was it, Larry? And he said, there are damn few Indian languages that have Latin as a root.

[LAUGHTER]

I said, Larry, there are none if you want to really-- he said, no, you don't understand. He said, we've had this problem in bilingual education all along is how to translate this stuff to these kids. And he said, I can't think of a single Indian language offhand. He said, maybe you know. But he said, they're not even any that are related to Romanian or Lithuanian or any of them. And I said, Larry, I think next, you'll be telling me that people are moving West. And it was over his head.

But if you're dealing with that at the level of the commissioner of Education in the United States, I mean, that that's a real problem that they can't out bilingual education for Indians because they have a hard time figuring out which Latin language they're related to, then the conflict has got to come from the fact that non-Indians really look at their values and understand the world as normative. It never occurs to them until they ask silly questions just how narrow their viewpoint and understanding is.

And so I think I'll turn this over to the panel at this point and simply say, until we make breakthroughs in the area of how we make statements and how we evaluate our own tradition in the data that comes to us as we move forward in life, it's going to be damn hard to avoid conflicts in the future. And we have not avoided them in the past.

And I think that the solution to that thing is for Indians to get a very sharp, pointed, and responsible critiques of how non-Indians see the world. He just pointed out the stupidity in some of the situations. If you can think up a better explanation of what we did for Christmas before the white man came, boy, I would appreciate that, too.

So I'll turn this back over to the panel. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

DICK DALY: Indian author Vine Deloria, speaking at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth. In the question-and-answer period that followed, Deloria was asked to expand on his statement that Indians saw things in a cyclical way while the Western culture was dominated by a linear concept.

VINE DELORIA: I think what you're really talking about is what happens to relatively small, precise groups when they meet totally different situation. And what I would see is the difference in technology is so incredible. And the world becomes so different that if you alter all those factors at once, there's no small group that can really deal with it in the same way that Western society today cannot deal with all the factors that are hitting it.

In other words, America losing the Vietnam War is the end of Western history, in all practical sense. It stops. I mean, there's no-- all they can do is recycle people and ideas. The energy crisis, all those things hitting at once can destroy linear civilizations just as easy as anything else.

And in the height, the flowering of the linear type civilization is not very long. In Greece, it's what? 150-some years. Rome, it's a couple hundred years. The United States made it 200 years, but it didn't go make it 300 years.

And what I'm trying to say is the Klamaths are out there for 9,500 years. Sure, they got run over. But what are we talking about on a universal scale? We're talking about people that make it damn near 10,000 years as opposed to a people of unlimited growth that burn everything out in 200 years. The medical term for Western civilization, which is uncontrolled growth, is called cancer. And it's simple as that.

I'd like to just respond to one other thing. I didn't say that thing about Martin Luther and the Trinity in as flippant a way as you would think. I think there's a real question about the base of the fundamental basis of where all religions come from. And I think it's not satisfactory for people in the Christian tradition to assume that their religion is universally valid.

They've written an awful lot about it. And they've talked an awful lot about it. But the present state of the planet is largely responsible-- the responsibility largely rests with the Christian religion about why it is the way it is.

And president of the United States, who is a good Episcopalian, has just announced he's going to cut off food stamps in order to save money. And you look around at the United States and the people who need psychoanalysis. Every indices of social disorder, it seems to me, comes out of that Christian worldview. And what has been done to non-Christian peoples comes out of that Christian worldview. When an individual person has it, it's called a psychosis. But when everybody has it, it's called a religion.

[LAUGHTER]

And--

[APPLAUSE]

--so I really think-- I really think you got to be honest about it. The emperor said there would be no more bickering. That was the revelation, that if you opened your mouth again, the army was going to haul you off. Not that God opened up the heavens and said, this is who I am.

And what I was trying to contrast with Martin Luther and Black Elk is when the lightning hits a tree with Luther, he freaks out and goes through all of the things that are expected of him in that culture. And it stilled throughout his life, there's this incredible dread of this guy, the divine accountant, upstairs.

Whereas you go through Black Elk, and there's this tremendous familiarity with what the world really is. And it was flippant in the sense only that I wanted to probe and say, do you guys really understand what you come out and tell us out of another cultural background? And do you really know the parallels we could draw across to force you to face the issue of what are you talking about? So it was quasi-flippant.

DICK DALY: Vine Deloria was asked what he thought the single most important solution might be to improving Indian-white relations.

VINE DELORIA: I don't know. That's the trouble that the federal government always makes. And if you give us the single answer, we'll do it. And there's no single answer. Because then, I don't think the-- I think the problem is the Indians have lost confidence in their own tradition. And as Bob said, we're very apologetic, and we're not sure how to take our own tradition or how far to come out of the tribal background with it.

But the main problem is not really our problem. Just take the recession. The only solution any politician has is to create jobs and get more money into the economy. Well, there's a more fundamental question-- what's the meaning of human existence? Why does everybody necessarily have to work to produce cars and other things that nobody wants?

You see, the prior human questions, they have to be asked before you can solve any of the others. And I'm absolutely baffled when you ask that question, because there is no single thing I could ever say that would even approach the question. And the tragedy is now we get the Abourezk commission set up for two years. And they're going to try and find a single answer.

But if you force me on a single answer, I would say a good deportation program would.

[LAUGHTER]

[APPLAUSE]

DICK DALY: Deloria was asked to expand further on why he thinks the dominant culture thinks it's always right.

VINE DELORIA: Yeah, I think it is because of what I would call the mechanical nature of technology. In other words, if you're capable of producing jet planes and doing strip mining and all that, I think it gives you an overwhelming confidence about things in a faith in your technology that's really not warranted.

If you go into early development of early oil fields, the first field in East Oklahoma, they only recovered 13% of the available oil. And if you go into the history of the Comstock Lode, they only recovered 25% of the minerals that were there. And those things are overlooked in favor of the products of that.

So I think Western culture is really notorious in thinking, because we've accomplished a lot of these things, therefore, we must be right. But if you put it on a-- if you really get back to it and put it on a technical basis, any bunch of damn fools could recover 13% of an oil field if they put their mind to it. I mean, it's no great accomplishment.

I don't want to put white society down. What I'm trying to do is kindly, as possible, say, a lot of your presuppositions are really not based on facts, that you get to really look at what you believe and pull back from it and say, well, now, on what basis do we make these statements? And I think you're going to find that the world's really much different than you thought it was.

And I see an unwillingness to do that when you see American political and religious leaders making absolute statements all the time. Nixon didn't want to be the first president to lose a war. So he kills people for four more years, and because it would be a bad precedent.

And a big concern I have in all this Wounded Knee stuff is nobody's looking for what's the justice of the situation. We're all trying to determine what the law is so we can apply it. And I think that's an intellectual arrogance that I'm unhappy with, even as I'm working on one side of the question. The question will be what's just in this situation, not who's the best guy with the footnotes. And it's just a way of life that I don't like.

DICK DALY: Deloria related his training as an attorney to his involvement in the Wounded Knee situation.

VINE DELORIA: Well, when I got out of law school, I was still very naive about what law was. And Watergate kind of cured me of a mystical belief in the legal profession.

[LAUGHTER]

And getting into the treaty issue on Wounded Knee, it raised real questions in my own mind about how the other side, how the government attorneys can look at the documentation that is available on what that treaty means and continue to maintain the position they maintain.

So the whole question of law, I've left that behind to go to the different, I think, moral question of what is justice. Because it really repels me that people do bad things to other human beings and say, well, I can't help it, it's my job. That's a hell of an ethic. And that's what I run into with these US attorneys, that someone will say, well, we know you guys are right, but it's our job to say that you're wrong. Well, how can you live like that? I can't live that way.

And so I work on different treaty things to help groups outline as completely as possible what the history of their group was and what those relationships with the government were. But I really have very little faith that the present way we do-- the way we handle legal problems in law is going to really solve anybody's problems.

I think it's just a terribly symbolic way of a whole bunch of egos getting together and pretending they know something. But I also think the only thing that holds this country together right now is that there are a lot of decent men in the federal courts as judges who look beyond all that ego manipulation and try and come down with some kind of reasonable solution.

And I don't see any sense of integrity in Congress or the executive. And my big faith right now is that there are decent guys like Nichols and Sirica and other people who aren't afraid to stand up for what's right and say, well, I've looked at it and this seems to me to be a reasonable conclusion.

But we're getting 300, 400 Indian lawyers now. And I'm really worried that when we get technical skills, we'll lose the whole sensitivity that we had as Indians will become technicians. And what the hell is the sense of winning an abstract case if your own people don't know what you've won and the other side is going out to kill you because you did won-- you did win, which are going on fishing rights in Washington.

Sure, we proved a legal principle in the white man's terms. What happens? Every redneck in the state of Washington is carrying a gun to shoot any Indian that's fishing. It's not a solution. And what I'd like to see is a lot of people in the legal profession start doing interdisciplinary stuff and say, what's the whole point of all this? And the whole point is to bring some kind of just society about-- the prior question to any litigation is, what is the justice of this situation?

So I'm really terribly distressed right now that the field of law is as sterile as it is.

AUDIENCE: Sir, are you a member of the American Indian Movement?

VINE DELORIA: No, I belong to Amnesty International, just in case.

[LAUGHTER]

DICK DALY: Indian author Vine Deloria speaking at Duluth's College of St. Scholastica in the first of what's to be a five-part series on American Indian rights and public policy. This is Dick Daley.