LaPointe’s attitude in 2006 could not be more different from that expressed over thirty years earlier by the Lakota intellectual and activist Vine Deloria Jr. in Custer Died for Your Sins. Reflecting the radicalism of the Vietnam War era, Deloria described Custer, the righteous martyr of the first half of the twentieth century, as the quintessential “Ugly American…[who] got what was coming to him.”
