Spirit and Reason Quotes

“Religion, as I have experienced it, is not the recitation of beliefs but a way of helping to understand our lives. It must, I think, have an intimate connection with the world in which we live, and any religion that promotes other places—heaven and so on—in favor of what we have in the physical world is a delusion, a mere control device to allow us to be manipulated.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The first and great difference between primitive religious thought and the world religions, therefore, is that primitive peoples maintain a sense of mystery through their bond with nature; the world religions sever the relationship and attempt to establish a new, more comprehensible one. Foremost”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“One little, two little, three little Indians” is not simply a familiar children’s nursery rhyme, it is also a celebration of North American genocide. This little ditty, many Indian militants argue, captures in lyrical form the belief held during the last century by most in­formed Americans that Indians were vanishing from the face of the earth. This view was popularly symbolized earlier in this century by a small figurine showing an exhausted warrior on horseback, head slumped over and bowed, entitled “End of the Trail,” which adorned the mantlepiece of many white homes. The”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The argument, therefore, that the Europeans brought the great conception of civilization, conceived as a sedentary agricultural enterprise, to the New World is absurd on its face. That”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“discovery and settlement of the New World resulted in: “a dietary revolution unparalleled in history save possibly for the first application of fire to the cooking of edibles.” He continued, “Picture the long centuries when the Old World existed without white and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn and the many varieties of beans, and you have some notion of the extraordinary gastronomic advance. Add, for good measure, such dishes as pumpkins, squashes, turkeys, cranberries, maple syrup,”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“New Swedens, New Frances, and New Englands flourished, and one glance at the map of New England will indicate how thoroughly the new settlers wished to relive their former lives in familiar places. No comprehensive theory of human existence, no profound religious insights, and no universal political ideas came to these shores initially. Rather the ideas that came with the first settlers were the perverted ideas that had failed in Europe; the psychological walking wounded brought with them an irrational fear of the unknown that was slightly less emotional than the fear of extinction that they had known in Europe. All”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Feyerabend’s work is critically important for non-Western and post-Western peoples because he stands within the Western tradition yet has mastered many of its social and political barriers so that he can speak meaningfully and critically to its less intelligent proponents.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Traditional education gives us an orientation to the world around us, particularly the people around us, so that we know who we are and have confidence when we do things. Traditional knowledge enables us to see our place and our responsibility within the movement of history. Formal American education, on the other hand, helps us to understand how things work, and knowing how things work, and being able to make them work, is the mark of a profes­sional person in this society. It is critically important that we do not confuse these two kinds of knowl­edge or exchange the roles they play in our lives.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Indian activists holding religious ceremonies in the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) building concluding their stay by looting the building seems incongruous and ridiculous, unless we probe deeper into the nature of the relationship between Indians and whites. Indian activists accused of fomenting the destruction made a rather weak reply. What about the rape of the North American continent, the destruction of tribal cultures, the wasteful use of human beings, the deprivation of rights to a helpless minority? Do not these crimes make the destruction of a building pale in significance, they asked. Do they?”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Even if there is a general consensus that reduces the figure from one hundred million to fifty million—and some qualified investigators concede that we could hardly settle for less than that number—we must now accept the fact that the dismal story of Indian depopulation after 1492 is a demographic disaster with no known parallel in world history. We must also acknowledge that the catalyst of all this was undoubtedly the European invasion of the New World.1 The estimate of the aboriginal population of the New World not only has important consequences for American history, it may also force us to draw some very unpleasant parallels with contemporary events in Central and South America.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Perhaps the belief that the Indians were destined to vanish originated in early colonial times as a means of justifying the massacres of Indians by the Puritans. If, as the New England colonists believed, Indians were under a cosmic curse and in a state of rapid decline, killing a few was not really a criminal act and in some instances might actually be doing the Lord’s work. It was not all Thanksgiving dinners in those early days. No one questions that the Indian population in the East did decline precipitiously as whites settled the New England area. Many Ind­ians were killed, others hid in obscure places, and still other Indians moved west before the American Revolution. Many eastern Indians were allies of Great Britain in both the Revolution and the War of 1812. Believing they should not stay behind in the United States when their English friends fled to Canada after the Revolution, they left with the departing British troops, vanishing from the United States but remaining very much a part of things north of the border. The virtual disappearance of Indians east of the Mississippi can be traced directly to Andrew Jackson’s policy of removing the tribes of that region to Oklahoma and Kansas, not to some cosmic decree commanding their inevitable extinction. Even then only the largest and most threatening tribes were removed. Smaller tribal groups simply remained in the backwaters of the eastern United States where they had always lived.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Indian country is a means of forecasting where the larger society may be headed. The bicentennial inspired much enthusiasm for recapturing individual ethnic heritage, and the intense desire of non-Indians to have some Indian ancestry or activity may be a part of that movement. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have the patience to find both our own heritage and the place in which heritage can make a positive contribution to the larger society. We are in the process of establishing a new kind of American identity, apart from the Pilgrim tradition, and it is a very painful process of sorting out values. We must not take any easy or superficial answers.”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“When this conglomerate of ideologies hit the American shores and filtered among the criminals, religious fanatics, and indentured servants, it appealed to the worst of their instincts, because it was basically a European doctrinal complex transported to a world in which the physical and political and indeed even the religious boundaries of Europe did not exist. Scattered efforts were made to reincorporate the old baronial holdings of Europe into the new continent. Francis”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“syrup, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, crab apples, chest-nuts and peanuts.”7 Schlesinger concludes, “In the four and a half centuries since Columbus blundered into the Western Hemisphere the American has not developed a single indigenous staple beyond those he derived from the Indians. Today, it is estimated, four-sevenths of the country’s agricultural output consists of plants (including tobacco and a native species of cotton) which were discovered with the New World.”8”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“The intensive cultivation methods of European farming were finally abandoned by the immigrants and they moved swiftly to the other extreme, farming soils to exhaustion and abandoning them to move on to new fields. American genius in agriculture until the dust bowl years has really never been its cleverness but its inexhaustible supply of land that could be carelessly exploited and abandoned. Southern planters controlled thousands of acres and ruthlessly exploited labor and land and then sought more land. By the Revolution “the older tobacco areas along the Chesapeake and the great rivers”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“A significant proportion, then and now, was from the beginning devoted to the violation of laws, the disregard of rights of any kind, and the casual murder or rape of those who resisted them. Something in the neighborhood of fifty thousand convicts were transported to the New World in an effort to provide law and order in the Old.3 Third, a substantial number of immigrants arrived in the New World with their foreseeable future years already mortgaged to pay for their passage over. “Redemptioners” or “free-willers” booked passage for America and on their arrival were auctioned off by the ship captain to the highest bidder. Many English merchants specialized in this trade and fraudulent practices in recruiting were commonplace. The immigrants were packed aboard like sardines, and a mortality of more than 50 percent during a trip to the New World was not unusual. These”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Second, a large portion of the first generations of settlers were the criminal element of England who had a choice between immediate execution or exile in the wilderness of America. Georgia was a penal colony of the British crown and the first families of Georgia for many generations were descendants of whores and footpads of the Old World. There was not, therefore, an inbred respect for the law or human rights that we today attribute to the Founding Fathers. A”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“An old chief of the Crow tribe from Montana was once asked to describe the difference between his tribe and the whites who lived nearby. Pausing slightly and drawing his conclusions, he remarked that the white man has ideas, the Indian has visions. The”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader

“Wilma P. Mankiller No writer has more clearly articulated the unspoken emotions, dreams, and lifeways of contemporary Native people than Vine Deloria. This collection of Deloria’s works takes the reader on a fascinating journey through Indian country as Deloria responds to some of the most important issues of the last three decades. Deloria’s literary gift is amply demonstrated in pieces that are a mix of logic, humor, irreverence, and spirituality. But it is his clarity of thought and stunning ability to express complex concepts in a simple, straightforward manner that captivate the reader. One of the most compelling pieces in the collection, “If You Think About It, You Will See That It Is True,” reminded me of the phrase coined by Alice Walker, “looking backward toward the future.” With flawless logic and adroit use of language, Deloria examines the way many traditional Native people look at the universe, the connectedness of all living things, and our own insignificance in the totality of things compared to the objective, segmented way scientists in the academy view the universe. Deloria points out that “everything that humans experience has value and instructs in some aspect of life. . . . The”
― Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader