God is Red deals with the contemporary issues facing Indigenous populations in North America, situating many of these issues in a broader historical context which can be traced back hundreds of years, beginning with the foundation of British colonies on the continent.

British authority in North America rested on royal charters to trading companies and colonies that assumed a European Doctrine of Discovery, by which European powers could claim to have “discovered” land already occupied by Indigenous peoples and then lay claim to jurisdiction over them. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 drew an “Indian boundary line” along the Appalachians, reserved western lands for “the several Nations or Tribes of Indians,” and forbade private purchases: Only the Crown could acquire Indigenous lands by public treaty. Treaties at Fort Niagara (1764), Fort Stanwix (1768), and others implemented that policy. Legally, the Proclamation acknowledged Indigenous possession and made clear that relations (war, peace, land cession) were a matter of imperial authority, a structure the United States later emulated.

The new republic largely adopted the imperial template. From 1778 to 1871, the United States entered hundreds of treaties with Indigenous nations, sometimes recognizing boundaries, but often extracting cessions that opened vast territories and frequently on terms that heavily favored the white settlers. Despite these formal safeguards, the US government often practiced forcible land seizure and violent dispossession against Indigenous tribes. The Indian Removal Act (1830), for example, created the Trail of Tears, leading to the displacement of Indigenous peoples across the Southeast and Midwest.

By mid-century, a reservation system confined tribes to smaller homelands while the US government asserted “guardianship” over them. Congress ended formal treaty-making with an 1871 appropriations rider, deciding that no tribe would thereafter be recognized as an independent nation for treaty purposes. Relations would proceed by statute or agreement ratified by Congress. The General Allotment (Dawes) Act (1887) broke up reservations into individual parcels, opened “surplus” lands to non-Indigenous settlement and held most allotments in federal trust, diminishing tribal land bases by tens of millions of acres and fracturing community governance. Various measures also institutionalized discrimination against Indigenous customs, languages, and cultures, including the mass removal of Indigenous children into non-Indigenous systems in an attempt at forced assimilation and cultural erasure.

God is Red emerged from a time and culture when activists such as Deloria were trying to educate the broader American (and white) public about the historic mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. In response to centuries of treaty violations and racist discrimination, Deloria and other Indigenous Americans organized to fight back against discriminatory measures and to assert their legal rights, thereby regaining greater control and autonomy over their own communities.