God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

Deloria Jr. traces a shift in how the United States perceives and treats American Indigenous from the late 19th century through the 1970s. Until 1890, he argues, Indians occupied a central place in American domestic imagination as symbols of a frontier to be conquered. From the 1890s to the 1960s, they were treated as “Vanishing Americans” (1), reduced in public life to token appearances and tourist images, while most non-Indigenous persons assume tribes have effectively disappeared.

The protest movements of the 1960s disrupted this illusion, revealing that treaty rights remained legally meaningful. Conflict intensified because many remaining natural resources, including oil, water, minerals, and fish, were located on or connected to Indigenous lands. Deloria describes how officials and local whites pressed to strip Indigenous tribes of these distinct rights under the rhetoric of “equality” (2), while ignoring ongoing inequalities in jobs, housing, justice, and social treatment.

Deloria describes activism through regional histories. In California, treaties made in the 1850s promising reservations were never ratified, while miners committed violence and massacres to seize land during the gold rush expansion. Later, federal programs during the Depression purchased “submarginal” (2) lands largely to aid white landowners, then organized small reservations that were subsequently neglected.