God Is Red: A Native View of Religion

“There were token Indians present at Columbus Day and Thanksgiving celebrations and some Indian women sitting at the Santa Fe railroad stations selling pottery, but for most Americans Indians had ceased to exist.”

Deloria begins the book with a comment on the current state of Indigenous American people. For the majority of American people, he suggests, the Indigenous peoples exist only on the periphery of society, so much so that the “token Indians” (1) exist more as decoration at annual events than as people in their own right.

“As the Civil Rights movement began to be eclipsed by antiwar protests, and Martin Luther King Jr. linked Vietnam with American domestic problems, the public began to turn to other minorities for the reassurance that they were, in spite of themselves, good guys.”

Deloria laments that Indigenous identity in 20th-century America has been essentially commodified. With mainstream society in a state of moral distress, he observes the way in which society treats Indigenous Americans as a balm for white guilt. The people who once lived in the United States are almost rediscovered by the peoples who drove the Indigenous to near-extinction.

“Americans simply refuse to give up their longstanding conceptions of what an Indian is.”

Deloria is an observer of contemporary American culture, as well as an advocate for Indigenous rights. Since mainstream America is so comfortable in its deluded interpretation of “what an Indian is” (27), Deloria’s battle is even more difficult. He cannot simply advocate for the rights of his people; he must redefine his people’s identity in the eyes of mainstream white America.