Vine Deloria, Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, was a prime intellectual gadfly to mainstream American culture for five decades, beginning in the 1960s with his publication of Custer Died for Your Sins and We Talk, You Listen. Throughout the course of his career as an Indian activist and public intellectual, he wrote works that challenge undergraduates to rethink many of their key assumptions regarding Western epistemology and scientific practices, questions of identity and definitions of freedom and individualism, traditional accounts of the history of Manifest Destiny, the goals of Western higher education, and Christianity. From his rejection of the theories of evolution and the Bering Strait migration to his explication of a kinship model of a moral universe in which the recognition that “we are all relatives” is experienced as a lived truth, Deloria presents students with values and assertions that frequently run counter to their own, thus opening up for a teacher of his works a number of promising educational possibilities. In this paper I will consider some of the important lessons his works can impart to students as well as the understandable resistance to such profound critiques of their own assumptions that the intellectual encounter with him can produce.
About the presenterRon Denson
Ron Denson is Assistant Professor of Writing at Ithaca College.