RED PROPHET: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr., flawed man with interesting ideas

RED PROPHET: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr.
DAVID E. WILKINS
Fulcrum Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$25.95 trade paper,, $20.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: In the face of looming, tumultuous global change, this examination provides answers for those venturing into Vine’s work in Indigenous and non-Indigenous politics, ecology, and organization. David E. Wilkins’s insights, based on his personal relationship with Deloria, document the sacred life and legacy of “one of the most important religious thinkers of the 20th century, according to TIME.

A must-read for any deep examination of Indigenous legal, religious, social, and philosophical tactics.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If we are, as a civilization, going to survive this existential inflection point we find ourselves at in 2025, we need fresh, better ideas.

Vine Deloria, Jr., presents some of the most underdiscussed, freshest contributions to the worldwide discussion of what we as a culture need to do to keep on living. The culture of the West, its capitalism and its greed and its solipsism, have landed us in a rotten mess. The same thinking that got us here will not get us out of here. Maps are handy, but they're limited by the mapmakers' ideas of what needs to be, what should be, included on them. It's time to look beyond the edge of the map.

Vine Deloria, Jr., is called "the Red Prophet"...an yclepture that makes my 1960s-trained self wince a bit...but justified by a family and personal background of Episcopal religious study. The man was son of an Episcopal missionary, and studied to be a missionary in his turn. Like all prophets, he spoke against orthodox thinking. The issue for me as I learned more about him is that he rejected consensus reality as much as any religious nut, eg Ken Ham, does, even claiming Native Americans coexisted with dinosaurs, that white peoples' science is a religion with unquestionable orthodoxies (there is truth in that analysis), and that the conclusions of geologists about the age of the Earth were lies to exploit Native Americans.

There are no full-throated convert's proselytic shouts forthcoming. I'm not going to defend the less acceptable to me parts of the man's thought. I am going to encourage you to do what I did, look into the overall analysis of the systems we in the West have imposed on the planet. Deloria was opposed to extractive industry's utter dominance of the means we all need to live. There are no reward systems for sustainability. It is the way we got into this mess. Equally, Marxism's orthodoxies came in for Deloria's disapproval for its hegemonic tendencies that exclude other ways of understanding the world.

So while this hagiography of a passionate, persuasive person is not The Way, the way leads past, eve through, his head. Many, many are the Native American ideas and reasons and methods that we ignore at our substantial, near-term peril. Don't dismiss them because the messenger was messy. You aren't perfect, I'm not perfect, why should we expect Vine Deloria, Jr., to be perfect? Read, think, take what you can from a thinking person's thoughts.

We're in trouble we haven't seen before. Dare to think thoughts you haven't before, maybe there are solutions not part of your usual thinking in them.