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.

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature offers a bracing dose of Reality to "gender essentialists"

FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature
PATRICIA ONONIWU KAISHIAN
Spiegel & Grau (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Non-Fiction For the week ending November 3, 2026

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.

Growing up, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.

In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness of all the life around us. Fungal species, we learn, commonly encompass more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, a mystery that scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.

Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprises, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Honestly, our very much elder siblings the fungi, part of a family we do not share but the most distant connection with, have more to teach us about Life than I expected. Author Kaishian is a very well qualified guide into their world, having several degrees in mycological subjects and being the New York State museum's curator of mycology. An unimpeachable fount of expert knowledge, then.

I've never really thought about the gender realities of fungi before now. I knew they were ubiquitous...the wood-wide web...and enormous (that several-square-mile honey fungus in Oregon), for two memorable examples...but how they got it on was hazy, limited to fruiting bodies producing spores in my infobase. I am of greatly expanded consciousness now.

Fungus is just the beginning of queerness, of "gender non-conformity" that culture-specific ungeneralizable concept, in Nature. The examples are weird...eels? what the hell my dudes?...slugs *shudder* doing unspeakable things to each other after sex...and the list isn't even fairly begun. Vertebrates, our fellow spine-havers, get themselves up to some wild shenanigans, like the fish harems where the physically largest female becomes male when the old one dies. How do they know? Who thought this was a good idea?

But, overall, the thing I loved about this read was not the fount of factfulness but the fountain of meditative, calm reflection that Author Patty (she refers to herself as such on her website so I'm presuming to do so too) uses to soothe away the hurts being queer in a hostile world has wrought. Her Irish-Armenian heritages, her neurodivergent presentation of self, her life experiences, all give her the invaluable, painful gift of Otherhood. It is a thing I've been grateful for in my older years of life. It takes Otherhood to see the absurdity of the prejudices most people use in place of learning, thinking, meditating. Author Patty gets this on such a core level that as she lets us in on her uncoverings it feels organic (!) instead of calculated as is so often the case. Even her coinage of "eco-spirituality" to describe this manner of being in the world feels uncondescending. It could easily have read brummagem and insulting. Instead it's all of a piece with her shared factual information as viewed through her lens of personal reflection. Like this:

I like blurring the line between human and nature because I believe we, as a species, have become profoundly lonely in our self-enforced isolation. And it’s because of this that the planet is spinning through a devastating loss in biodiversity. The species that have brought me the most companionship, assurance, and inspiration are those furthest banished from human society, those least associated with the “desirable” traits of being human—upright and logical, two-legged and binary-sexed. My personal connections to these organisms have brought me a sense of queer belonging and comfort in the heaviest of times. In exchange, I hope to do my small part by sharing their stories. And I hope that in sharing these stories, you too will feel the closeness of the earth, the lack of space between our cells, and the memory of each other.

I think the last word has been had. I'm just that hair away from five stars because I still find slugs utterly repugnant and with a gardener's eye of loathing.