Video: The Impact of God is Red on Native American Rights and Native American Religion

Full Transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: God is Red 50th Anniversary Symposium. The Impact of God is Red on Native American Rights and Native American Religions. October 6, 2022.

OK. I think we can go ahead and get started for an event that's been in careful planning for some time. Very excited that the evening has finally arrived. So good afternoon and welcome.

JOSEPH GONE: My name is Joseph Gone. I'm a cultural psychologist. I'm a professor here at Harvard, and I'm up here because I'm the Faculty Director of the Harvard University Native American Program, which I've done since 2019. I'm also a member or a citizen of the A'aninin Gros Ventre Tribal Nation of Fort Belknap in Montana.

I want to start tonight by just opening with a land acknowledgment that who networked in partnership with the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag to develop, and that acknowledgment reads as follows-- Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people.

The Harvard University Native American Program, or HUNAP, is an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University, and our mission is four-fold. First, education. To cultivate the development, achievement, and impact of American Indian, Alaskan Native, Native Hawaiian, and other Indigenous students to further the goals of the Harvard Charter of 1650, which committed the President and Fellows of Harvard College to, quote, "the education of the English and Indian youth of this country," unquote. The foundation is really this charter from 1650. So education is an important part of our four-fold mission.

A second is community. To create and nurture a thriving community for Native American and Indigenous people and their allies and supporters on campus. And we do that through these kinds of events, but also through the reception, which you are all invited to, and we'll mention before we close out today.

A third domain is scholarship. To promote university-wide engagement with Native American and Indigenous issues in support of Indigenous self-determination through relevant research, teaching partnership, and exchange. And finally, inclusion. To expand the presence, visibility, and impact of persons of Native American and Indigenous affiliation or descent on campus in a wide variety of roles. We're really grateful to be doing that tonight in this very event.

So for these reasons and more, HUNAP has been delighted to collaborate with Professor Ann Braude at the Harvard Divinity School in jointly sponsoring this 50th Anniversary Symposium dedicated to celebrating Vine Deloria Jr.'s influential book, God is Red. In addition to HUNAP and the Harvard Divinity School, other sponsors of this event include the Center for the Study of World Religions and the Canada Program of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

Allow me now to introduce my colleague, Philip Deloria, who will convene the remainder of tonight's opening event. Phil Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University. His research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of Indigenous peoples in a global context.

His first book, Playing Indian, 1998, traced the tradition of white Indian play from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book, Indians in Unexpected Places, examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early 20th century, and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance. He's currently completing a project on American Indian visual arts of the mid-20th century and co-editing with Beth Piatote I Heart Nixon: Essays on the Indigenous Everyday. Phil, please.

PHILIP DELORIA: Well, I want to extend the warmest possible welcome to everyone who's gathered here today for the God is Red 50th Anniversary Symposium. In particular, I'd like to greet those who are online. There's many, many of you, and you're with us in spirit, if not in body, an important part of the community that will come together over the next day or so as we talk about this book, God is Red.

My co-convener, Ann Braude, is so sorry that she's unable to be here with us in person due to a recurrence of COVID infection. She's on day 15, apparently, sort of total. But she will be participating remotely via Zoom. The time, effort, and care that Ann has put into this event, I think, makes her absence even more keenly felt. The original idea for this symposium was her idea, as has been much of the execution. So in that regard, I want us all to say a big hearty thank you to Ann Braude. Also, to the staff at the Divinity School, and in particular, the indefatigable Tracy Wall, who's sort of taken up a lot of the organizational labor.

[APPLAUSE]

So as many of you know, Vine Deloria, Jr. was my father, so there's a kind of a joy for me here as well as a sort of Oedipal groove, frankly. But in a good way, in a good way. And I actually traced that good way to 2019, to the 50th anniversary of his very first book, Custer Died for Your Sins. And there was a number of celebrations, including a very large conference at the University of Colorado, where we gathered together to think about that book.

2019 sent me back to study Custer Died for Your Sins in a deep and serious way that I hadn't done in many, many years. In fact, I never had done that sort of deep or serious study of it. I had sort of read it, but not taken it as seriously as I should have. And you know, what I discovered at that time was the complexities, I think, of that book, the complexities of my father's thought, the curious nature that he brought to all sorts of inquiries, his insistence on heterodoxy, and sort of resisting-- there's an edited collection about him called Destroying Dogma, which I think is a completely apt way of thinking about his work.

And now, I find myself a few years later, having spent the summer doing a similar kind of deep dive into God is Red, and finding it to be every bit as complicated a book as Custer Died for Your Sins. It's pointed me to several of his other books, including in particular The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, which is, I think, his most sort of deeply philosophical kind of book. And to the book that's one of his last books, The World We Used To Live In, in which he makes a case, I think a really interesting case, an argument that's based upon multiple forms of evidence about the powers and the spiritual kinds of lives and worlds of medicine people historically.

And it's an argument that basically just piles up case after case after case, and you can sort of hear him thinking like, do you believe me now. Let me tell you five more stories. Do you believe me now? There's another 10. Do you believe me now? Well, there's more where that came from. So it's an argument that is very much about the possibilities for Native spirituality, past, present and future, that's quite important I think.

So we're going to do God is Red this time around. Over five sessions, we've been able to assemble an amazing roster of presenters and commentators, each of whom will take up specific themes relative to the book. 24 hours from now, we will all have, I think, a much richer sense of God is Red, of its past history, its context, its arguments and their consequences, and its possibilities five decades on as a possible roadmap for our futures.

Our first session is going to feature my good friend and mentor, Suzan Shown Harjo, who was also a very, very good friend of my father's. And so without further ado, let me introduce Suzan, and then she and I will engage in a bit of back and forth conversation. And after that, we will be bringing up the presenters at our other sessions for tomorrow to sort of pose a question, kind of one question to Suzan. And in that way, hopefully kind of build a coherence across our day and a half worth of seminars.

So Suzan Harjo, Cheyenne and Holdogee Muskogee, has been the most consistently effective advocate for Native American rights over the last five decades. As Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians from 1984 to '89, and President of the Morningstar Foundation, she has helped develop critical legislation affecting the lives of Native people across a tremendous, kind of a mindblowingly tremendous, spectrum, from museum representation, repatriation of human remains, free practice of religion, access to sacred sites, land and treaty rights, political and economic development, among others.

At NCAI, Suzan Harjo led the final charge that produced two major pieces of legislation, the 1989 National Museum of the American Indian Act, which created NMAI out of the old New York Museum's collections and established the repatriation guidelines for the entire Smithsonian Institution system. And as well as that, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, which extended repatriation requirements to all museums receiving federal support, and which has opened up an entirely new era in the relationships between Native peoples and American museums and the institutions oftentimes in which they rest, including our own Harvard University.

Suzan Harjo served as a founding trustee of the NMAI and has maintained her commitment to that museum, serving as the guest curator for the acclaimed exhibition, Nation to Nation-- Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, which is still up in the D.C museum. She began as a poet, writer, radio broadcaster, then a newspaper columnist and essayist, and now, still a voice on social media. She continues to produce incisive political commentary. In 2014, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her long career of activism and advocacy.

She's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. And it has been my great honor to work with her and with our friend, Robert Warrior, in a kind of sustained effort to recognize many, many more Native people in those kind of prestigious organizations. In 2014 here at the Harvard Divinity School, Suzan Harjo delivered the Dudleian Lecture on natural religion. It is the oldest endowed lectureship in North America, established in 1751 by Paul Dudley, Chief Justice of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And I think it's quite wonderful that she was here giving that lecture.

Back then, she spoke on the topic, Saving Religion from Civilization, which suggests the extent to which the conversation engendered by God is Red extends from the early 1970s through various markers and moments, such as Suzan's speech, up to the present day. And on a more personal note, Suzan and my father, Vine Deloria, Jr., spent decades exchanging views on politics, spirituality, and countless other topics, usually in late night phone calls. And if both she and I retire a little earlier these days, one of the great joys of my life has been our ability to continue on that tradition.

And indeed, only a few nights ago we spent 2 and 1/2 hours in what was a lovely and moving conversation, talking through some of the themes that might come up in our exchange tonight. We're going to try to speed it up a bit, but I want you to know that we can only do so because we have already talked slowly with many long pauses for thought and reflection. And so I'm going to move over to that chair right now, and Suzan is going to come up on the screen, we hope. Please make her welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

It's the Shure SM58, the classic rock and roll mic. I always feel happy when I've got one in my hand.

SUZAN HARJO: That's right.

PHILIP DELORIA: Suzan, it's so good to see you on the monitor screen. It worked.

SUZAN HARJO: Yay.

PHILIP DELORIA: So in our conversation the other night, we started by talking about politics, and I wonder if we could maybe sort of begin there. For those who don't know the book well, you should be aware there's three editions, with a 50th anniversary edition and an audiobook forthcoming, thanks to Fulcrum Press, which has been really wonderful about publishing my dad's work. And to his very good friend, Bobby Bridger, who's been really interested in making his work accessible through audiobooks.

One of the things I think that's most notable about that first edition from 1973 is the way that it reads not only is a serious critique of Christianity and a description at a somewhat general level of Indigenous spiritual kind of life, but also of political work. So where the later books open with two chapters on the contemporary moment of the early '70s, the first edition opens up with three chapters on it. It includes the 20 points that were part of the Trail of Broken Treaties and the Native response and the government response and those kinds of things.

So there's a politics I feel like that's embedded in the first edition that maybe is not so much in the second edition. And so as we move into the discussion of the book, I wonder, Suzan, if you might ground us a little bit in the politics of the early '70s, particularly as they pertain to these questions about religion and churches and Native spiritual practice.

SUZAN HARJO: First, I want to say that everyone should have the good fortune of having Phil Deloria introduce them. You do it so beautifully, and I feel about 10 feet tall. So thank you very much for that lovely introduction.

The late 1960s and early 1970s were killer. And I think everyone who was active at that time, in whatever they were doing, really understood how to make themselves four or five or six people and how to delegate and ask for help and think out loud with trusted friends. And then know when to ask people to suit up for whatever was going to happen. And sometimes we didn't know.

Vine one time called me from New York, where he was in a meeting of the Museum of the American Indian. They were the reformed board of trustees after the crooked one was dissolved, and the whole museum was taken into receivership by Louis Lefkowitz, the Attorney General. And so Vine called and said, I really need backup. Here's my plan. I'm going to nominate you, and this will be early in the morning. And can you come to New York?

I said, yeah, I could. He said, I'm going to nominate you for the board. And so when you arrive-- and we figured out the timing, that if I caught the first Eastern shuttle, I would be there at such and such a time-- and this would already have happened. He said, if they put you on the board, then great, you'll be attending your first board meeting. If they don't, then we'll be holding a press conference about why these racist bigots wouldn't put you on the board.

So I got on the Eastern shuttle in the morning not knowing what I was prepared for. But as I was raised by grandparents and parents, always be ready, always be prepared for anything, and always kind of know your stuff. Always understand that whatever you're called on to do, you're being called on to do because you can do it. So that's it. I mean, it's said in much more beautiful ways by other people. The readiness is all, for example. But that's how things were.

And Vine was a master at doing what our favorite oracle of choice, the I Ching, says-- set armies marching. That once you have a plan, once you have an idea, once you have an agreement on a direction and a goal, then you inform the people and get their agreement, and then you set armies marching. And he was excellent at doing all of that. People think of Vine as being an author, and he was, of course, brilliant author of so many books and editor.

But also, he was an engineer of Native policy. He and Hank Adams and I, I think, were probably the best ones at writing NCAI resolutions for decades. And you could sort of see our work in NCAI resolutions that don't carry our name or anything, but there's a pretty consistent line. And that's a whole other set of books. That's an encyclopedia that taught Vine a lot when he was Executive Director of NCAI in the '60s.

And taught Hank a lot when he was the Special Assistant to Vine. As he was a war resistor, Vietnam War resistor, in the army, he didn't resist going in the army. He was in the army, but he was assigned to NCAI and to Vine as a way of doing his service. And so he would write the community paper for the local military base and then work with Vine on NCAI resolutions or position papers or other things.

And Hank was also a special project. Hank was a Assiniboine Sioux who was raised at Quinault. And so he's from Montana, raised on the beautiful Pacific Northwest coast at one of the garden spots of the universe, Quinault Nation. And then he was part of the Frank's Landing Indian Community. And he was one of the early people working with the National Indian Youth Council.

And one of the people who was involved with the 1963 March on Washington, he and Mel Tom and others from NIYC. And they, with Vine chiming in here and there, and lots of other people-- there were lots of other people involved in that 1963 March on Washington, lots of Native people-- Martha Grass, a Ponca from Oklahoma, and Rose Crow Flies High, Mad Bear Anderson, lots and lots of people.

And Hank met a lot of movie stars through that effort, and that's how he met Marlon Brando and arranged for him to go out to do a fish-in protest in the Pacific Northwest at the Puyallup River in 1964. And then he dragged Vine and me into writing script after script after script with Marlon Brando about Indians. It was Indians 101, Indians this, Indians that, the story of the Indian, Wounded Knee, when we got to that point.

But Marlon Brando was out on the front line of the Northwest Indian fish struggle, as vine was and as Hank was and lots of other people, early, early on before it came to the attention of the world through the Academy Awards ceremony in the early '70s. He was interested in Native rights, and he really meant it. I mean, he was arrested at the protest, at the fish-in with Native people, and he was arrested with an Episcopalian representative there. And I think they were the only two arrested. I don't think the Native people were arrested.

So Hank was really pivotal in all of this kind of work and someone that Vine depended on a lot. And Hank depended on Vine a lot. And they would call me and get me to suit up for things I didn't even know the outcome of or couldn't predict. I'll say that, now that I've mentioned Marlon Brando, that Hank said when he went to his house-- Marlon Brando wanted him to visit him, and he showed up at his house in Hollywood, and Marlon Brando wanted to know what the fish thing was about. And so Hank explained it and explained it and explained it.

And anyone who knew Hank Adams knows that he has a wonderful way of explaining everything in the world from the beginning, and everyone always would say, not the beginning, start somewhere in the middle or the end. And he said that Brando was riveted on his every word, and Hank was saying, I'm doing so great here. I'm really telling this story just right and the intricacies of it. And he even posed at the fireplace and put his arm on the mantle of the fireplace, imagining that he was really striking a wonderful pose of someone who knew everything there was about Pacific Northwest fisheries.

And when he finished talking, Marlin said to him, would you mind if I fixed your teeth. And this was the kind of thing that Vine and Hank, myself, Billy Frank, a whole lot of people, did for each other. We were the levelers for each other. We were the encouragers. We were the fixers, the cleanup crew, the cooks, or whatever was needed. Write this. Do this. Let's go.

And a lot of work got done. A lot of what people don't understand is movement work got done because we were all fast typers, and we could just type things up. And we knew how to mimeograph. We knew how to Xerox, the revolution of Xerox. So all of these things were hugely important skills, and we knew how to find the armies to set marching. Many a time, Vine and I would go into the bars in any given city that we happened to be in because there weren't Indian centers. There weren't gathering places. We have a really luxurious situation now where there are those places.

But no, if you wanted to find the Native people, you went into-- you asked for the worst part of town. And then you went there and asked what was the ruggedness bar in the place. And I have vivid memories. I was the designated memory for much of that time. And I have vivid memories of a lot of those discussions that when I look at the book, God is Red, or any number of books, but especially God is Red and Custer and We Talk, You Listen and the last one, sometimes it's hard for me to distinguish between what was the germ of that particular idea. A person, a group of people, a way of talking. How did that come about?

And what I read in draft and what I heard your dad read to me, so it's a very rich way that I look at a page of some of his books. And I mean, I count myself so fortunate to have been in that position. I think the way we all got through all of that was just to understand that we were always being called on to do the impossible. And we had every confidence in each other and in ourselves that we could. It just didn't occur to us that we wouldn't be able to do it.

PHILIP DELORIA: You know, Suzan--

SUZAN HARJO: Well, go ahead.

PHILIP DELORIA: Well, I was just going to say, when we were talking the other night, you drew a kind of throughline. You used two words that really were striking to me. One was "defense," and the other was "combat." And you actually were willing to draw kind of a straight line between his time in the Marines, which was very important to him, his work at NCAI, and then his subsequent writing career, and then all of the politics. That there was a sort of continuity there across time, and this feels to me like what you're describing is that particular context.

SUZAN HARJO: I truly think that Vine's time in Marines boot camp, let alone the whole time in the Marines, in just getting through boot camp was his vision quest. That's where he battled the mountain lion, or that's where he flew with the red-tailed hawk, or that's where he did something that was magic or something that was very practical. And that involved great concentration and strength and confidence.

And because he was able to do that and get through it, he had enormous respect for everyone else who had been through it. And he would say, oh, yeah, so-and-so, a marine. And I knew what that meant. I mean, my dad was a military man. I understood what that kind of comment meant, and it's very respectful. I mean, even though we were against the Vietnam War and all of that, that was a point of view. That was a worldview that was not respecting or not respecting the people who were prepared to defend and protect the people. So I think that-- go ahead.

PHILIP DELORIA: He always drew an invidious comparison between the Marines and the Army. And he would say, look, the Marines go for-- will pull their comrades out at the risk of their own death, and the Army will just leave them there. And I think he felt like the Marines was sort of a warrior society in that sense. There is a piece of writing that sort of just sits within our family where he talks about a transcendent sort of experience while he was on patrol in boot camp.

And I think you're quite right. I think it's easy to think like, oh, pass through the Marines and all of this. But I think you're right, that boot camp experience for him of coming into a robust physical and intellectual and sort of perhaps, I think, also even spiritual kind of confidence that he might not have had before was really quite transformative for him.

Suzan, you also used a word just a minute ago that I wonder if we might kind of return to a bit of our conversation on Tuesday, where you said something like this to me-- you said he believed in magic. He believed seriously, and that opened up all kinds of possibilities for him that were foreclosed to other people. And you also sort of were thinking with me out loud about a kind of trajectory of that, about more and more over time. And it feels like that might be-- your reflection on that might be helpful for us in terms of thinking a bit about how God is Red unfolded and its effects and consequences.

SUZAN HARJO: Well, I can drug us into scriptwriting with Marlon Brando and working in the Pacific Northwest and doing things with salmon and anadromous fish and the laws surrounding that. And resolutions and writing and organizing people. And I drug us into repatriation, which we didn't call. We just called it give them back, or leave them alone, or put them back, or leave them be, or they're our ancestors, not yours. And how would you like your grandma to be dug up and so on?

So from the 1960s forward, we worked on repatriation and sacred places protection. And everything that goes with that, everything that the genocidal maniacs tried to kill off in us, were the things we were working on to advance. We were working on cultural reclamation, whether it was language revitalization or ancestor protection or water rights protection, whatever it was, or land, landback. I love the landback movement. It's exactly right on target.

And we were working on everything-- landback, ancestors back, people back, kids back from boarding schools. And put the people back where they belong, and get them out of these places where-- or returning Vietnam Native vets. We're saying, our ancestors are prisoners of war in these museums, and we've got to bring them home. We can't leave them there. And that was really a good watchword or phrase for all of us working in that area. So when I asked Vine, how do you-- what do you do about this kind of sacred object that's in a museum? Not a person, I wasn't asking about that. I was asking about what people wore when they were murdered.

PHILIP DELORIA: Well, we were thinking about repatriation and about some of the-- this was sort of a place where it's kind of an emergent spiritual sort of focus for him. I mean, there's the early sections of the book. There's a kind of highlighting of the summer of 1971, and '71 as being this very violent time. But also the summer of '71, the discovery and the burial-- the unearthing of so many Native remains everywhere. I mean, there's a section in there that's very, very focused on that, those particular issues. I think he says something like, in the summer of '71, every white person felt like they had to dig up an Indian at that particular moment.

SUZAN HARJO: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And we were really gearing up for repatriation law, whatever that meant. We weren't quite sure, and we didn't achieve it until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. And then we had a repatriation. One of the warehouses is about repatriation. And the first federal repatriations were done under AIRFA.

When I first went to-- I know where I was-- when I first went to Vine and asked him when he was Director of NCAI-- and to me, he was our most important Indian. That's what that meant to me. And so I went to him and said, how would I go about protecting, getting back, doing the right thing by the people whose things are in this museum, which was the Museum of the American Indian, never imagining that either one of us would be connected with that museum at some point or that collection, I expected him--

I was ready to take mental notes. I was standing there with a baby on my hip, ready to receive the wisdom of this important Indian. And when I've written this, I've said, I don't know the answer to that, or something to that effect. He actually said, beats the shit out of me. He said, but I'll tell you what, I'll find out about it, and I'll help you, and I'll have your back. And you can't ask for more than that from any person.

So we helped each other. We backed each other up. We were sounding boards for each other. And I'm not just talking about myself and Vine. I'm talking about a whole cadre of people, the people we-- the Cheyenne say that you take the people into battle that you would choose for friends, and only then. And you only take people into battle who know how to make a peace, which is the other part of that that's so important. And to know when you've won, or to know when you've lost, or to know when you have an agreement.

All of that is so important. So what we, collectively, were doing with each other in our families, in our extended families, in our circles of friends, was to teach each other and learn from each other life skills kinds of things, tips, and strategies. We've got to make a plan to get this done. This is what we need done. How do we get there? How do we do that? Oh, well you just do this, this, this, and this. Some people were good at saying that. And others were not, but could hear that that was a good thing and build on that.

So it was very much a "we" culture, and not at all a selfie culture. Most of the time, things that we wrote didn't even carry our names, and we were writing in other people's voices for organizations and all of that. I'll tell you, if Vine is credited with 30 books, I bet he has more than that in things that he wrote for other people and things that he-- I mean, big things. Big things, little things, even the resolutions are very long and involved and detailed and sourced and cited. Briefs almost.

And sometimes, as you know, Phil, because you're very much like your father in this regard, you help people and you end up doing some of their work, but your name doesn't go on it. And that's OK because the job was to help that person get over that hump or to help that person complete something that was important that they were unable to do. And I know you do that a lot. People who know that about you are really grateful for it, as were so many of us grateful to your dad for all the work he did.

I mean, talk about a James Brown kind of Native person, the hardest working Native and Native business was your dad. And second only to Hank Adams, I think.

PHILIP DELORIA: Yeah. Well, you're in that roster too, right at the top. So I mean, I'm always stunned by-- I mean, you know, he'd play solitaire for an hour before he went into his office to write, and he was addicted to watching The Godfather, which he probably saw, I don't know, 50, 60, 100 times, you know. And he had a few other films that were like that, that he watched over and over again. And he was very social. There were a lot of times people coming through the house.

It's always kind of boggled my mind as I think about my own kind of writing, and I think I'm writing all the time. But yeah, I'm not even in the same universe. I think most of us are not in the same universe in terms of productivity. And I totally agree, there's the books, and then there's all of this sort of structure of articles and pieces that-- Robert Warrior and I were just talking about this-- that are out there.

I do have to tell you one thing, though. Marlon Brando, at one point, rented a house on Lummi Island, and we all went out-- my brother and my dad and I went out there, and I fell off of his dock and got completely wet. I went into the house, and I got to wear Marlon Brando's robe. But instead of actually washing my clothes, he just threw him in the dryer, so I had this sort of saltwater-soaked dry clothes that I put back on after wearing Brando's robe around. He seems like he was everywhere, Brando, you know.

But Suzan, let me ask you one more sort of question, and I think we'll bring up our panelists. And each of them will pose a question as well, and we can continue the conversation. And that question would be this: in the foreword-- here's the 30th anniversary, here's the 1994 version, and here's my first edition, which comes from the Laramie High School library. The joys of eBay, it turns out.

So in the foreword to the second edition, the 1994 edition, he observes, I think kind of wistfully or perhaps crankily, that the book was not widely reviewed. And I think this is true. When you go looking for reviews of Custer Died for Your Sins, the first thing you find is an Edward Abbey review in The New York Times, you know, and many, many other reviews after that. And when you go looking for this, basically you find two or three sort of small reviews in kind of academic journals about Ethnic Studies or things like that. And most of those reviews are negative also, by the way.

But yet, in 1974 this was kind of a-- I think he found this deeply ironic-- but in 1974, there's the famous Time magazine report on this sort of ecumenical poll of church leaders about shapers and shakers of the faith, and there he is on the list, a shaker and shaper of the faith, which he got a huge, huge kick out of. And of course, in Indian country, God is Red is sort of an article of faith in and of itself. And here you are right at the center of politics and religion and spirituality. So I wonder how you remember the impact of the book.

And maybe particularly in that sort of decade of the '70s into the '80s, when it should have had its most substantial impact. And I think he felt like by 1994, he was kind of wondering where the impact was, but it seems like it was there somehow. How do you remember that period?

SUZAN HARJO: When Custer was published, every Native person had to copy and kept reading it and reading it and reading it and telling it and telling it and telling it. It became their stories, our stories. And then there was one time that was similar, and so it was a very accessible kind of thing, and Native people were just so happy that someone had put out something that made us humans and funny and interesting and complicated.

When God is Red came out, for the Native people what you'd hear a lot is people saying, oh, he's really smart. Which reminds me that between the first edition and the second edition, he wanted to-- he told me several times that he wanted to, in effect, be intellectually accepted, accepted as a public intellectual so that people wouldn't think that he was just a jokester from Custer. And that he was someone who could make an argument, who could reason, could support the argument, and who could tear it apart.

Now, most people, I think non-Native people, wanted the politics but not the religion. They didn't want-- unless it was the mystic Indian religious kind of thing of, well, we took-- we had mushrooms over here, and we saw this, and we thought this, and this happened. Or we saw a UFO, and it landed in the Grand Canyon. And guess what? There were Native people there.

So he was being vilified for being smart by non-Indians with God is Red and for not being a mystic Indian, at the same time that he was having visionary experiences personally and group collective experiences, and at the same time that he was understanding more and more and more about the relationship of people to place, the relationship of people to protocol, the relationship of people to ceremony. And that he was not an observer of that. As he became more and more-- and people think of him as a true unbeliever, but he was as much as an unbeliever as he was a true believer.

He was a man of faith, and one of the things he had faith in was the Native people, the collective wisdom of the people, the collective power of the people, the collective understandings of the people, and the resilience of the people. So having that as a guide. I think you can chart that transition from first edition to second edition and third. Well, also there was a clean break with the Episcopal Church, and that was huge. And that was a political statement that had to do with boarding schools too. That had to do with things the church-- you know, church, anyone's church-- had done to Native peoples.

And we found out more and more things. Someone would find a document or find a hidden set of files. We were constantly looking for things that were alluded to in footnotes and in statements of people that people would make, and that's how-- it was Vine who set me off on finding the civilization regulations. He said, what were they? Why do they come up here and there? And why did they have to be withdrawn? And when I found all of that out, I realized how off most historians had been, never even considering them or looking at them as their tributaries rather than as the headwaters of a genocidal wave.

So your father's own-- I mean, no one knows everything at the beginning of their lives. No one knows everything in the middle of their lives. You evolve. You gain more knowledge. You gain more experience. Your dad used to say, look at the old people. They say less and less and less because they realize how little time they have and how much more is to be known, so they just listen and listen and listen. And once in a while, we'll say something. I thought that was so understanding, and that's where he ended. That's where he was.

And God is Red was his way of saying to the non-Native people, we have something to contribute to this field, to this theological examination, that is world class. And you should recognize it because you're missing out on a bunch of stuff. And then, too, he was such a contrary. I mean, he was a coyote in coyote's clothing. He really was happy to stick with the alien and the hybrid Indian and Native super beings, in a way of just tweaking his nose at people who would call anyone thinking anything out of the mainstream and out of the ordinary and out of the Judeo-Christian experience as kooky, as crazy, as idiotic, as not to be considered at all.

So he was always pushing the boundaries of what's acceptable in society. And because he did, there were more things on the edge. What he was doing was being a good military strategist, if you will. He was pushing the parameters of the field so that anything that was left toward the middle could be accepted, could be understood. And that's what a movement is about, any movement of anything, that the people in the movement have to be constantly saying, this is our position and it's ironclad. And you stake out your ground in the farthest way you can. You go for the most rights, whatever it is you're trying to get at or to.

And then what you're doing is making a way for everyone else to sound super reasonable, super nice. You're taking on the mantle of being the bad Indian for the White man's bad Indian, good Indian idea that's in a lot of people's minds still today. The good Indians and the bad Indians, the acceptable Indians, the ones who know how to use the right fork and the ones who don't, the ones who will take the consultant fee and shut up and the ones who won't. So there are lots of things that happen today that were happening in the '70s that are happening in the early '90s.

But Vine was on a constant quest for not knowledge for himself to know, but knowledge for himself to be able to help protect and defend. I keep going back to that because he was a defender of the people. And when he did the traditional knowledge series, that's what he was doing. And when he did his last book, that was, of course, what he was building toward from the very beginning, trying to find a way to let everyone who needed to know how to produce an evidence base for whatever it is you're doing.

I got an email today from our friend Richard Leventhal at the University of Pennsylvania, who said he was going to try to tune into this discussion, and remembered fondly his talks with-- and Richard Leventhal is an archaeologist and anthropologist and used to be the head of the leading anthropology museum in the country at UPenn, the Penn Museum. And he's my favorite person behind Deloria, and all our discussions about giants. And that I would say, but where's the evidence. Where's the evidence? And he said, oh, you mean besides these newspaper accounts of people who are 18 feet tall and who were 15 feet tall. That's evidence.

So that's what he was doing, was building an evidentiary base for all of us. And he would say, paper, they always want paper, you have to get paper. And if you want to know what they've done, look for the paper. And that's because they always tell on them themselves because they never throw anything away. They'll hide it, but they won't throw it away.

PHILIP DELORIA: Right. Well, let me invite the panelists to come up. And I'll do just a very quick little introductions because these are all scholars and teachers who deserve deep introductions, but those will happen tomorrow. So tonight I'm just going to do a very basic thing.

Robert Warrior is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and a citizen of the Osage Nation. The author of several books and countless articles. He was the Founding President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. His first book, Tribal Secrets, began a long intellectual history engagement with the thought and writing of Vine Deloria. So Robert, welcome.

Michael McNally is Professor and Chair of the Religion Department at Carleton College. Along with two other books, he's the author of Defend The Sacred: Native American Religious Freedom Beyond the First Amendment, for which he retooled himself with Legal Studies training in a sustained and deeply impressive way. It is our pleasure to welcome Michael back to Harvard, where he took both an MDiv and a PhD in the study of Religion.

Susan Hill, citizen of the Mohawk Nation and Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, where she directs the Center for Indigenous Studies. Her 2017 book, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River, won a slew of prizes and reflects her long and abiding interest in Haudenosaunee knowledge, thought, and history.

And last, but certainly not least, Daniel Wildcat is a member of the Muskogee Nation of Oklahoma and Professor of Indigenous and American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, where he's been a teacher and administrator for 36 years. Among his other writings is Power and Place: Indian Education in America, which he co-wrote with Vine Deloria, Jr.

So Robert, perhaps you could kick things off by posing a question to Suzan. We'll have four questions, and then we'll wrap things up. We've got 40 some minutes to go.

ROBERT WARRIOR: I get to ask four questions?

PHILIP DELORIA: No, you get to ask one question, my friend.

ROBERT WARRIOR: I've got 25 questions, Suzan. And part of this, I want to be-- first of all, I want to say that I know that giants travel the Earth because you're one of them, and Vine was another of them. And so this is part of saying out of just immense respect and admiration and marveling at the contributions that we're discussing here. I mean, these are things, as Phil already said, that we can't do. And I think that there's something generational that happens in trying to make sense of all of this.

There was a point at which I realized, in getting to know Vine as somebody who was willing to suffer me being with him, you know, and then hanging out with him and learning from him, that I wasn't trying to be what he was because it was a different moment in the late 1980s when I got to know him. The one thing that I could do that was an example was to figure out, what does it mean to serve-- to serve the greater good of making the world better for Indian people.

Anybody can do that. You don't have to be Native to try to ask that question to yourself and to say, how do I do something that would further this agenda, which goes all the way back to the beginning of time. To say, how do we do this? How do I do this in my generation? And it might be exactly the same. It may be shutting up when I want to say something. It may be just listening when I think I have something to say. And I think every moment that I spent saying something to Vine was a moment when I could have been listening to Vine saying something to me.

At your bar, at the Lion's Head, that was your place, and that's where he and I would meet in New York on a couple of occasions, three, four, or five times, and some of the most important moments of my life. So I want to reduce all of the questions I have down to this one.

First of all, I think that there's something a bit punishing about having to be the person that's at the end of it all You know what I mean? That say that, Vine is gone, Hank is gone. I mean, I remember Hank telling me, when I interviewed him for seven hours one time on the phone, how hard it was for him to remember back to the people that he helped start NCAI with-- not NCAI, sorry-- NIYC with. That remembering being with them at the end of their lives, and he lived so much longer than that.

But thinking about the conflict, I guess the thing that I always go back to, and you brought it up for me again, was this moment, let's say, around 1973, around the time of Wounded Knee, which is also the time of God is Red. So Vine wrote in a way that said, we're all doing something together. The NTCA, the National Tribal Chairman's Association, they're doing their work over here, which is really important, and advocating for the rights of tribal governments. And those in the NCAI are doing their work in Washington, D.C. to advocate for policy.

People over here in the NIYC are out organizing people to register to vote. And then we have the activist people here giving us this punch, he called it-- literally this punch-- that reminds people that we have power, that we can do things and be in their face. And representing all of this as somehow this grand moment when everybody's kind of working together, even though they're doing things that are different.

And yet, you reminded me as you talked that that wasn't how everybody in that group saw each other. The NTCA, the Tribal Council, Tribal Chairmen, tended to really not like the activists. I mean, there was a real tension there. Vine, in God is Red, indicates he doesn't-- I mean, he thinks that the activist wing is un-- doesn't deserve its place at the front of the line, that the churches especially are kind of serving that agenda. And so I wonder, I can never--

I don't want to say, well, Vine didn't know what he was doing. Obviously he did. And the one thing I come back to, and this is, what was the relationship that Biden had to-- that seemed like an idealist statement to me, which he hated when I said that to him, and I dropped it immediately. To call him an idealist was, for him, to say he wasn't a pragmatist. Somebody later said to me, every pragmatist is an idealist at some level because you're never a pragmatist unless you actually believe that somehow your pragmatism is going to help you achieve your ideal.

I wish I'd been able to say that to Vine when he was alive to see what he would have said. He would have run circles around it probably. But I just wonder in that moment, I guess that's the one question I would say, how did you all think about that? I mean, Vine reflects it in his writing, but I still can't make sense of that because I see in this-- Phil and I have disagreed over so many things. We've known each other since graduate school, and I think that's productive and fruitful. If we were doing politics, it'd be different.

Politics is when you say, hey, I disagree with you, but what are we trying to do here. We're trying to get this policy passed. We're trying to do this. We're trying to achieve this. But now, if there's just a principle, an idea, then we disagree and we kind of duke it out. We fight it out. We say, God, how can you be so wrong.

PHILIP DELORIA: We're just doing intellectual sovereignty, I think.

ROBERT WARRIOR: Right, exactly. And how dare you steal my ideas in the midst of our argument here? But you're exactly right to do so. But you don't always end up agreeing, right? And anyway, that's a jumble of ideas and things, and I wonder how you all made sense of that because I marvel at how much was achieved in the midst of it. And I know that the way I think about it is not necessarily right, but I'd love to hear what you think of that jumble of ideas.

SUZAN HARJO: Then and now and always, we're all related in some way. And it wasn't that you just did what your family wanted or just did what your Nation wanted or your clan or your society. You did what was called for on a national level. People were working on a national level, even if they didn't realize it, because everyone was doing networking. Everyone was doing outreach. Everyone was doing all of the things that people talked about later and trying to figure out, how do we achieve this, who do we need to talk to.

The first place we went after our historic gathering on repatriation and where we envisioned the National Museum of the American Indian in 1967 at Bear Butte, the first place we went to, there were several teams that were sent out from there to go to different places to see if others wanted to be part of this coalition that we'd built that we had pledged ourselves to. And Zuni Pueblo was the first place we went, and that is because one of the Vietnam vet's buddies, one of the Cheyenne Vietnam vet's buddies at that meeting at Bear Butte was from Zuni, so that's why we went there.

And from there, that developed a relationship with Robert Lewis, who later became the head of the National Tribal Chairman's Association. And NTCA, while they hated activist and where "activist" was a dirty word, and they were part of the Committee to Re-elect the President and part of-- they had an organization, Republican Indians for Nixon. While they were on that side of the politics, they also were from someplace and represented someplace. And the people that they were accountable to had as a first effort the protection of the children, the protection of elderly, and cultural reclamation.

So we combined efforts to work on eagle feather returns, making eagle feather possession not a crime for Native people. And that was working with Bob Lewis because no one in NCAI at that time was interested in that. And everything is cyclical, right? So while there were things that NTCA would not work with Hank Adams on, Robert Lewis and I got along fine and worked on many cultural rights issues, as did Vine with some of the tribal leaders of that time.

And Vine really knew how to do that because he said, you have to be-- don't let people just be mad at each other. Don't let people just be mad at you. Just go up and shake their hand and treat them like a friend, and they'll forget what they were mad at you about. But if then you don't speak with them, they're not going to speak with you, and on and on.

And I thought that was a really important thing to know. I didn't know that until he said that, even though I knew it about ceremony. I knew it about feast day. I knew it about this and that and the other thing and how you behave in families. But it's a different thing on the political scene to know that. And it all comes down to respect. So you had to find the people who you could be friends with and could take into battle and make the peace with, no matter what they were doing in their organization.

I backed up Joe DeLaCruz, who took over NTCA and then dissolved it. He was the youngest Chairman elected in the country when he was doing that, and he was selected as head of NTCA at a time when they had a BIA telephone number. It was connected to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an extension phone. I mean, it wasn't even their telephone. It was kind of crazy. But there were things that Joe needed from NTCA. Tribal leaders across the country helped with jurisdiction issues, helped with the fishing rights struggle, helped with on and on and on, with sovereignty recognitions. And that he couldn't do through NCAI at a given time. When Vine was at NCAI, it was a golden era. It was less so after it.

The reason I wanted to be Executive Director of NCAI was because Vine had been. I mean, that really is the thing. So here's the practical working Vine. I said, Joe DeLaCruz wants me to be Director of NCAI, stand for election and all of that. What do you think? And he said, don't do it, don't do it. He said, you will not survive. He said, I found myself underneath my desk sobbing because I knew what had to be done, and I knew that I wasn't up to the task. I couldn't do it. And he said, it will overwhelm you.

So I thought about that and thought about that, and I went back to him and I said, well, you know, I'm glad to know that in your experience. I'm going to do it anyway. And he said, OK, great, here's what we need to do. And he rattled off a list that in effect became the agenda. The working agenda for the whole National Indian country while I was Director was that list that he rattled off because we were the ones who pushed for Senator Inouye to become Chairman of the re-permenatized Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

And he looked to Vine Deloria and to Oren Lyons and myself in several meetings in New York and Washington to set his agenda for what he would do as Chairman and to back him up. And we did that, and that was a great partnership. So we were all in. I think it's just sort of like putting on a feast. Someone has an idea, let's put on a feast, and then that's the last see of that person. And everyone else, oh, OK, well, we know that it's this time, and we have this many days.

So then people just start dividing themselves up and organizing and doing it because so-and-so who was respected wanted it done on this day and not any other day. Or certainly if you're talking about ceremony, then you know who's in charge of that. It's the person who's allowed to look at the sky and tell you, this is when we're going to do this, this is when we have to do this and where and when, how, at whatever cost.

But for practical organization, you have to be a person who's grown up in a certain way around community work, around extended family work, where you know what needs to be done. You know where your place is. The power of place is, in part, knowing where you fit in so no one has to tell you, go over and do that. You know that that has to be done. You look around and see something that has to be done, and you do it.

When you operate that way, and everything is part of the Indian Rights movement, where you move fast and are accountable to everyone, but no one person or entity can stop you, can block you, once everyone decides what to do, then that that's a powerful, powerful force if you have lots of people who have self-selected or been selected because they have those skills.

Joe DeLaCruz was not the person who caught the fish, but he was the person who convened meetings of NCAI, for example, when he was president. And you would always find him in the serving line as the Chairman of one of the host tribes serving all the people their food and chatting with everyone. This salmon came from here, and this came from here, these shells came from there, and this was right here. Come to our territory and see this. And you're so close, come spend a week. So he knew exactly where his place was.

Vine always knew in his later years where his place was, and it was at the-- it was a place he never sought or thought he would end up at. And that was at the very top of the mountain as far as being looked up to, admired, loved, listened to, read. And he's such a contrarian. The worst thing that he would say about people-- and he said this. I heard him say it about lots and lots of different people-- is, he or she, so-and-so, they don't know anything they haven't written a book. He was always looking for people who knew stuff that they hadn't read in a book, which is funny coming from someone who writes books, that you hope they're going to read your book and learn something.

PHILIP DELORIA: One can only hope. Why don't we turn to a second question. Michael?

MICHAEL MCNALLY: Yeah, sure, unless anyone else has a question that's following up on this because mine moves in a slightly different direction. Well, it's good to be among all of you. It's amazing to be among these folks up here and wonderful, Suzan, to listen to your voice and hear your stories.

I had another question that I was going to ask, but something you said a bit earlier gave me a pause. And you said that in your view, one of the things that is going on in God is Red is putting out to non-Native people how Native traditions have something, you've said, world class-- I loved how you put that-- world class to offer in the space of Religion and Theology, and urgent and necessary that it be engaged. There's other times in the book where-- and maybe this is more in the chapter that was added in 1992-- where it borders on arguing that Native traditions are kind of incommensurable with Western religions.

And I wondered what you thought about that tension in this book and that tension in your work with Vine Deloria, the political work and the intellectual work. And of course, some of that is all the people, the wannabes, the academic wannabes, of which I might be one, who come into the space and take up necessary oxygen. So I wonder what you thought of that.

SUZAN HARJO: We've been forced into the religion box. And to our detriment, in law and in policy, Congress doesn't know how to deal with us as religious people. Religion doesn't quite fit because while we're very conservative and have protocols and have ways of doing things, we're also very flexible and nonrigid, welcoming of new influences. And we're not proselytizing beings, or we don't come from proselytizing traditions. And we're not judging people who have different ideas about who they're related to and how they relate to creation.

So the contest between religion, it's something that is a very big deal. It was and is. It's ongoing that you really have to think of it more as Native spirituality. Some people just want to call it our ways, so you hear lots and lots of people say Native ways or Pueblo ways or Gila River ways. These are just our ways, rather than trying to call it anything. And that we've resisted in repatriation law a long time before calling it anything and settled on repatriation in the '70s for the purpose of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act.

But before that, we didn't have a name for it. And then we didn't know how to refer to what we were talking about, and before we got the lexicon of that universe changed and codified, we would just say, we want our people and things back. We don't want them to be prisoners. We don't want them-- so everything was, put them back, or leave us alone, or leave them alone, let them go. It was all about freedom and respect.

The longer you look at anything as complex as Native spirituality and ways of being in the world, and protection of sacred places and sacred objects and ancestors. And the way you look at language and what it tells you, what it tells you about place and what it tells you about relationships among people and the relationship of people to other beings in the world. And how we're supposed to be in proximity to them or juxtaposition to them, and where our place is at any given time, and where no one else can be at any given time except us, whoever "us" might be.

So I think the more that the courts and the federal agencies, especially the Forest Service, which is the worst of the worst, tried to undermine Native spirituality and destroy ties between Native peoples and places, important sacred places, or even unimportant sacred places, places that people need for certain things, the more setbacks we've had. Most people working in the area have tried to make a distinction between religion and spirituality and to look at our religions as the ones who really need that freedom from religion and who have everything to fear from the Establishment Clause.

Because we know what it is like for Christian religions to have franchises out on our people, federally-sanctioned and appropriated franchises to go out and proselytize to our people, many of whom have already been so traumatized by other great federal projects and Christian projects, that they're kind of ready to accept almost anything if it seems to provide some sort of solace. You know, you always have people who are ready to stand up and fight.

One thing that Vine wanted to do, and I think it's really clear in the evolution of God is Red, is that he wanted to shore up, arm up the people who didn't think they could fight for themselves and who didn't like that way of being, who didn't want to be fighting. They wanted to be protected from the people who were trying to keep them from doing a ceremony or having to be an outlaw, to get to a place you had to lift up a barbed wire and make a trench and/or take down a "no trespassing" sign. We were forced, in many cases, to be outlaws and to be very, very cautious when it came to who we let in.

And you're talking about a lot of 1971 was a heck of a time. You're talking about Nixon's Enemies, all our veterans who are coming back and saying, this is a bad war that we're in. And horrible things and all the grave digging that was being done, all the Native people who were being murdered and maimed. And it was terrible. I mean, everything that we were at one of our lowest points in history and in that period, 1971 and '72-- suffocating poverty and we were at the mercy of war mongers and at the mercy of grave robbers and developers and all of that.

And any time we looked for sanctuary in the Church, whatever the Church was, or in the law or in just the ability to get around and do things and figure it out ourselves, we often did not have that kind of assistance. And that's one thing that Vine always railed against with the Churches, of course, the Episcopal Church, but the Churches generally and the do-gooders. Like, just if you have money, give it to us. We know what to do. Don't try to make a favorite Indian of your church just because that's the one who's going to tell more Indian people to join. If you want to help Indian rights, then help us.

And he made that a mission and did that and turned that same zeal toward whole professions, the anthropologist most notably, but also other professions. And while he had ideas that people thought were way out there, he also had a stack of evidence to support those ideas. It was great that he went to law school and that he had that big win under his belt as being part of the legal team that got off the first two people who were accused of murdering the FBI agents in 1976. The government finally put Leonard Peltier in prison, and he's never gotten out.

But the first two people on the team that Vine was on were acquitted on the same evidence. And there was more evidence against them. So he picked up a lot of prosecutorial skills. He picked up a different kind of way of looking at things, having gone to law school, and a way of saying, I know how we can use the law to help with these religious freedom and establishment kinds of issues.

PHILIP DELORIA: I can tell you that sort of sitting at the dinner table with him, or worse, playing Monopoly with him. I mean, talk about prosecutorial. So we have a few minutes left. I wonder if maybe Sue and Dan can both sort of frame a question, and then, Suzan, maybe perhaps you can think of a response to both.

SUZAN HARJO: OK.

PHILIP DELORIA: Just in terms of where we're at, in terms of time.

SUSAN HILL: OK, sure.

SUZAN HARJO: [INAUDIBLE] Sue and Dan.

SUSAN HILL: That was so much for your words, Suzan. You're always an inspiration to many of us, and so it's been really wonderful to get to hear you tonight. With that, I'll be succinct. In my experience listening to you, listening to Vine, listening to many of the others up here, us younger folks-- and I'm going to call myself a bit younger because I think I got a couple of years on you guys-- we're used to marching orders. So I'm going to ask you for some marching orders, particularly for scholars and for Native public intellectuals. What do you think are the key things we ought to be focusing on in the coming years?

PHILIP DELORIA: That's a great question, Dan, so you're going to have to top that.

DANIEL WILDCAT: She stole my question. What can I say? What can I say?

PHILIP DELORIA: So Suzan, what do you think? Where do we go? What are our marching orders? Or what are Susan Hill's marching orders?

SUZAN HARJO: Well, first has to be the very thing that Dan Wildcat has just gotten the biggest grant ever to help figure out, is Native people struggling-- Native peoples who are negatively affected by climate crisis and how to deal with that. And so I think a lot of us can not relax our efforts because Dan is doing it, but know where to pitch in and sort of line up behind Dan and his effort to deal with the climate emergency.

Because we've just been dealing with Ian. Ian just marched up the East Coast and was so awful and had such a terrible back end because of a two-degree difference in the Gulf waters, two degrees, and it caused that kind of devastation, that kind of wind that blew everything away. Or as my friend, the late Vicki Santana, used to say, the wind doesn't blow, it sucks. Isn't that something? And I believe that entirely, so Ian sucks, and that's the first thing we have to attend to, is the people who are in crisis because of what the world is continuing to do to put us in crisis.

And to protect sacred places. We have to find ways to protect sacred places. And I so appreciate what the Biden-Harris Administration is doing, which is trying to find any way they can to protect cultural areas, sacred sites, important landscapes, national parks. Any way to protect sacred places. Tuning into the 2030 initiatives and trying to do everything that's possible with every agency that can, so that you don't have the Forest Service, because of its horrible policies, anti-Indian policies and anti-Native sacred places policies, in litigation setting policy for a whole administration, as they have for every administration now since the 1970s.

It's directly traceable to the Forest Service, and it continues to do it. So it drives the Justice Department with it, and then they claim supremacy over every other department and say, well, Interior, you can't really say anything about sacred places. And they just make things up. It's like certain Supreme Court members just make things up. One thing they just made up was co-management, that co-management needs new legislation, that you can't have co-management without legislation. Well, that's a lie. I mean, that's just made up stuff. There are all sorts of co-management agreements, some of them in their third and fourth and fifth decade, and they're doing fine, thank you.

And the reason I think they started saying this about co-management was to keep the conversation away from landback. Because if you look at landback, it's 100% in co-management, at best, at 50%, then you're starting with half a loaf. And that's a neat trick, folks, but we're not buying it because the first option should be returning the land. Now, there are all sorts of reasons that people wouldn't want the land back or wouldn't want it back until it is reclaimed, until it's cleaned up, like Kaho'olawe.

The people didn't want Kaho'olawe returned immediately. They wanted the Navy to clean it up. It was being used as a bombing range and munitions dump, and there were live ordinances all over the sacred place. And by golly, they cleaned it up, and everything started to thrive on the island. And then it was returned. But that was a long process that started under the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, and then Senator Inouye championed a Kaho'olawe Commission.

And we started out with a Department of Navy that had great leadership. They were the very best of all of the 50 plus agencies implementing the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. The Navy Department was the best. Mitzi Wertheim was the Under Secretary, and she would call up and say, OK, we weighed the national interest against the Indian Religious Freedom interest and went with the Indians on this in this missile base. And what's next? What's our next thing to do? And we always had a list of things that they could do.

So if we dealt with just those two issues, a lot of the other problems that we have would be dealt with because we're addressing the climate crisis and because we're protecting sacred places. You would have more culturally secure Native children and teenagers, young people, because of the strengthening of cultures and them knowing their place in the world and sharing in the traditional knowledge. Everyone talks about traditional knowledge, but a lot of people think it's something that's out of their reach.

When you protect a sacred place, when you revitalize the language, when you make sure that you have water in a drought-stricken place, or you know how to protect yourself from too much water, whatever the situation might be, you're making it safe for the children. You're making it accessible to the children. You're making it possible for young people to be much more secure in themselves and have many more optional images. There's the drunk in the gutter. There's the end of the trail. There's Tonto. We have all sorts of different images now, and some are just full of life and verve and energy.

And I mean, all you have to do is look at Reservation Dogs and see the brilliance that's in Indian country in the writers' room alone and the directors and the actors. And where does that come from? That comes from a lot of years of trying to be the Native people that we would want our ancestors to smile on.

PHILIP DELORIA: Suzan, you couldn't have framed it any better for us as concluding words. Oh, young warrior, right? So I feel like that's your response to Sue's question, right?

ROBERT WARRIOR: Can I just jump in really fast for those who won't be here to hear Dan tomorrow? It may not seem a lot here at Harvard, but for a lot of us, $20 million is real money.

PHILIP DELORIA: Oh, man. Yeah, it's huge. Dan, you know. Exactly.

DANIEL WILDCAT: Thank you.

PHILIP DELORIA: So just two little bits of business. For those who will be joining us tomorrow, we've got a full day in store. We start at 9:00 with a continental breakfast to lure you in, starting at 8:30. So come at 8:30, chat, and munch a little bit of continental food. And then we'll start up at 9:00.

And beginning in just a very few minutes, the Harvard University Native American Program will be hosting a reception at the Harvard Faculty Club. It's at 20 Quincy Street, kind of next to the art museum and the Carpenter Center. I'm sure many of us will be walking over, so we'll kind of walk over in a crew. It's maybe a 10-minute walk or so. And it will be a perfect opportunity for us to continue the discussion. The one person who we won't be able to join in that, Suzan, is you. And so can you all please join me in thanking Suzan for being with us?

SUZAN HARJO: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

PHILIP DELORIA: Thank you so much, Suzan, and thank all of you. And we'll see folks at the reception. And we'll see you tomorrow.

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors-- Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Native American Program, Center for the Study of World Religions, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright, 2022. The President and Fellows of Harvard College.