#  Video: The Impact of God is Red on the Future  

 





November 29, 2022

 

 

On October 7, 2022, Dr. Dan Wildcat (Yuchi/Muscogee) from Haskell Indian Nations University discusses the impact of Deloria's work in the present and in future scholarship. This lecture was part of the 60th anniversary symposium for God is Red at Harvard Divinity School. This lecture series discusses how Deloria's landmark text speaks to the field of religious studies, Native American studies, theology, and environmental studies in the twenty-first century.



 

 

 



 

 

 



 

 

 

Full Transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: God is Red, 50th anniversary symposium. The impact of God is Red in the Future, October 7, 2022.

KELLI MOSTELLER: I want to welcome all of you to our final session of the day entitled, The Impact of God is Red in The Future.

My name is Kelly Mosteller. I am the new executive director of HUNAP. I am very excited to be here and to be the convener for this session, in particular, because when was in grad school, the very first Indigenous scholar that was assigned to me for reading was Vine Deloria.

And so being able to be here with these emerging scholars and hear what they have to say is something very special to me. So I first want to introduce our presenter for this afternoon, Daniel Wildcat. Daniel Wildcat is a Yuchi member of the Muskogee Nation of Oklahoma. He is the Professor of Indigenous and American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nation's University. His service as teacher and administrator at Haskell spans 36 years.

In 2013, he was the Gordon Russell visiting professor of Native American Studies at Dartmouth College. Dr. Wildcat received an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Missouri at Kansas City. In 1994, he partnered with the Hazardous Substance Research Center at Kansas State University to create the Haskell Environmental Research studies Center.

Dr. Wildcat is currently the principal investigator of a $20 million five-year NSF-funded project to develop the Rising Voices Changing Coasts Research Hub at Haskell, a research hub where Indigenous knowledge will be part of the climate science developed to understand climate change impacts on Indigenous coastal peoples of the US and its territories.

He is the author and editor of several books, Power in Place-- Indian Education in America with Vine Deloria Jr; Destroying Dogma, Vine Deloria's Legacy on Intellectual America, with Steve Pavlik; and Red Alert-- Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge. He is also a co-author of the Southern Great Plains chapter of the fourth national climate assessment.

Our commenters this afternoon are all students here at Harvard. I like to think of them as emerging scholars all at different levels who are being very brave today in presenting their thoughts on Vine Deloria's work. First, we have Dylan Nelson. Dylan Nelson is a doctoral candidate in American studies who studies religion and place in the American Midwest. He comes from Scandinavian Lutherans, and his research and teaching seek to critically and creatively engage, having grown up on Sauk and Meskwaki, Ho-Chunk, and Pottawatomie homelands, and to honor the unyielding gifts of extraordinary teachers and mentors.

Lena Tinker. Lena is enrolled and an enrolled member of the Osage Nation in Osage County, Oklahoma. She is from Portland, Oregon. Lena is currently a sophomore at Harvard College where she is incorporating Native studies into her major in history and literature.

Cable Wilkerson. Cable is a second-year PhD student at Harvard's department of history and a citizen of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Born and raised on Southern. Plains of West Texas, they received a BA from Texas Tech University in 2019. Their scholarly interests include understanding the relationship between American Indian policy and the formation of race law and the Third Reich, questions on the nature of indigeneity, the interaction of ideology and aesthetics in settler colonial states. And all of this taken together how the historical memory of genocide is consequently influenced.

And finally, Sarah Sadler is a history PhD candidate specializing in Native American history with a secondary field in studies of women, gender, and sexuality. As an undergraduate at Stanford, she quadruple majored in American studies with honors, history with honors, Iberian and Latin American cultures, and political science as a secondary major, and graduated with distinction. She completed her-- yes.

\[LAUGHS\]

She completed her master's in modern thought and literature in 2017 at Stanford and her master's in history in 2019 at Harvard University. In 2022, she graduated Magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, where she was the vice president of the Harvard Law Review and published pieces on tribal sovereignty, boarding school reparations, and using the Indian canons of construction to strengthen climate change suits. So welcome to all of our panelists and commenters. And I'll invite up Dr. Wildcat.

DANIEL WILDCAT: \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\]

Good afternoon, everyone. How are you? It is late in the afternoon, so I'll be provocative so you don't fall asleep, OK? And in the spirit of my dear friend and mentor Vine Deloria Jr.

And I'm really glad that I was invited by the Divinity School, because Myrna and I, my wife, we have a really good friend. And he's been fortunate to send two of his children to Harvard. And his youngest daughter is graduating this year. And Viera or Viera, Viera Petrovic. And if you've ever met Viera, she's dynamite.

But I was speaking to her just recently when she had revisited. When she had come back. And one of my questions, of course, was about student life at Haskell. And I said, so how's food services at Haskell and at Harvard.

And she goes, well, they're pretty good. They're pretty good. She said, but, yeah it's strange. Food services, we had international week at food services last semester. And she says it was really strange because one day they had Kansas.

I said, what? And I said, well-- so she said-- and I said, well, why did they serve for Kansas' foreign country? And she said, well, it's interesting. I think we had corn and barbecue.

And I said, well, they got it half right anyway. But I thought, for a symposium where place figures prominently, that I just had to share that story. So someone might want to have a talk with food services over there and let them know, although the media often portrays us as if we are on another planet or something, Kansas is a part of the United States of America.

And so anyway, honored to be here. And so I had some written remarks, but I'm not going to read them. What I'd rather do is talk about, I think, the impossible topic of the future of God is Red. What is that? I don't have a clue. No one knows.

But I think if there's any justice in the world-- and boy, that's a good term to use to start this presentation, justice. What does justice look like?

Well, I think, if people-- my hope is that the 50th anniversary edition of God is Red will introduce people to one of the great, not just Indigenous, I'll say, American writers, thinkers of the history of this place. I think the power of Deloria's work is interesting.

We've touched upon this. Everyone has mentioned this and kind of gotten into it at different points in time. But I would say that what's interesting about this work is that, at its root, it's full of-- when you read it carefully, you come up with all these incredible revelations about the sort of context or subtext of the arguments that Vine was making. Robert did a great favor kind of contextualizing when this work was being done, as did Suzanne last night.

But I think, ultimately, one of the first things to point out is that this book wouldn't have been possible but for the fact Deloria was really exploring the fact that he takes the Christian tradition as being as interesting. Some people he would not agree with on anything. But those people who want to argue, hey, the United States is all about the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Vine in a sense kind of puts out an argument saying, guess what? Christianity shapes the Western tradition in a very powerful way. And that's why if you're going to do a critique of colonialism and particularly Western colonialism, you've got to start with Christianity. And I think that's what he did.

And I think what's really radical about this book is-- so in an odd sort of way, it's weird. So those people who get upset-- this is a Christian country founded on Christian morals and stuff. Vine would sort of halfway ironically say, well, you're half right.

You're right about the Christianity part. I don't know if you're right about the morals part. That's not quite-- putting those two together doesn't work too well.

And so I think that really, the power of this work is it's sort of an Indigenous non-modernist critique of Western civilization. It's not post-modernist. It's Indigenous. What does that mean? It means it's about people who still had a connection to a particular place on the planet.

That's what Indigenous is. And I think the strength of his critique is to really suggest when you look at the chapter 4 Thinking in Time and Space, which my students read every semester that I'm teaching, is that it really is this incredibly, incredibly insightful notion of, on one hand, the power of the Western tradition. Because the Western-- so why is the Western tradition so powerful?

Because it is this great-- as we've used the term earlier today, this great homogenizing and universalizing declaration a kind of a worldview. It is the truth. It is the way. It is the light. And if you stand outside that, you must be false. You must be in the darkness, and you've lost your way.

And thank God the pilgrims came to save us. And Dolores laying right into that saying there's a reason that these Christians think that way. They think that way because this whole world view is one that is so globalizing, universalizingly the abstract that once you kind of subscribe to that, it's like-- and once it sort of has seeped into the seams, the roots of all the institutions that are dominant in this society, especially universities, I think you begin to really see what Deloria is challenging.

It's a monumental work in my mind. It's a work that I hope a new generation will discover because in so many ways, it challenges us to reshape how we think and then, most importantly, how we live. Now, I want to say something about this because this has come up several times.

There is no dichotomy. There is no binary in Deloria's worked between being an intellectual and being an activist. In fact, you go through his work and there are numerous places-- Custer died for Your Sins. He's got that section where he says, young Indians, guess what? They're not going to fall into this binary bi-cultural trap.

But if they have it within their ability to speak coherently, consistently, and critically about the world we live in, they could really influence people. They could make changes. This is Deloria and Custer Died for Your Sins.

There's this optimism. Now, Vine, I think in his life would go like myself. Most people see me and they think, oh Dan's the eternal optimist. He's just always so optimistic. And I'm probably partly guilty of that.

But my defense for that is, if you're going to be an education and you're not an optimist, get out.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Get out. You need to find another job. Because what are we doing just telling students, well, you're doomed? It's all over.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Sorry. Time out, folks. And so Vine, I think, is this incredible force. I was thinking another way of doing my introduction was going to quote the Kris Kristofferson song, which he would have appreciated, The Pilgrim. He's a fact, he's fiction, he's partly contradiction. That's Vine Deloria. That is Vine Deloria. He's fact, he's fiction, he's partly contradiction.

And I think he enjoyed that. He didn't want to be put in a niche. He wanted to be respected. We've talked about the trajectory of his life. Yeah, I like that Suzanne tied God is Red with the metaphysics of modern existence and then the world we used to live in. I like that she made that trajectory.

I can take some credit, along with my dear friend David Wilkins, for convincing Sam \[? Akintoye ?\] that they needed to republish the Metaphysics of Modern Existence, because I said, this book needs another airing. I said, I think it was so far ahead of its time people just didn't quite know what to do with it.

And of course, this is one of Vine's great complaints. He always resented the fact that he said Harper and Row was expecting another Indian book. And when I wanted to say something about the world, not just Indians, they didn't want to hear any of it. And they didn't do anything to promote the book.

And I don't know what truth there is to that. I do know that publishers can have very preconceived notions of what you're going to deliver and how they think they're going to market it. So there might be some truth to that.

But I'd like to make four quick points and then we can discuss these and hash these out. So my first point would be this, is that the way I teach, the way I read God is Red is as a major critique of the Western worldview. That it's completely abstract. It's almost-- inherent in that worldview is a manifest destiny kind of logic.

And again, what's interesting-- and Deloria, that's why he wants to talk about peoples in particular places. It's sort of like, how is it these one people on the planet figured that they divined the truth about the world and the way it works and how you understand it? And so he's really just saying, not so. The world is much more complex than that. The world is much more interrelated, non-binary.

If you wanted to put it in a contemporary kind of discourse, again, I would say one way to think about it is that you can read the Deloria's God is Red as a non-modernist critique of Western tradition. And then you could also see it as very much fitting all of the discussions we have about identity just in gender in general and human sexuality and everything else, this kind of rejection of binary kind of ways of thinking about the world.

And I would argue that really, the second contribution he makes is that this is a profound book about the importance of community. Now, what's interesting, what's interesting, community and the God is Red presentation as is justice, not about just us.

It is maybe the earliest critique of an anthropocentric worldview, which is deeply Western-- it's all about us-- to a worldview that says there are people in the world who don't think it's all about us. In fact, we constitute our families, our relatives, and our identities with plants, with animals, with the Earth, with the air, with the water, and we acknowledge them as persons.

Wow! That is a radical view of community. And it's one that we better wake humankind up to soon because right now, folks, humankind has been acting like immature, I need it right now, selfish beings. We look at the world as if it's an ATM machine? How much can we get out of that forest? I love it.

One of my major accomplishments-- in the fourth national climate assessment, we were having a discussion about, we got to say something about wetlands. And I said, you bet we have to say something about wetlands. And this scientist says, yeah, we need to talk about working wetlands and the economic value of working wetlands. And I just couldn't resist. I had to say, well, I like the lazy wetlands.

\[LAUGHTER\]

I like those that are just there.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And you know what? There was this long pause. There was this long pause. And he goes, yeah, let's not do that. \[LAUGHS\] One small victory.

\[LAUGHTER\]

OK? I love my ecosystems, services, ecologists. They're my relatives too. But I have to tell them not everything gets reduced to a dollar sign. You've got to understand this.

And this has come up in the context of the talk. Why is it Vine never launched into a headlong critique of capitalism? Why? Because he knew that was a non-starter. Politics in America, OK maybe it's changing with your generation. Things change, thank goodness.

But if you read Vine, that's one of these weird subtexts. I mean, how can you argue that nature is full of relatives and then walk out the room and look at that as full of resources again? You can't. So I would argue the second major theme is he gave us a view of community where we could understand. We don't lives in a world full of resources, we live in a world full of relatives.

And by the way, isn't that what modern evolution and ecology teaches? Now, not in a way that Vine would completely agree with. But as a general notion, we're all connected, we're all related. No argument.

And what's the advantage of this view? The advantage of this view, as our dear sister Braiding Sweetgrass has argued, that the advantage is that we recognize that in this ecological community that we're a part of-- by the way, we're not in charge and it's not all about us-- we actually can learn something about how to be better human beings if we just started paying attention again.

So in some traditions, they talk about our elder brothers and sisters, and they're referring to plants and animals. They've been here longer than we have. Now this is-- so again, this is an expression of deep ecology. Interestingly enough, if I looked this up. I think the first publication on deep ecology came out the same year as God is Red.

Now, this would have been one year after Earth Day. Our first Earth Day was 1972. By the way, is there any record of Vine having any correspondence-- what was the-- excuse me-- the congressman's name who started Earth Day? I should know this. Anyone remember that?

Gaylord Nelson. See, that's a Harvard student right there.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Gaylord Nelson. Yeah, all right. Gaylord Nelson, right. It's interesting. I always wondered did he have any-- it'd be interesting, OK? I guess I'll have to save up my money to visit the Yale archives to see what I can find out. Was there some correspondence between Vine and Gaylord?

Because here is-- so first point, what did I say? Well, first point, it's an incredible critique of Western civilization. Second one, it's a reconstitution of a sense of community in which humans no longer live among resources, but we live among relatives.

Now, take that seriously. And what does that mean? That means tell your institutions to not do land acknowledgments unless you are ready to accept the responsibilities that go with acknowledging your relatives. Can't be a check the box activity.

You check the box-- oh, we checked the box. We got a landing acknowledgment. We're going to dutifully say that, and then we're just going to go out, continue living among resources and extracting wealth out of those resources? No.

So when you look at that, that opens the door to, again, another thing that comes out in God is Red. And I wish he had maybe given more emphasis to this. And that is, in a way, he's advocating in God as Red the need to couple unalienable rights with unalienable responsibilities. Because if you don't have the responsibilities coupled with the rights, they are groundless, literally groundless.

And I think just though-- you think about the power of those two points. You want a worldview shift. You want to Indigenous your thinking. Think about what it would mean to leave this building tonight and say, I'm going to quit acting as if I live among a world full of resources, and I'm going to live my life as a good relative among my kin, my different-than-human kin. And I'm going to recognize that means I have responsibilities.

You guys all understand this. I mean, if the only time you ever go to see your family is when you got your hand out, at a certain time, if the road's long enough and they see you coming, they can turn off the lights and lock the doors and pretend they're not home. But isn't that exactly the way humankind looks at the natural world?

So again, this counterpoint-- and again, these are fine distinctions and you can probably lump this in with this critique of the Western tradition. I think ultimately what he's presenting in God is Red is a very non-anthropocentric view of our human experience and suggesting even our sense of the sacred.

If it's going to have any true meaning in this life, in this place, wherever that place is, we have to literally ground it. And to me, this is the real power of God is Red. And this is what he was saying. Indigenous people still recognize this, that justice is not just about us.

So I think we've got all of these layers in Deloria. Now, the last point I would make has already been made. And it's a great point. And that is that I believe when you get to the end of this work, that last chapter-- and I just finished an afterword to the 50th anniversary edition Fulcrum is going to publish. And honored to be asked to write an afterword.

And I said, just to read the last three sentences of the last three paragraphs, the lead sentences. And that tells you what he's really thinking about. Who will listen to the lands? Who will pay attention? And therein lies the sauce for human redemption not in any metaphysical abstract sphere of consciousness.

And for Deloria, this was a possibility. But it was a possibility grounded literally in the Earth, on the Earth that we are a part of. And I really-- my hope for this 50th anniversary edition is that all of the people who are now listening to the Earth-- and there are a lot.

So this has struck me as interesting is that I believe-- and this is what was so frustrating about Vine being one of his students and trying to build on what he did. Every time I thought I had gotten a new idea, I'd start talking to Vine. He say, oh, yeah, you need to read this thing I wrote for you.

And I'm going like, oh, my gosh, he already wrote this. And so it was tough. But I did come up with a few kind of embellishments. And I think one of the things that I've tried to use in my work is this idea of we need to understand our lives in a nature culture nexus. This is the other beautiful thing.

For Vine, there was no tension between nature and culture for Indigenous people. Our culture was emergent out of the lands, the oceans where we lived. And that is an incredible gift. We've lost that.

Think of how we think of human culture today. We think of human culture as something we do to change nature, to control nature. I think it's a serious misstep. OK, did we modify landscapes? Certainly.

But this is the question, what is the criteria? Why would you do something like that? And how do you do that? Well, first of all, I think-- and I wish I had-- Sam \[? Shenton ?\] and I were kicking around the title of my book Red Alert.

And unfortunately, with Red Alert-- Saving the Planet with Indigenous Knowledge-- well, if that doesn't sound anthropocentric, I don't know what does. But you have to read the book. Because if you read the book, you realize that what I say is Indigenous knowledge is non-anthropocentric.

And by the way, the background for that-- and this always bugged me. I got a chance-- I was invited-- remember Al Gore's 666 event, global event about global climate change? And I got invited by my good friend Jose Barrero who was at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Museum, to come share the stage with Al Gore.

So I wrote out a nice three- or four-minute thing I was going to deliver. And what bugged me about SOS, 666, Save Ourselves, is what bugged me about that is, oh, so we're again only interested in ourselves again, huh? And so I thought, well, I've got to do a counter to that.

And again, I just changed-- wish I had a little different title today because the title can be misleading unless you read the book, and then you understand that saving the planet with Indigenous knowledge is not just human knowledge. When I think of co-production of knowledge-- and I apologize for missing the great socializing I could have done over lunch with all of you. But I was in an NSF call and in an NSF meeting.

And the meeting is about this very topic. And I keep reminding them that convergence and co-production of knowledge is not just a human co-production, but it is an ecosystem co-production of knowledge. Well, NSF's finally said, well, let's put up or shut up. So they gave me and a bunch of my colleagues $20 million to try to show them that Indigenous people understand something about what's going on the planet.

And I hope Vine took a puff off that Pall Mall and said, well, Wildcat, let's see what you can do now. \[LAUGHS\] Well, I'm not going to do it, right? It's not about me. That grant who was all kinds of partners-- National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA, Scripps Oceanic institute, and then six or seven major universities.

And it's hard work. It's going to be hard work and it's not going to be I think what NFF thinks it's going to be because it's going to be Indigenous. And this will be-- we're going to have to do some educating. But I'm just honored to be on the stage today with Dylan, Sarah, Lena, and Cable. This is a great people to share this stage with because I'm just going to give you a final piece of advice that Vine told me. And I can hear him in my ear right now.

He says, you know, these young Indians, good, they're lot of good talkers. He says but they never write anything.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And he says, you got to write. Now this goes back to this intellectual engagement. Vine really held the word in such high esteem. Even if he used the colonizers language, he was careful about the words he used. So write, don't just talk. Write.

And it's imperfect. It can't convey everything that we want. But it's the way we communicate and it's useful.

The last thing I'll tell you is a story about myself and Vine. So when he asked me to write Power in Place with him, I got about three chapters done. I thought I better-- \[? Myrn ?\] was saying you better send those to Vine and have Vine look at them.

So I got all excited and I hit the Send button. Had three testers, three chapters. Next morning I get back the shortest email I ever got from Vine. And it said, Daniel, who is going to read this? Question mark.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And I thought, oh my god, this can't be good. I was telling \[? Myrn-- ?\] she says-- \[? Myrn ?\] says, you better call Vine. I said, well, OK, I better call Vine. Come on, I said, Vine, I saw your comments about my paper. And so what do you mean, who's going to read this?

Some of the best advice I ever got. He said, Daniel, I a lot of you young Indians really like those big words-- ontology, epistemology, paradigm.

\[LAUGHTER\]

He said, that's academic writing. And he said, if we want to write a book that can really have a consequence in our communities, he said, we need to try to express these complicated things in ordinary language, non-PhD language. And I thought about that.

I've tried to take it to heart in all of my writing. My writing isn't academic writing. Because when you think about it, you can put all those big words in there. And Harvard Library and Yale and Dartmouth, they'll buy your books. And if you're lucky, maybe six scholars will read it carefully.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And maybe one of them will write a PhD on it.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But if you write books like Custer Died for Your Sins, God is Red, We Talk, You Listen, people that aren't scholars are going to read them and they're going to learned something. And so I just share that with you. It's all right to use those big words every--

So that's what he finally told me. He said, well, Dan, you can leave a couple of those big words in there. He said, but I'm just saying, think about if your aunt and uncle could read this book and understand it. So I went back and made some revisions.

And it's still not perfect. My students still say, well, you still have some big words in there, Dr. Wildcat. Well, I'm struggling. I'm trying to do better.

I've talked too long. I'll just leave you with those thoughts. But God is Red in the future, I hope it has an incredible-- but will this be the third, fourth life of the book? And it will be young people like you who write the reviews, who read it, who think about it deeply that I think we'll see if it has a vibrant life and a consequence for our future.

Either way, the planet's already telling people we've got to change. They're going to-- and a lot of people are figuring that out without reading God is Red. But I think that be the better for reading God is Red because they'll understand just how difficult the problems we face are, how set they are in the institutions we move through daily.

So I'm getting that \[INAUDIBLE\] from my work, Dan, cut it off. So I'm going to cut it off and just--

\[LAUGHTER\]

\--sit down and shut up. OK.

\[APPLAUSE\]

DYLAN NELSON: Hello. Well, hello. Thank you so much. This is an intense honor to be speaking here, to be on the stage with all of you, everyone in the audience. And thank you so much to Ann and Phil for this opportunity. I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint you both right away by relying on the written word and by talking about vocation instead of my dissertation.

\[LAUGHTER\]

So in God is Red, Deloria describes how revelatory experiences with the land, fasting, and participation in ceremonies grant practitioners of tribal traditions a vocation to serve their people. To the extent that I have been granted a vocation, it has been shaped not by such experiences, but substantially by reading Vine Deloria Jr. And from, that I'd like to outline two dimensions of my vocation as a practitioner of American Studies that I hope will be of service to my people.

And here is where I'll allow myself one abstract statement that I hope I sufficiently explain later.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But my people being Scandinavian Lutherans from the Midwest, service looks something like, supporting and exceedingly sincere people to appreciate and integrate the ironic T's of survivance by contemplating the possibility of totemic associations on this continent. So the first dimension of vocation for me is pragmatism, as understood in the American Studies tradition, which views philosophy as a form of cultural criticism and privileges practice over systematic thought and the elaboration of concepts.

So this finds Vine Deloria alongside people like William James, John Dewey, and Jane Addams, but also the prophetic pragmatism of Cornel West in what might be called the ecowomanist pragmatism of Tiya Miles. And God is Red made it impossible to ignore the mutuality of pragmatism and place.

In my 30th anniversary edition of the book, The Passage That Keeps on Giving, comes on page 121. Quote, "Indian tribes combine history and geography so that they have a sacred geography, that is to say, every location within their original homeland has a multitude of stories that recount the migrations, revelations, and particular historical incidents that cumulatively produced the tribe in its current condition."

Sacred geographies intensely complex and emotionally dense are sustained by and sustain pragmatism. Centuries of systematic murder, ethnic cleansing, and Indigenous confinement and erasure in concert with industrialization and decadence have overlaid a new multitude of stories upon those homelands, producing what might best be called profane geographies. I have come to understand American studies as a critical, imaginative, and material inquiry into profane geographies with the pragmatic intention of undermining their transmission.

And for those of us in American studies and affiliated fields, I think our studies of sacred and profane geographies should equip us to become what Karen \[? Holton ?\] calls, quote, "full participants and cultural stakeholders in our own communities." And this entails a rejection of purposelessness across academic protocols, training, and products.

There's lots of good examples of this in the Boston area. There's the African-American Trail Project at Tufts, the Public History Program at UMass Amherst, and the Institute for New England Native American Studies at UMass Boston. These engaged-- or public scholarship forms of public scholarship do certainly exist at Harvard. But in my experience, that's not what universities like this one are most interested in or best at supporting.

And I think maybe being honest about that and practicing other forms of institutional humility is how Harvard and some of its graduate students will contribute to the futures that God is Red helped enact. I don't have especially clear ideas what this looks like, but I personally would love to hear people's ideas about how institutions like Harvard might help bolster the already superior capacities of tribal, state, and community colleges to support place-based research and teaching.

And another thing that might require rethinking is the nomadism that is encouraged of graduate students in early career scholars. Obviously, people have really complicated trajectories. And the demands of and the consequences of nomadism are not applied evenly.

And I also don't have a good understanding of the economic forces that drive precarity and administrative decisions. But it's still hard for me to see how prevailing patterns of academic mobility support the long-term discernment of the land's rhythms. And more often, I found myself wondering if such practices mostly stabilize the types of whiteness found in Deloria's rebuke of American Protestantism and secularism unmarked by place ethnicity, class or inappropriate religious expressions.

It's one capable of tailoring itself to any imaginable space without repaying the infrastructure and nourishment of places. But also for a lot of people, discourages kin obligations which people with wealth and a plastic anti-culture can afford but others can't.

And so the tone of these last few remarks suggests the second vocational dimension that God is Red supplied for me, which is an aspiration to take the prophetic voice seriously. Towards the end of his life, Deloria explicitly described his early religious writings as fulfilling part of the prophet's task, offering, as part of condemnation, the view of a more profound way of being.

And above all, this is what I hope to bring to my people and to an American studies practice. To wear their condemnation with grace, not with the ecstatic guilt that Deloria found among Lutherans in the 1970s or the chauvinist pride of every era, but with something like repentance, which demands better listening followed by in inwardly directed action.

Profaned geographies do not exist elsewhere. They run through each of our hearts and our forgetfulness. So the forgetfulness of so many of us of where and who we come from. So some form of return to the region, suburbs, and small towns that raised us, learning to cherish their ordinariness and name the particularities and peculiarities, rediscovering the very old stories and devotional practices that nourished our ancestors, reaching towards initiations into healthy and mature masculinities, knowing where our food and water come from, and listening to rocks and rivers.

This is the more profound way of being that God is Red illustrates for Americans whose lives resemble mine. And among the possibilities, such a way of being offers is something like reconciliation and eventually perhaps revelatory experience with the land, at which point my people might become minor partners in the ongoing Indigenous Renaissance on this continent. Thank you very much.

\[APPLAUSE\]

LENA TINKER: Well, thank you, Dylan. And thank you, Daniel Wildcat. I feel deeply humbled to be in this space with all of you. I was talking to my dad on the phone earlier. I was kind of nervous, the only undergraduate sitting here with all of you today.

And he gave me a fan down over the phone in this virtual word world we're living in. And I was grateful for that. But he reminded me of something that the Osage people say that I was feeling a lot today, which is this term, \[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH\]. And that means, take pity on us. We're too small.

And so as I'm sitting here in a room and I've been listening over the past day and a half to everything that everyone has said, I feel that deeply. So thank you for letting me be a part of this conversation. And I'm excited to talk with all of you for the next hour or so about God is Red in the future.

But with all of that said, I'll start laying out just a few things that I was thinking about as I was reading this book. And it started with an introduction that my uncle, Dr. Tink Tinker wrote 20 years ago, when he said that one of the major contributions of this book is that it seriously stirs the pot.

And I think--

\[LAUGHTER\]

\--yeah. I think it's very evident after listening to everyone talk that this is something that still is deeply true today. And as I was reading God is Red for the first time this past summer, what was amazing to me was realizing that someone was talking about things 50 years ago that have still become and are becoming the defining issues of my generation.

That's the climate crisis, the restriction of abortion, mental health issues. The list goes on and on. My generation is experiencing a kind of hopelessness that can be found rooted in settler colonial practices. And I talk a lot of that to those-- we have come of age in a world that every year seems closer and closer to dying.

Every summer, my family organizes their camping trips around wildfire smoke. I've watched places that I grew up in, that my parents grew up, in and that my grandparents raised their families in burn over the past few years. Every so frequently we're reading in the news about new species that become endangered or extinct. We're living through a global pandemic.

And we have protested and marched and walked out and spoken out again and again for years around the world, but we haven't seen a lot of action. In fact, a lot of things that we took for granted to be solutions, like the United States participating in global climate solutions, have actually been revoked under recent leadership.

And I'm left with this question, this overwhelming question of, what are we to do? What are we to do? And I think that Vine Deloria Jr lays out a solution in his work. And that was what was so powerful for me to read this as a young person.

And it reminds me again of something that my Osage elders relate to us and that my auntie has often shared with me, that we must be focused on moving forward. And so I left me with some questions. What would it mean for our generation if we stop taking for granted how bad things are? In the vein of your talk, what would it mean if we resented ourselves on optimism?

For Vine Deloria, the answer for that is clear. If we can center ourself on space and land and our interactions with the world and in our spiritual beliefs and practices, this is possible. A quote really stood out to me that I'll share with all of you from chapter 15.

Quote, "The imminent and expected destruction of the life cycle of world ecology can be prevented by a radical shift in outlook from our present naive conception of this world as a testing ground of abstract morality to a more mature view of the universe as a comprehensive matrix of life forms. Making the shift in viewpoint is essentially religious, not economic or political."

This reminds me a lot of what you were saying, Daniel Wildcat, throughout your conversation. And I think what it has meant for me is that we have to turn to Native solutions to heal. This is a really complicated task, because I think has been brought out in a lot of panels before us. How can we incorporate Indigenous knowledge in a meaningful way?

That's also not extractive. That doesn't allow non-Native people to take that knowledge in a way that's appropriate. There's a lot of issues and complications that go along with that, but it's a task that I think we also were all trying to take up.

Vine Deloria Jr points out that it's not practical to convert all non-Indian people to thinking about native belief systems. But we do need to create a new cultural reality. And in those final chapters, I felt again and again this call to action. This what are we to do that he's attempting to answer.

And how do we get there? That's the real question. And I think it's something that I certainly do not think that I can point out solutions for and none of us really can. But there's a few things I've noticed and I've been paying attention to that I-- I don't always a lot about these things, but I do think that they're helpful in guiding our way forward and things that I will share with you briefly as solutions, potential solutions, things we can look at.

One of those things is putting native people in charge of land. I think a lot of us have celebrated Deb Haaland, Chuck Sams, the first native director of the National Park Service, and Deb Haaland, of course, the first Native Secretary of the Interior. There's a today a potential to put native people in power in a way that legitimates native knowledge and also makes it a part of our national culture and identity. Native leadership at the center of movements is something that we've always called for, and it's something that we have to continue to demand.

Another potential solution can be found in education. What would happen to our future generations if we could deconstruct the classroom to give students access to nature, where they could learn about the relationships within natural spaces? What if curricula were to teach and not just about the colonial history of how a place came to be within the United States, but instead, about the relationship between local Indigenous people on the land that students occupy?

In my tribe, others often say that you can't learn how to be Osage from a book. That's something that was echoed to us last night from Suzan Harjo. And I know that I'm grounded in Osage from the time I have spent there, participating in ceremonies and visiting with relatives.

I have noticed that many of my non-native friends and acquaintances crave something like that, which Deloria talks about as a search for authenticity. So the question that I'll leave off with before we really can dig into things with the rest of this discussion is, how do we foster experiences for all people that could help them to nurture a spatial consciousness to allow the Earth to teach the next generation how to live? Thank you.

\[APPLAUSE\]

CABLE WILKERSON: I don't know if I'll be able to follow up.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Thank you all so much for a wonderful introduction, Dr. Wildcat. And some wonderful thoughts from my incredible colleagues. And yeah, I read God is Red in my undergraduate. And I remember not being as careful a reader as I am called to be now as a PhD student.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And so I had the great pleasure of re-reading d last year. And as I've been going through my classes, and I've been meeting colleagues who are the future generations of historians across the field of American history, not just folks who are doing native history in particular, I've come to see, I think, more acutely just how native people are not often considered.

In whatever way you can imagine, in a very serious way, there is a lack of training that I think most students sort of find themselves with when they don't have the ability to understand who native people are. And that's quite a serious problem when you're writing a history book about Native people, right? Or even involve Native people tangentially.

And so when I read this book-- or I should say re-read this book, but let's just say read this book since I didn't give it such careful reading the first time--

\[LAUGHTER\]

\--I was struck. I was struck by the very fact that there is a deep critique of not only Western religion, but how Western religion positions itself in relation to nature. So the idea at least within the problem of creation regarding the corruption of nature in Genesis. But then also that man has dominion over the land.

And when we think about that in relation to how Native people are positioning themselves within their environment, how it is not that they have dominion over the land because they have been created last, rather, it is that they have more to learn that we have more to learn from our older relatives. That is a fundamental reorientation that I think I've tried to impress upon my colleagues who have been gracious enough to listen to my rants and my raves, and of which I believe Sarah might be able to confirm.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And I see this as being a pedagogical tool, I think. I've tried to bring this into the classroom especially in moments where I felt that it is relevant to, at the very least, hold in contrast to work that I don't feel is representative of what I think should constitute a better set of approaches-- let's say that-- for the historian to undertake.

And I think this is just a baseline for folks to be able to just conceptualize how different Native people are considering themselves in relation to the world, in relation to each other. And for that, it's been immensely useful. It's been wonderful to dive back in advance of this wonderful symposium. And it's been wonderful to continue to engage in a community of scholars who I have come to find so willing to engage with this material, and in ways that I feel privileged to be able to partake in a conversation that I am, in some cases, facilitating.

And that is what I see the future of this book doing, where we're able to bring in a whole generation of folks who perhaps not only are non-Native, but folks who have no idea how to approach Native people in history to be able to write about them, to be able to write their stories, and to be able to now think about them seriously and genuinely. It's a true privilege, much as it is a privilege to sit here with so many wonderful scholars and people. And for that, I am quite thankful. And so with that, I'll go ahead and pass it off to Sarah.

\[APPLAUSE\]

SARAH SADLER: Thank you so much. I can't follow-up on these really fantastic comments, but I will give a few short notes. We've covered many things that Vine Deloria Jr was-- visionary, academic, intellectual. Another one of them is a lawyer.

\[LAUGHTER\]

So I read God is Red before law school. And actually, post-law school, I've gotten different things out of it than I did prior to entering. So in the intervening time when I went back and looked, one thing that really sticks out to me is actually the appendices, which often in grad school, you're so stuck on the main text, you may just be like, OK, in the back.

But going back through them, I think that they are truly an amazing commentary on the past and aspiration of the future for treaty rights. The appendices vary between the different editions. I can't wait to see what's in the fourth edition as well.

But to start with the first, and particularly the first and the third stuck out to me. And the original appendix 1, I'll actually read to you in full because it's relatively short. And I think we have some time. And it's worth the read.

So it is a proclamation to the great white father and to all of his people, written in 1969 by the American Indian Center after the center was burdened down and right before the occupation of Alcatraz. So I will read it to you shortly.

"We, the Native Americans, reclaim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of All-American Indians by right of discovery. We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land and hereby offer the following treaty. We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for $24 in glass beads and red cloth, a precedent set by the white man's purchase of a similar island around 300 years ago. We know that $24 in trade goods for 16 acres is more than what was paid for Manhattan Island, which was sold. But we know that the land values have risen over the years. Our offer is $1.24 per acre. And is greater than the $0.47 per acre the white men are now paying the California Indians for their land. We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of the land for their own to be held in trust by the American Indian Affairs and by the Bureau of Caucasian affairs to hold in perpetuity for as long as the sun shall rise in the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our lifeways in order to help them achieve our level of civilization, and thus raise them and all their white brothers out from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men. We feel the so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian reservation, as determined by the white man's own standards. By this, we mean, this place resembles most Indian reservations. And that one, it is isolated for modern facilities and without adequate means of transportation. Two, it has no fresh running water. Three, it has inadequate sanitation facilities. Four, there are no oil or mineral rights. Five, there is no industry and so unemployment is very great. Six, there is no health care facilities. Seven, the soil is rocky and nonproductive. The land does not support game. Eight, there are no educational facilities. Nine, the population has always exceeded the land base. 10, the population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others. Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that the ships from all over the world entering the Golden Gate would see the Indian Land and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians."

So there's a lot happening in this appendix, especially after we end with the three sentences that Dr. Wildcat read to us earlier in this lecture. So as I mentioned before, this is around that occupation of Alcatraz that lasted for 18 months. It is a very powerful way of conveying the history of treaties and the impact that they've had on Native communities. But it's both humorous and deadly serious.

It articulated grievances. It stated demands. It makes fun of the noble Indian and savage dichotomy and evoked the Doctrine of Discovery, which was so destructive in the history of Native land dispossession. But I also think it reflected what Leslie Marmon Silko described Vine Deloria's other work in her introduction to the third edition, which is a special sort of defiance that depended on the warmth of Indian humor and the rule of international law.

So I think that the dwelling on that, this is present throughout all of his work. And the inflection of law even on in text, where it's not particularly salient, I think is always there. But it does show the sort of sense that if we are going to develop Indian law and make it this case internationally, we need to grab attention. We need to think about how we're going to restore treaty making and bring it to the forefront of everything we do. And I think that's one of the reasons why it's located in \[? appendix ?\] one of the first edition.

But it's interesting that actually in the third edition, it's replaced with a new thing. Also from around that period of time in 1972, it's actually it's not written by a Native person. It's written by a white Supreme Court justice in 1972. And it's a dissent in Sierra Club v Morton.

So Vine Deloria recognized this as quote, "The first major effort in the history of American jurisprudence to incorporate contemporary understandings of nature into law. The opinion itself recognized that lands, rivers, non-human things might in the future have legal power to be represented in courts." And the opinion itself suggests that, quote, "Those who have the intimate relation with the inanimate object about to be injured, polluted, or otherwise despoiled as its legitimate spokesmen can bring claims on behalf of those."

So it's interesting that its inclusion in the third edition 2003 isn't really explained at all in detail except in a brief sort of prelude. But I think it's important that it's there. And it shows sort of-- I don't know what will be in the fourth edition or the fifth edition or the sixth edition. But the evolution in thinking about where the sort of treaty making and advocacy on behalf of non-human relatives is going to be in the future, not just in federal courts, but also in tribal courts.

So now the Yurok tribe, for instance, has recognized the personhood of rivers. And that is defensible and the tribal court. Rivers can bring suits. People can bring suits on behalf of them.

And the White Earth Band, for instance, is also sued on behalf of its relative, wild rice, in a suit against the Minnesota natural resources department for permitting a pipeline through the waters that belong to the wild rice. And so we're starting to see some of those opportunities to defend non-human relatives via the law sort of borne out in a way I think that's anticipated by the inclusion in the appendix of what would otherwise seem like a relatively old opinion that had not garnered sort of much development. But that sort of jurisprudence is now happening in tribal courts.

And then finally, I just want to say in the introduction to second edition, Deloria commented that the point of the occupation of Alcatraz and other protests was to have a structure, a set of relationships in which all entities participate. And he described the religious view of the world as one that seeks to locate our species within the fabric of life that constitutes the natural world, the land, and its forms of life.

He also recognized though that today our society is still at a primitive aesthetic stage of appreciating the personality of our lands. But we have the potential to move beyond mere aesthetics and come to some deep religious realizations, the role of sacred places in human life. The law, as he noted even in the second edition, still only really recognizes aesthetic injury, economic injury, all these other things.

I think tribal courts and Native lawyers are having the opportunity to show that it's not just aesthetic injury, it's not just economic injury, it's a much deeper spiritual injury not just to humans, but to our non-human relatives as well. So yeah, I'm looking forward to starting the discussion. Thank you both so much, Dr. Wildcat, for kicking us off. And I'll hand it back to you.

\[APPLAUSE\]

DANIEL WILDCAT: There's hope. There's hope. You listen to the voices of these young people, there's hope. And yeah, I mean, I think in the comments about this work being inspirational, or maybe it's an aspirational statement on the part of Vine. But certainly, I think it is a tremendous example of it is a useful tool for pedagogy.

And I think that the one thing that I think is interesting to think about-- and I just want to comment. Because listening to you four beautiful young people made me think about this. So we're back to this deal about experience and about the word, about the form that our words take.

And as serious as we take them, we always know that somehow they're often insufficient in communicating what we want to communicate in terms of our feelings, in terms of our emotions. There are things we can't put into words. And so I thought about this particularly after Suzanne's remarks last night.

I think I would put forth the proposition that Vine's real teaching was embodied in who he was, the many avenues of different activities he was involved in. And he told me something that I've tried to take to heart in every grant I've wrote. But he was really responsible what, 30, maybe 40 years ago, anyway, when WSSA was the major place where he wanted to take his students, the Western Social Science Association.

And that was when Robert Thomas and N. Scott Momaday and Vine were all at University of Arizona. And he told me something. He said, Dan, if you write grants, make sure you put in travel money for your students to go to conferences. He says, your young students need to go to conferences and see scientists, scholars, academics do their work because they have an unrealistic notion of what that is.

He says, once they go there and see them, they're going to go like, oh, they're people just like I am. And so he tried to practice what he preached. He'd hate for me using that term, preaching. He was not a proselytizer, but he was a prophet, indeed.

And so when I referred to that song The Pilgrim, I wasn't thinking about the pilgrims. I was thinking that person who's on a spiritual journey, a pilgrimage in that sense. And that's who Vine was. His whole life was a pilgrimage.

And he modeled-- I think-- and tried to embody in his life what that meant. Give you suggestions on how you might do it. But always very humble and always very humble. And I sense that with all of you. That was something that really came through.

So you've had some good teachers here because humility is something that often I think is missing in the academy. And we'd be much better off if we had faculty in general who were much more humble than they tend to be in the classroom.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Just my thought. I try to be humble, too, right \[? Myrn? ?\] She's going like, yeah, really. No, she's-- you got to have someone around-- a significant other to kind of keep you humble. So she does a good job at that.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Anyway, those are my comments. You guys have questions. Are we going to-- So how's this going to work? We're going to open it up? You guys have questions?

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, I think we're going to open up for questions for the panel. And if we have any from Zoom, please let us know.

SPEAKER 4: This is way too much fun.

DANIEL WILDCAT: \[LAUGHS\]

JUDITH LE BLANC: My name is Judith Le Blanc. I'm a citizen of the Caddo Nation, and I have a Boston accent.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Can't get over it.

\[LAUGHTER\]

My family's names are \[INAUDIBLE\]. And I'm the executive director at the Native Organizers Alliance, which is a national Native organizing thing that's been around for over a decade, born out of the grassroots mobilizing to support the Indian Health \[? Improvement ?\] Plan, which was rolled into the ACA.

And then, I have one other title to draw on the end, which is something that is a commentary about the Academy. And that is that I'm a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School here. But I'm only the second Indian since 1966. 1966. So when the young folks said that we're often ignored, excluded, sidelined, erased, just another example, just another example.

At-- so I'm just very honored to be here and to be in the presence of many of you whose books and articles I've written. And I am 70. So I grew up under Vine's leadership, so to speak, but did not have the pleasure of knowing him, just his books. And his books, if you didn't read them in the late '60s and early '70s, and in the '70s, you didn't read them, you couldn't consider yourself a serious Native organizer.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Period. Full stop.

DANIEL WILDCAT: Yeah.

JUDITH LE BLANC: And that's the truth. And every one of us have lugged those books from apartment to apartment our whole lifetime, first editions.

\[LAUGHTER\]

First editions. So I want to ask you all a question because it's something that we grapple with in our work with tribal leaders, many community leaders, traditional leaders in trying to make some social change happen in this mad movement, moment we're in, where we are recognized as politically significant. So that recognition is growing. Thank you \[INAUDIBLE\], which was a struggle, for example, to be included in this administration. Nothing comes without struggle. So my question is this long-winded question. I'm supposed to end with \[INAUDIBLE\]. No? As in, this is my question.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And this is my question. We grapple in the leadership development training that we do with the concept that indigeneity is not about being Indian. It's not like funding. It's not federal recognition but, in fact, a way of thinking, a framework. And that there are certain concepts that are global because our belief systems grow out of our relationship with the natural world.

And that therefore, concepts of relationality, of all in relationship, all things being in relationship, the natural world being-- that we're all in relationship. And therefore, how we walk, how we move in the present is the only time \[INAUDIBLE\] together. It is the only moment. And so what we do matters.

How do you feel about that? And I would also like to get the input of those who've spoken before because the question about whether or not we write down our ceremonies and people study them is a false question in my opinion. I think it's, how do we share our understandings, our framework for understanding every minute? Indigeneity is not about being Indian. It's a way of thinking. So what's your reaction? What do you think?

DANIEL WILDCAT: I'll give you a quick answer. And it's just mine. And it's honest, therefore, probably wrong.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But I think you've raised the critical point. And the point is, by the way, and I think this is one that by you asking that question, that confirms for me you did read Vine's books very, very carefully.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Because Vine is-- one of the ways that he's-- there are some people that would be dismissive in the Academy of Vine's work as Vine is comfortable making generalizations. There are people in the Academy who think you can't make any generalizations at all. And you must start making generalizations, then you're just stepping right into it.

But he's making generalizations that are inductive out of all these years of experience with many Native people. And as he says in his later works, this is really a metaphysics he's developing, an Indigenous metaphysics. And so I think he would fundamentally say, yeah, I think that is one useful way to think of indigeneity. But I think he'd also say, but remember when you go into federal courts, that didn't count.

And the courts, we're in a colonial court system. And it's still a colonial system. And Indian law is about us. It's not laws we've created. And so I think he would agree with your premise. Although, I think he'd say, you're going to have complications with tribal leaders who are going to tell you they don't care how you think. They want to know if you've got your enrollment card. And that's it's That's the bottom line. Yeah, so it's a contested terrain. But a deep-- a good question. Thank you. That's my response. Anyone else?

\[LAUGHTER\]

SPEAKER 1: Yeah, so I'll tell a story, if that's all right. Yeah? So over the summer, I had the privilege of going back to the Citizen Pottawatomie Nation and working with our language department, working specifically with Robert Collins and a young man whose name is \[INAUDIBLE\]. And he's just 16 years old, and entirely homeschooled, and is almost fluent in Bodéwadmimwen, entirely self-taught, memorizes dictionaries, is creating his own dictionary.

DANIEL WILDCAT: Cool.

SPEAKER 1: Just listens to hours of recorded material from elders that is just absolutely fried because it's from the 1920s and is working to try to transcribe what he is hearing. And I got to watch him do this work. And he's just 16. And I remember him telling me about just what he does in a day. That when he wakes up, he gets up before dawn. And he puts tobacco down. And he prays. And he walks. And he tries to then, of course, do language work, which never seems to stop for him because he is just so passionate about it.

But the way he treated people, the way he interacted with the world around him, the way he thought about the world, it to me, I think, proved what your question entails, that it's not about blood quantum. It's not about the fact that he was enrolled or unenrolled or who his family is.

It's that he has committed himself to understanding this way and helping us and our people figure out how to follow him. And it was such an inspiration to be part of that and watch that happen because that is the future, that. And it was remarkable. Forgive me if I didn't necessarily answer your question. But that's what immediately came to mind.

DANIEL WILDCAT: Yeah.

SPEAKER 2: I think we have time for one more question, if anyone-- yes? Coming behind you with a microphone.

AUDIENCE: Hello. Thank you for your remarks and presentation. So I had as an idea that-- or well, a question about something you said about universities. You talked about land acknowledgments. And I wonder if you have seen initiatives that would be interesting to replicate at other spaces to make sure that universities or, in general, learning spaces move into the right direction to acknowledging Indigenous students, faculty, knowledges, and communities. Thank you.

DANIEL WILDCAT: At this point, I'd have to say, I think, so land acknowledgments is a fairly recent thing. And so at this point, it's hard to tell the extent of which there's some efficacy and some mortal sense of responsibility in that act of acknowledging the land. I think it's interesting because most tribal colleges, many tribal colleges, don't have land acknowledgments. And they say, we acknowledge the land every day we get up.

It's like my favorite response to, how do you celebrate Thanksgiving day? And I always tell people in my house, every day is Thanksgiving day. We don't have one day a year where we do Thanksgiving. I say, well, what do you do for Indigenous Peoples' Day? I said, in my house, every day is Indigenous Peoples' Day.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Oh, we don't need that signifier. Now it's interesting because we just do it. And this is getting into that thing then, again, of embodiment, how you do things, what you do. You can embody knowledge that way. And so you learn a lot by just watching people carefully.

And I'll just tell one quick story. And Phil's probably heard this before. But Vine was asked one time by a scholar. And so we're in the Academy. And the scholar said, you sure share a lot of knowledge with-- about Native people. But I don't see any footnotes or anything. How did you get that knowledge?

And Vine was-- I really loved his response. He said, well, I'm going to tell you something. He said, when I was a young boy, very young, my dad, as a part of his ministry, would go around and visit people on the reservation. And sometimes he'd take me with him. And he said, I learned. And of course, I had to be told the first couple of times, hey, be quiet, just sit still. But he said, I learned if I would just sit and listen, I would learn a lot.

And he says, a lot of what I relay is what I've heard in meetings, my father when he was ministering to people on Pine Ridge. And he said, I would just sit and I would listen. And he said it was the same thing when I was at NCAI. I learned the most about our tribes by just listening to some of those tribal leaders who had been around for a decade. And they had this rich experience. And he said, they were just so wise. And he said, I knew to just sit and listen.

And I think so that's a way. That was embodied knowledge that those people held. And I like your uncle's statement in the American Indian Encyclopedia, Tinks, enter entry on religion in that encyclopedia. He says, when you talk to most practitioners and elders, they don't talk about religion. They say, we had a way of life.

That's something the Harvard Divinity School should think about. What is our way of life? And are we affirming an active engagement with the sacred every day right here, out there? And for me, the answer is yes. I try to be mindful. I try to be mindful of that. We've got a hand back up here, that-- are we ready? Wrap it up? Oh, no. Oh, no.

\[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

SPEAKER 2: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Just a question. Channeling something that's not on the chat. But it's actually my question.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Pretend like it's coming in from the chat.

\[LAUGHTER\]

Thank you so much. Everybody who's up here on the panel, my fellow colleagues and students, an inspiration to me every day.

I'm interested to follow up on Professor Wildcat's comment here about embodiment and what it means especially for the students here at Harvard to think about God is Red as a text that's not just-- what does it mean to read that here in Cambridge, which may not be or, actually, I don't think it is what you would identify as your home or the place that has shaped you, formed you, to read that in this setting here in the Native Northeast? How does this place matter for how you read and interact with this text and relate with your own communities?

SPEAKER 1: Perhaps I'll tell another story. Oh.

SPEAKER 3: Yeah, no

\[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

\[LAUGHTER\]

SPEAKER 3: Well, I know that for me, one thing I was thinking about, I know I was doing all kinds of notes and reflections throughout this whole panel. But one of the big things that I've been thinking about being, in general, just a Native student at Harvard, there's a weird spatial relationship in this place. And this book talks a lot about what it means to be in space, and responding to space, and thinking about space.

And so as I have been spending time here-- so this is just my second year. And it's my first time ever on the East Coast when I moved. And becoming-- coming into the Harvard sphere of things, I think I had a lot of realizations really quickly. Some of them, I had already been thinking about a lot.

But as I started stepping in and thinking about, what is-- during my freshman year, one of the big things I started thinking about is, what is Harvard doing for Native and Indigenous people? And that was a question that I had wondered about before and I thought about.

But it's something I started to think about a lot more as I was taking part in some really, really amazing things that were going on with our student group, Natives at Harvard College, with the Harvard University Native American program, and meeting a lot of Native students, and then realizing at the same time that it feels-- and it makes sense when you think about Harvard history.

But also, there's a lot of-- to be a Native student here, it is still baffling to me that we have such a rich history when you think about the Harvard charter, when you think about the Harvard Indian College, when you think about all of these things throughout Harvard history. That we don't have a lot of even just spatial acknowledgments around campus.

So that's been something I've thought a lot about. And I'm a tour guide with the Harvard admissions office. And so we take our guests through the yard. And we go. And we stop outside Widener. And we tell them this whole big story about how Henry Widener graduated in 1907, died on the Titanic--

\[LAUGHTER\]

This whole thing. And how his mom then came in and decided, I want to honor my son's legacy. And I'm going to pay Harvard all of this money to build this-- knock down this library that was there, build another one that has his name in it, that I'm going to lay down these rules. And no one can ever change the exterior of this building.

So it is forever embedded in this campus and this place and as a history that we always are telling people. And it's a part of this space that is-- a lot of people, it's some of our first interactions with this campus. And that was really-- it's become increasingly strange to me. And in reading this text here, something I was thinking a lot about, that we don't have a lot of-- we have some plaques.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But we don't have a lot of real representations that talk about Native and Indigenous people here. We don't have, to my knowledge, and I've thought about this and looked for it, oh, some of the relationships with local people here. And so I think thinking about space and then thinking about existing in an institution that's on space, I'm in this class with Professor Deloria this semester, alongside Cable as well, that as thinking about how Harvard got the lands that it is currently built on.

And so I think the question of spatiality is deeply related to how we're all existing on this campus, and something that we have to think about and we have to really reflect on as we're being here. And it's something that I hear a lot of my non-Native friends talk about too, just in terms of being in this space, as in an institution that is Harvard.

What does Harvard represent? And what is Harvard culture? And what does that mean for us to be here? And so I think it's a thought-- something that we need to keep thinking about and unpacking. But those are some of the things I've thought about a lot with this new dimension of thinking about space in this way that Vine Deloria lays out in this text.

SPEAKER 2: Well, I do know that we were asked to leave a little bit of time at the end. So that concludes our panel. I want to thank the presenters and the comments, that it was a really great discussion. I do believe at this point, we are going to turn it over so that Ann Braude can give us a few closing comments. All right. Well, thank you all.

\[APPLAUSE\]

ANN BRAUDE: Well, what an amazing couple of days. All my hopes and dreams for this symposium have been realized. It was so moving to me to be able to start with the wisdom of Suzan Harjo and her willingness to share her invaluable knowledge and experience through all the wonderful presentations that we've had from scholars and then connecting with our young people and the students who made such great presentations.

I have to tell you, if you want to hear nice things about yourself, plan a conference and then don't show up because you guys have been so generous, and starting with Phil and all the nice emails I've gotten. And it was really very relaxing to sit here and watch from afar. So I thank you for that.

I thought I would tell my origin story of, why didn't a nice Jewish girl plan a conference like this? Because we've heard a lot of great stories about when people were introduced to God is Red and what difference it's made to them. When I first read the book, it was a revelation. I was introduced to the book by Richard Grounds, one of the editors of the volume Native Voices, a collection of essays that was inspired by Vine Deloria's work.

God is Red was like nothing I had ever read. As a Jew, it seemed to me that my chosen field of study, American religion, was hopelessly mired in Christian assumptions, that it was so much so that it was often a struggle for any non-Christian to participate. Jewish thinkers like Freud, Durkheim, Bourdieu were considered central to the study of religion. But they were not viewed as Jews when their theories were used. And in fact, they themselves portrayed their Jewish identity as something they had left behind when they wrote their great works.

At the same time, scholars who embrace their Jewish identity in writing about religion often had interests that seemed to me parochial in that their limitations to Judaism. Vine was something completely different. He was both an insider and an outsider to Christianity. And both in profound ways. He could critique Christianity knowledgeably. I did not know any Jewish scholars, or Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist scholars who had graduated from a Lutheran Seminary in Illinois, or who had been raised in the church, or came from three generations of Episcopal priests.

I was trying to learn about Christianity enough to understand what these sometimes crazy people were doing. But Vine was deeply entrenched in Christianity, much more so than I could ever become in graduate school or in a 1/4 century of teaching at Harvard Divinity School. Yet Vine had all the clarity of an outsider in ways that were enormously valuable to his perspective.

And this allowed him to see the limitation of movements for liberation that most of my lefty colleagues seemed to think somehow escaped the problems of their Christian origins, the Social Gospel, liberation theology, even the Civil Rights movement. I love the point that Robert Warrior made earlier about Vine's implicit critique of the category of liberation itself. Liberation as a goal could be pursued without acknowledging our nature as connected beings, connected to each other, to families, to communities, to cultures, to animals, to plants, to history.

We could seek liberation as individuals. And Vine saw that was a very, very limited goal. He convinced me that he had an understanding of religion unconstrained by Christian assumptions so many times in this book when he said that in Native cultures, there's no salvation outside the survival of the tribe, when he insisted on the pragmatic nature of rituals that are important because of what they do, not because of what they represent, when he suggested that it may be more important to ask where a religious creation story occurred than when.

These were all approaches to religion that made sense to me and that did not seem culturally bounded. All of these examples and many, many more made me feel this was a theoretician of religion that I could look to and that had much to offer the field of religious studies. Not only that. He was funny, irreverent, and provocative. What's not to like?

So there was a problem. The problem was that the book was still treated by many the way that Michael McNally read it as a student, as a primary source rather than as a methodological model. Phil often says that Native scholars want to be recognized not as a source of information about their traditions, but as thinkers who have something to say about everything.

And today, I think we heard that in spades. That was what I really wanted this conference to demonstrate. I hope that it was not-- that I was not misled in thinking that Vine, while he will always belong to Native people, also belongs to the intellectual world in a much larger sense and needs to have a role there.

And everybody who participated today made a huge push in that direction. It's been a huge privilege to just sit and listen today. I'm so impressed how focusing on this book focused all of us on a really instrumental set of ideas that are going to do well in that next edition. Phil, I'm going to pass the baton to you for the last words.

PHILIP DELORIA: Well, and the first part of my last words is thank you to you for being such a wonderful thought partner and organizer. And, Tracy, all the work you've done. Everybody here at the Div School, I think we need to offer--

\[INTERPOSING VOICES\]

\[APPLAUSE\]

PHILIP DELORIA: So Megan Hill asked me earlier, well, do you think your dad would have appreciated this?

\[LAUGHTER\]

Do you think he would have liked this? And it feels to me like the conference has maybe given us two answers. One is, Robert, I think perhaps your answer, which is, I don't know. He maybe didn't necessarily like to have this focused attention. He maybe didn't really appreciate this critical discourse surrounding the books. It may be that some form of the humility that I think-- sometimes, he was not a humble guy. We should be clear on that.

But he did have a meta humility, I think, in terms of not wanting to actually be the center of attention, being willing to put an idea out there and hope that it was engaged, but not have that idea be attached to him. And this is something that Suzan and I talked a lot about prior to our meeting, the ways in which an idea may pass through generations, multiple generations.

We may have an articulation of an idea. We may feel that articulation is our own. It may have a certain art to it, which is some part of our own personality. But oftentimes, the idea that we're articulating, or it is an idea that's actually been around before. I sometimes found myself for the last little bit saying, this thing I'm saying is not very original. It feels-- it doesn't feel new to me. It feels flat. And then, I am reminded that here in my family, we've been saying the same damn thing for four generations.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And there is a certain metaphysics to that, that I think he deeply understood, and felt, and embraced. The connections to his father, to his grandfather, to his great aunts, these are real kinds of things, real things, actual real things that are important to note. So one answer to Megan's question is, I don't know that he would have enjoyed this all that much.

\[LAUGHTER\]

But a second answer, I think, might be more affirmative, that perhaps he would have enjoyed this. And I think the irony and symmetry, both of him passing through a Divinity School himself and finding his ideas being discussed at the Divinity School and, no, not just any Divinity School, but Harvard Divinity School, I have to think he would have taken some real pleasure right in that. And it is part and parcel of this thing that, Ann, you just mentioned, that Native intellectuals taken seriously as intellectuals of the world with things to say.

He knew the Christian tradition, Ann, as you're saying. And he understood that the United States was some ultimate representation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. And that, in fact, was the problem. That was the problem. For me, one of the striking things about the book is the analysis of the post-World War II social and political world, where he says, look, the United States stood up at Nuremberg and said, we will be the arbiters of justice.

And we will take an ethic and a morality. And that will be fundamentally Christian. And we will put it in our political system. And we will apply it to the rest of the world. And that moment, that statement, he puts a lot of weight on that, which then can only lead you to consider what happens in the United States after that.

The failures of the Civil Rights movement, not only their successes, but the failures, the structural kinds of failures that are embedded within that leads to a conclusion, I think, that a religion, as he says, a religion is not actually about ethics. To make a religion about ethics is to actually take us down the wrong path. A religion is about experience, about these kinds of things.

To say a religion is about ethics is to talk about historicity and to put history, and time, and temporality, and the unfolding of certain things in an evolutionary and developmental way that has-- takes creation at its beginning and the end times as its end times. So this linkage of historicity, colonialism, modernity, time, and temporality as central kinds of concepts, that poses to me a question that he answers with place and space, actually. In chapter four, it's worth us noting the differences between place, space, and land, terms that oftentimes get mushed together, I think, a little bit in our analysis.

And I think what that leads him to is the willingness to embrace-- and, Robert, I really appreciate the ways that you helped us work through Volokhonsky, and the ancient astronauts, and these kinds of things, a wider horizon of explanation of being in the world than any of these kinds of traditions, than science gives us or that religion in its Christian form gives us. He was willing to expand that horizon of exploration into ways that I think transcend some of the standard kinds of formative and institutional explanations that we have.

And so it feels to me like we are caught perhaps-- one of the things that's emerged for me out of this day and 1/2 is caught between what Joe framed as a contradiction, what Michael framed as a contradiction. Does this book tell us Native stuff, keep away, not for you, separate and distinct, incommensurable? Or is it as those glorious last paragraphs suggest, an invitation to imagine some commensurability here and some future for the planet and for the us that is incorporative of everything?

Do we need to be invited into that? How do we resolve that? Or, Joe, as you've framed it in more specific kinds of terms, how do we think about the specificities of locality and tradition and how those things actually play out relative to their accessibility, their-- are they being extracted? What does this look like? How do we think about these kinds of power dynamics?

And it feels to me like, Judith, the question that you've framed, Anthony, the response that you had at one point, I wonder if this is what he was thinking in some ways or if it's a way for us to think about. It feels insufficient to me for us to say, we name this as a tension. We'll sit with the tension. It feels like it doesn't really get us to a place we want to go. And yet, we don't want to pick one of those poles of the dialectic and sit there. We don't want to do that either.

So how do we solve this problem? This feels to me like it's something central here. And so I'm going to try to channel what I thought I heard Anthony say, which was something like this. The ground or the basis for some commensurability cannot be or cannot start with Indigenous spirituality or Indigenous religious practice. It's not that our stuff can be your salvation or our stuff can be our salvation, the salvation of the greater we, as we sometimes see.

I was really struck, of course, by Zoe Todd's observation, which I've been talking about as well, that ecosystem biologists have been quite happy to talk to us about the ways that forests communicate with each other through fungal networks, and all kinds of interesting things, and cross-species communication. It's not just the sycamores help sycamores, the sycamores might help oaks, and all of these things.

And of course, Native folks have been saying this for a super long time. And all the scientists who would engage Native folks, who would say, those superstitious, ignorant, primitive savages when, in fact, now we say-- so the answer to this is not to say this Indigenous stuff is now available to us, the Tek rush, the T-E-K rush that Zoe Todd described. That's not where commensurability lies.

Where commensurability may lie, as with the book, and this is the way that the book starts, that the ground for commensurability may start with the shared critique of Christianity itself and, thus, the shared critique of the category of religion and taking apart that category as we take apart the category of science.

I think taking those two categories apart were critically important to him because when you take away the category of religion that you just plomp on top of Native practice and life, and you take away the category of science that you don't allow Native people to have, and you imagine what Indigenous life is, you can borrow a little bit from those two categories and understand that those ways of life were profoundly spiritual and also profoundly smart, and experiential, and local, and experimental.

It was like walking through the scientific method. I pay attention to the world. I frame ideas about the world. I test my ideas. I convert-- I talked about them with other people. We test them together. We pass them down to the next generation. That may be a form of Indigenous knowledge transformation, transmission.

But it also may just be the scientific method as we're thinking about it. Thoughtful engagement and being in and of the world. And in that experience, understanding, coming to understand over long periods of time in specific places what that wider horizon of explanation actually looks like, I think that's what he's talking about, what he's interested in.

And so if we could imagine the commensurability that starts there with that critique and we could work our way through that, work through the fire of that, then we might find ourselves in a position to actually have the conversation, to actually think about what commensurability looks like, to embrace those final paragraphs of the book itself. I think-- Suzan and I were talking the other night about his immense productivity. I mentioned that he watched The Godfather probably 50 times.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And it may have been more than that. And the number of Solitaire games that he played. But it's important to note between 1969 and 1974, Robert, you're going to know the real number, but it's something like six books, seven books, plus all those articles. And Suzan said to me something that was really, I think, quite interesting and profound and very, very much in the spirit of my father. She said, I wonder if time moved differently for him than it does for other people.

And she said, sometimes there's moments when I say, I just need a little bit more time. And I throw this out. And I get more time somehow. This is the thing that I think ought to make us think about the relationship not just between biological science and what Native people knew about forests, but I think the place where my dad was really interested in going near the end of his life, which is the connection between physics, and metaphysics, and Native spirituality.

And so to talk about Leroy Little Bear and to talk about some of the ways in which physicists, and high-end theoretical physicists, and those string theory people, and all those folks start saying things that start to sound very Indigenous when they get to these points where electrons are moving when they look at them and stuff like that, where you could actually imagine an elect-- that's very tiny, minuscule, molecular or cellular atomic control over something that happens in the universe.

And is that how medicine people were able to make things happen? What if there was an Indigenous science that took us to the leading edge of physics as we understand it today? This is where he was at and where he was going in the final years of his life. I was really struck, by the way, as my dad died in 2005. And I was amazingly struck, actually, by how fast he seemed to disappear from the conversation.

He'd been at the center of so many conversations for so long. And after he was gone, within a year or two, I never really heard people talk that much about him. It just seemed to fade. And it was slow. That perception, I think, was slow coming to me. But when I had it and I realized it, I thought, well, this is really odd. How did this happen? How did this man who wrote so much, who was so tied in with so many Native communities, who was so much a part of the discourse of this field, how is it that he just went away so quickly? But it did happen. It did happen.

So I have to think that, actually, he would really, really like the fact that we're all here thinking about this and talking about this. And well, I can't put myself in his head. I can say one thing, which is I very much appreciate the fact that we are here, and we're thinking about this book, and we're talking about this book.

And it's about to have its fourth edition, so 50th anniversary edition. And, Dan, I just want to second your thoughts and your hopes that I hope this new edition will actually give the book another life. And we can see it for what it is, really a complicated book. There's times when I'm reading this book and I'm going like, ah.

\[LAUGHTER\]

And then, there's times when I'm reading this book and I'm just completely-- my socks are knocked off. And as Dan said, sometimes that happens in the end of a paragraph.

\[LAUGHTER\]

It's not the thesis statement that does it sometimes.

\[LAUGHTER\]

It's something that just creeps in. And I think that would be also part of the ways in which he would think about these things, that you can't always think that when you mobilize the word, you're directly conveying what you mean to convey. The accidental things, and contingent things, and readerly things happen in texts that you can't necessarily predict.

And so that's my hope for this book as it comes out yet again. It's my hope for our engagement with it. I hope that everyone who's here and all the folks who are watching online will continue to engage with it and they will continue to take away interesting and unexpected stuff. Thank you all so much for being here. It's just been a fabulous and fantastic-- thank you to the presenters.

Thank you, Ann. Thank you to all the folks at the Div School who have made this a possibility. Thank you to HUNAP for the sponsorship. Thank you for the Center for the Study of World Religions. Thank you to the Kennedy Center and everybody. So we conclude. Yes, we conclude. Thank you.

\[APPLAUSE\]

SPEAKER 4: Sponsors, Harvard Divinity School, Harvard University Native American Program, Center for the Study of World Religions, the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

SPEAKER 5: Copyright, 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ Video ](/news-classification/video)