A 50th anniversary revised edition of the beloved classic, God is Red.

First published in 1973, Vine Deloria, Jr.'s God Is Red remains the seminal work on Native American religious views, asking the reader to think about our species and our ultimate fate in novel ways. Celebrating five decades of publication with this new edition, Deloria's classic work reminds us to understand that we are a part of nature, not a transcendent species with no responsibilities to the natural world. It is time again to listen to Vine Deloria, Jr.'s powerful voice, informing us about a spiritual life that is independent of Western religion and that reveres the interconnectedness of all living things.

This new edition includes critical essays engaging with the original material by well-known Indigenous thinkers - Philip Deloria, Suzan Shown Harjo, Daniel Wildcat, and David E. Wilkins. Inside, the book covers a wide variety of topics including: the problem of creation, the origin of religion, Death, and Human personality.

God is Red should be read and re-read by Americans who want to understand why the United States keeps losing the peace, war after war. - Leslie Marmon Silko

In his final work, the great and beloved Native American scholar Vine Deloria Jr. takes us into the realm of the spiritual and reveals through eyewitness accounts the immense power of medicine men. The World We Used To Live In, a fascinating collection of anecdotes from tribes across the country, explores everything from healing miracles and scared rituals to Navajos who could move the sun. In this compelling work, which draws upon a lifetime of scholarship, Deloria shows us how ancient powers fit into our modern understanding of science and the cosmos, and how future generations may draw strength from the old ways.

Ella Deloria could speak intimately about Indian ways because she belonged to a Yankton Sioux family. A distinguished scholar who studied with Franz Boas at Columbia University, she had the gift of language and the understanding necessary to bridge races. Originally published in 1944, this book is an important source of information about Dakota culture and a classic in its elegant clarity of insight.

Beginning with a general discussion of American Indian origins, language families, and culture areas, Deloria then focuses on her own people, the Dakotas, and the intricate kinship system that governed all aspects of their life. She writes, Exacting and unrelenting obedience to kinship demands made the Dakotas a most kind, unselfish people, always acutely aware of those about them and innately courteous.

Deloria goes on to show the painful transition to reservations and how the holdover of the kinship system worked against Indians trying to follow white notions of progress and success. Her ideas about what both races must do to participate fully in American life are as cogent now as when they were first written.

Vine Deloria, Jr., leading Native American scholar and author of the best-selling God is Red, addresses the conflict between mainstream scientific theory about our world and the ancestral worldview of Native Americans. Claiming that science has created a largely fictional scenario for American Indians in prehistoric North America, Deloria offers an alternative view of the continent's history as seen through the eyes and memories of Native Americans. Further, he warns future generations of scientists not to repeat the ethnocentric omissions and fallacies of the past by dismissing Native oral tradition as mere legends.

Prior to the onslaught of the Europeans, the Puget Sound area was one of the most heavily populated regions north of Mexico City. The Native Americans who lived there enjoyed a bounty of seafood, waterfowl, and berries, which they expertly collected and preserved. Detailing the associated culture, technologies, and techniques, Vine Deloria Jr. explains in depth this veritable paradise and its ultimate demise.

Raising the possibility that the utopian lifestyle enjoyed by the Indians of the Pacific Northwest might have continued in perpetuity had Europeans not sought a Northwest Passage. Deloria describes in devastating detail the ramifications of the Europeans' migration into the territory. With more than two thousand American settlers in the Pacific Northwest by 1852, and with many more to come, the outbreak of disease and the encroachment of land speculators, railroad capitalists, and logging and mining interests forced the Native Americans to give up their ancestral lands and move to reservations.

Deloria speaks with a measure of sadness, outrage, and hope, writing a moving account of the Pacific Northwest Indians' struggle that began with the arrival of the white settlers and continues today.

Power and Place examines the issues facing Native American students as they progress through schools, colleges, and on into professions. This collection of sixteen essays is at once philosophic, practical, and visionary. It is an effort to open discussion about the unique experience of Native Americans and offers a concise reference for administrators, educators, students and community leaders involved with Indian Education.

We Talk, You Listen is strong, boldly unconventional medicine from Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005), one of the most important voices of twentieth-century Native American affairs. Here the witty and insightful Indian spokesman turns his penetrating vision toward the disintegrating core of American society. Written at a time when the traditions of the formerly omnipotent Anglo-Saxon male were crumbling under the pressures of a changing world, Deloria's book interprets racial conflict, inflation, the ecological crisis, and power groups as symptoms rather than causes of the American malaise: The glittering generalities and mythologies of American society no longer satisfy the need and desire to belong, a theory as applicable today as it was in 1970. American Indian tribalism, according to Deloria, was positioned to act as America's salvation. Deloria proposes a uniquely Indian solution to the legacy of genocide, imperialism, capitalism, feudalism, and self-defeating liberalism: group identity and real community development, a kind of neo-tribalism. He also offers a fascinating cultural critique of the nascent tribes of the 1970s, indicting Chicanos, blacks, hippies, feminists, and others as misguided because they lacked comprehensive strategies and were led by stereotypes rather than an understanding of their uniqueness.

Spirit & Reason is a collection of the works of one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century--Vine Deloria, Jr. Author of such classics as Red Earth, White Lies, and God is Red, Deloria takes readers on a momentous journey through Indian country and beyond by exploring some of the most important issues of the past three decades. The essays gathered here are wide-ranging and essential and include representative pieces from some of Deloria's most influential books, some of his lesser-known articles, and ten new pieces written especially for Spirit & Reason.

Tellingly, in the course of reviewing his body of work, Deloria found much that he had written in the past remained current and compelling because people have not made much progress in resolving issues. Whether disputing theories of religion and science, examining the problems of modern education, or expounding on our understanding of the world, Deloria consistently urges readers toward an intimate connection with the world in which we live. For those familiar with Deloria's works as well as those discovering him for the first time, this essential anthology will teach, provoke, and enlighten in equal measure.

Author of more than thirty books of poetry, Western history, stories, fiction, biography, criticism, and Native studies, John G. Neihardt (1881-1973) was born in Illinois, taught for many years at the University of Missouri, and was named by act of legislature Poet Laureate of Nebraska and the Prairies. Neihardt was devoted to his ideals of art, spirit, humanity, and understanding. This volume brings together fourteen lifelong admirers, who each contribute a portrait or an appreciation of this American original. Best known for his 1932 classic Black Elk Speaks, done in collaboration with the Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk, Neihardt is also justly regarded as an epic poet, travel writer, newspaperman, teacher, mystic, and spokesman for the beauty of the Great Plains and the drama of ordinary and exceptional lives.

I offer no comfort to religious fundamentalists or evolutionists...Both are passe and represent only a quarrel within the Western belief system, not an accurate rendering of Earth history. With this opening salvo, Vine Deloria Jr. launches a witty and erudite assault on the current state of evolutionary theory, science, and religion. Using the tension between evolutionists and creationists in Kansas in the 1990s as a focal point, Deloria takes Western science and religion to task, providing a critical assessment of the flaws and anomalies in each side's arguments. As he incorporates non-Western and Native American ideas, as well as the concept of Intelligent Design, Deloria provides us with a framework to better understand our origins.

First Published in 1999. For This Land, edited and with an introduction by James Treat, brings together over thirty years of the work of Vine Deloria, Jr., regarded as one of the most important living Native American figures. For three decades, Deloria has offered substantive and persistent contributions to understanding the complexity of religion in America. In uis writings he recognizes the spiritual desperation and religious breakdown in the contemporary situation, and provides the groundwork to get people to examine what they actually believe and how they must put those beliefs into practice. The essays in this collection express Deloria's concern for the religious dimensions and implications of human existence. His writings are engaged within a theoretical system of physical, not ideological, space, and ultimately give voice to this intellectual passion by calling into question our controversial religious institutions, commitments, worldviews, freedoms and experiences. For This Land offers a distinctive approach to comprehending human existence from one of the leading critics of mainstream American thought.

First Published in 1999. For This Land, edited and with an introduction by James Treat, brings together over thirty years of the work of Vine Deloria, Jr., regarded as one of the most important living Native American figures. For three decades, Deloria has offered substantive and persistent contributions to understanding the complexity of religion in America. In uis writings he recognizes the spiritual desperation and religious breakdown in the contemporary situation, and provides the groundwork to get people to examine what they actually believe and how they must put those beliefs into practice. The essays in this collection express Deloria's concern for the religious dimensions and implications of human existence. His writings are engaged within a theoretical system of physical, not ideological, space, and ultimately give voice to this intellectual passion by calling into question our controversial religious institutions, commitments, worldviews, freedoms and experiences. For This Land offers a distinctive approach to comprehending human existence from one of the leading critics of mainstream American thought.

In addition to his accomplishments as a talented novelist, a thorough historian, and an excellent essayist, Frank Waters is that rare breed of man who has merged heart and mind early in his life and moved forward to confront ultimate questions. This dilemma of faith and heritage, religion and identity, and commitment and comfort has never been resolved intellectually. Even with profound faith and rigorous discipline of self, mystics have found it difficult to resolve through action and prayer...I look at the life and writing of Frank Waters...and find...a remarkable journey of inquiry spanning nearly a century and illuminating questions which I did not think possible to formulate.

--Vine Deloria, Jr., editor

Contributors to this volume are Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., Bobby Bridger, Steven Wall, Will Wright, William Eastlake, Larry Evers, David Jongeward, Max Evans, Win Blevins, Barbara Waters, Rudolfo Anaya, Thomas J. Lyon, Joe Gordon, Robert Kostka, Charles Adams, Father Peter J. Powell, Quay Grigg, Alexander Blackburn, and T. N. Luther.