God is Red

When I was a boy I often accompanied my father on trips to the different Sioux reservations in South Dakota. During these trips he would point out various features of the landscape and tell me the names and stories associated with them. Regrettably, I can only remember a few of the places today, but indelibly imprinted on my mind was the fact that the Sioux people cherished their lands and treated them as if they were people who shared a common history with humans. In 1972 when I was writing the first version of this book, I sought to emphasize the role that spaces and places play in our human religious perceptions.

From the invasion and occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 to the occupation at Wounded Knee in 1973, I felt that the various Indian protests had a much deeper meaning than simply securing additional lands for reservations. At the bottom of everything, I believed then and continue to believe, is a religious view of the world that seeks to locate our species within the fabric of life that constitutes the natural world, the land and all its various forms of life. As long as Indians exist there will be conflict between the tribes and any group that carelessly despoils the land and the life it supports. At the deepest philosophical level our universe must have as a structure a set of relationships in which all entities participate. Within the physical world this universal structure can best be understood as a recognition of the sacredness of places.

I have been very pleased to see the outpouring of books and articles attempting to deal with sacred spaces and places by Indian and non-Indian writers in the two decades since God Is Red was first published. It will take a continuing protest from an increasingly large chorus to reprogram the psychology of American society so that we will not irreversibly destroy the land we live on. 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 of the role of sacred places in human life.

Feeling that a sufficiently significant number of people are now alerted to the ecological meltdown that we face, in this revised edition of the book I have felt free to raise additional questions about our species and our ultimate fate. It seems to me that our history on earth is far different than what we have been taught to believe. I suggest in this revised edition that we have on this planet two kinds of people—natural peoples and the hybrid peoples. The natural peoples represent an ancient tradition that has always sought harmony with the environment. Hybrid peoples are the product of what I refer to in chapter 9 as ancient genetic engineering that irrevocably changed the way these people view our planet. I can think of no other good reason why the peoples from the Near East—the peoples from the Hebrew, Islamic, and Christian religious traditions—first adopted the trappings of civilization and then forced a peculiar view of the natural world on succeeding generations. The planet, in their view, is not our natural home and is, in fact, ours for total exploitation. We are today reaching the “nth” term in this sequence of exploitation and face ecological disasters of such complete planetary scope as to surpass our wildest imagination.

Only a radical reversal of our attitudes toward nature can help us. While it is comforting to see the nations of the world meet and begin to deal with our environmental catastrophe, we may even now be too late to change the conditions we have created. It is extremely disturbing to see so many Americans wanting to clear cut the ancient forests, overgraze the remaining grasslands, and use the precious water of the continents for frivolous consumptive purposes. How many shopping malls and parking lots do we really need? In the United States we stand but a few dry years from ecological disasters that we cannot begin to fathom. Yet we see our government busy authorizing the destruction of the remaining wetlands on the continent so that a few developers can squeeze yet a few more dollars from a complacent public.

We are now in the process of celebrating the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World and the attitudes that marked the original discovery remain entrenched. In two recent decisions the U.S. Supreme Court has all but prohibited the practice of Indian traditional religions (Lyng, 1988 and Smith, 1990). and opened Indian lands to coalitions of developers, mining interests, and other exploiters. All this exploitation unwittingly aided by the Christian churches, which have no understanding of the nature of the creation, now presses traditional people to the wall. It gives me no comfort to have predicted religious confrontation two decades ago only to see it now in its most virulent form. Nor do I look forward to paying the penalties that Mother Earth must now levy against us in order for Her to survive.

In traveling around the country I now see revivals of ancient ceremonies in many tribes as if the people had been warned of the catastrophes that await us. It is time for the people to gather and perform their old ceremonies and make a final effort to renew the earth and its peoples—hoofed, winged, and others. Because many of these ceremonies are performed on behalf of the earth, all humans, and the other forms of life, it seems incomprehensible that they would be prohibited. But the prohibitions and the failure of the government to protect these traditions only highlights the nature of the conflict. Clearly the struggle is between a religious view of life and the secularization that science and industry have brought.

It remains for us to learn once again that we are a part of nature, not a transcendant species with no responsibilities to the natural world. As we face the twenty-first century, the next decade will be the testing ground for this proposition. We may well become one of the few species in this vast universe that has permanently ruined our home. Future explorers from other planets will walk this earthly wasteland and marvel at our stupidity and wonder why we could not accept the reality of our own finitude.

Vine Deloria, Jr.