Spirit and Reason

Vine Deloria Jr.'s 1999 essays — Native philosophy of religion and politics

Tradition: Indigenous philosophy / Native American religious thought

Deloria's 1999 essays — Native philosophy of religion and politics

Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader (1999) is the substantial essay collection drawn from across Vine Deloria Jr.'s (1933-2005) prolific Native-American-philosophical-and-political writings — gathering material from his major books (Custer Died for Your Sins, 1969; We Talk, You Listen, 1970; God Is Red, 1973; The Metaphysics of Modern Existence, 1979; American Indians, American Justice, 1983; Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties, 1974; Red Earth, White Lies, 1995) and from his many journal-and-anthology essays spanning from the late 1960s through the 1990s. Deloria — Standing Rock Sioux lawyer, theologian, historian, and philosopher; professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona (1978-90) and then at the University of Colorado at Boulder (1990-2000); director of the National Congress of American Indians (1964-67) in the formative period of the modern Indian-rights movement — was the most-influential single Native-American intellectual of the late twentieth century. Spirit and Reason gathers his work across four main domains: (1) Native-American religious-and-philosophical thought, particularly the contrast between Native space-grounded place-religious thinking and Western time-and-history-grounded thinking (God Is Red develops this contrast in book form); (2) federal Indian law, treaty rights, sovereignty, and the legal-historical-and-jurisprudential analysis of US-Tribal relations; (3) the critique of Western academic anthropology, archaeology, and historical science as inadequate to and frequently hostile toward Native ways of knowing and Native historical-and-cosmological accounts; (4) the politics and culture of contemporary Native-American communities. Deloria's distinctive voice combines sharp legal-and-historical-analytical precision with humour, pointed polemic, and a sustained commitment to taking Native religious-and-philosophical claims seriously on their own terms rather than translating them into Western-academic categories. The collection has been a standard reference for the field of Native-American Studies and for the broader engagement of Western thought with indigenous traditions.