Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

In Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria, Jr., over the course of 11 essays, explores the relationship between Native Americans and different institutions in the United States. The relationship between Native Americans and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, between Native Americans and Black people, between Native Americans and anthropologists, between Native Americans and missionaries and the Christian establishment, between Native Americans and the treaties that have been imposed upon them. The essays can be vicious, self-deprecating, tragic, hilarious, deeply reasoned, eye-opening, but they are always extremely lucid and offer necessary perspective. There are elements of the book that don't age perfectly well: Deloria has grievances with the civil rights movement which at times can seem overly fastidious, and in particular he seems specifically very upset with the failure of Martin Luther King's Poor People's March, which had failed in the spring of the year he was writing (and in the immediate aftermath of King's assassination), and these issues seem less important with 60 years of hindsight as I write this. Additionally, women's issues are almost entirely absent which I imagine some contemporary observers might take issue with. These issues aside, the work clearly comes from a very sharp with who was writing in a way that was all but totally new and totally necessary.