Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

In this essay, Deloria veers away from the impact of federal regulations on Indigenous groups and explores the negative impact that they have experienced at the hands of academia, specifically anthropologists. He describes teams of students and professors as an invading horde: “[F]rom every nook and cranny in the East they emerge, as if responding to some primeval fertility rite, and flock to the reservations” (78).

Unlike government lawmakers, who Deloria views primarily as self-aware enemies of Indigenous people, the anthropologists see themselves as “friends” with the goal of helping tribes by studying them and publishing endless papers about what Native people are really like. He sees a massive irony in the fact that many of the anthropologists receive large grants to fund this research. If the academics care so much about helping Indigenous Americans, he argues, why don’t they give that money directly to the subjects of their studies?

Deloria presents a multi-fold case against anthropologists. One major problem, he believes, is that academia’s obsession with publishing groundbreaking findings leads them to draw grand conclusions about entire cultures, ignoring any nuance in order to publish a paper that will impress the faculty of whichever university they represent.