Controversy: Vine Deloria, Jr.

Position: -

* Adovasio/Page 2002 p124-125

"As late as 1995, Vine Deloria, Jr., the sometime political scientist and full-time activist from the Sioux Nation, railed against the idea [of Pleistocene Overkill]. In Red Earth, White Lies, an impassioned (and largely ill-informed) diatribe against the matter of human evolution, the existence of the Bering land bridge, and the continuing failure of the sciences to confirm the creation stories of Native American myth time, he attacked Pleistocene Overkill as merely another politically motivated assault on the moral values of his people. In response to such assaults, he denied the underpinning validity of any and all science, its findings, and its methods, including any result whatsoever from radiocarbon dating -- except one he quoted of 38,000 years B.P. that apparently embarrassed scientific dogma. (.... [A] carbon-14 date of that age is by its very nature unreliable.) To unshakeable true believers like Deloria, biblical creationists, and others who are selectively antiscience, there is, of course, simply nothing to say."

* Feder 2006 p98

"Indian activist, author, and historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (1995), has made this issue [the Land Bridge scenario] the core of his book Red Earth, White Lies. His argument is that the Bering Land Bridge model cannot be proven. Besides, Indian religion maintains that native people in the New World have always been here; they were created here and did not come from anywhere else.

"There is, however, a problem with this perspective. The federal government of the United States officially recognizes more than 560 Indian tribes and Hawaiian groups. There are many more tribal groups in Canada and hundreds more in South America. These are distinct groups of people with separate histories; different languages, cultural practices, and religious perspectives; and, most important here, different stories of their own origins.

"Deloria maintains that Indian religion and not science is correct in the determination of an origin for the native people of the New World. But which one of the hundreds upon hundreds of very different -- in fact, often mutually exclusive -- Native American creation stories is Deloria talking about? They can't all be right at the same time."