Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

This chapter explains the history of treaties between Native tribes and the federal government and the various laws that have been enacted throughout history to allow colonists to take Native land. Deloria opens by remarking about the hypocrisies he sees in the modern United States. Politicians like Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson repeatedly condemn Russia for never upholding political agreements, yet the United States has broken countless treaties with tribes over hundreds of years.

Deloria highlights a number of these broken treaties, both historic and modern. In the early years of European settlement, he posits that the tribes trusted their white neighbors because they had helped them survive and navigate the harsh American landscape. Faced with the prospect of selling land to the United States, a concept unfamiliar to most tribal members, many agreed with the caveat that they would retain hunting and fishing rights. As more Europeans arrived and expanded westward, the United States began to break treaties and push the Native population into smaller and smaller areas.

To Deloria, the injustice at the heart of this process stems from an idea that the land intrinsically belongs to whatever European nation “discovered” it (and by extension, to the United States) rather than to the tribes who lived there before colony building began. The Indigenous people could only claim land as their own if they used it in a way that aligned with the European lifestyle, such as farming or building permanent structures. Those who wished to live as they had for thousands of years were deemed incompetent. This thought process eventually led to the 1887 Dawes Act, which Deloria views as the most destructive moment in Native American history. With the passage of this and subsequent, similar laws, “civilized” Indigenous people were allowed to keep specific, government-defined allotments while the rest of their traditional territory was turned over to government control.

Although the Dawes Act was eventually repealed, Deloria points out that many laws and treaties regarding Indigenous Americans’ rights continue to be treated with disrespect well into the 20th century. At the time of the book’s writing, state governments in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho were in the process of violating longstanding Indigenous fishing rights on public land. This process was advertised as a conservation effort, but Deloria argues that it was truly a way to cater to wealthy, white sport fishermen at the expense of the Indigenous population.

In the 1950s, the United States government began to implement an “Indian termination policy.” Unlike previous efforts that aimed to literally terminate Indigenous people through genocide, this policy was aimed toward the termination of tribes’ federal government protection. Instead, tribes would be managed by the individual states that held their land. On the surface, this plan was advertised as a return to independence; tribal members would no longer be dependent on the federal government and would therefore be motivated to start businesses, buy personal land, and otherwise assimilate with mainstream American society. Deloria argues that the main purpose of these laws was to steal Native land in a new, less direct way and to rid the country of its “Indian problem” by giving Native people no choice but to assimilate to survive.

Deloria spends most of the chapter outlining specific ways that termination policies played out in the real world. The idea was first proposed within the federal government during the World War II (WWII) era when Republican legislators set out to strip the New Deal, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) became an easy target. Deloria explains that the early versions of the termination policy were relatively reasonable. William Zimmerman, who led the BIA in the late 1940s, offered specific lists of economically stable tribes who he believed would succeed without government help: a few that may achieve self-sufficiency with several years of continued assistance, and still others that had no clear path to self-reliance. Importantly, he considered the viewpoints of actual tribal leaders as a key part of this determination.

Zimmerman’s plan was ultimately determined to have little potential impact on the Department of Interior budget, but by the early 1950s, the idea of termination was cemented into the minds of many lawmakers. They began stripping tribes across the country of all federal benefits with the promise of rights that tribes had been requesting for years. Deloria expresses no surprise that the federal government rarely held up its end of these bargains.

Deloria gives several examples of specific terminations, the motivations behind them from government officials, and how the tribes were ultimately affected. The first tribe to undergo the termination process was a small Paiute group from Utah, whom Deloria believes was chosen only because Arthur Watkins, a Utah senator and major proponent of the termination process, did not want to appear biased toward Native people in his own state. Being a small, impoverished group, they also did not have adequate resources to successfully fight for their rights. Ultimately the tribe and their lands were placed in the hands of a private “trustee” with little care for or knowledge of their needs or way of life. They, furthermore, were not granted the one thing promised to them in the exchange: namely, the right to have tribal marriages recognized as federally legal.