Custer’s Sins: Vine Deloria Jr. and the Settler-Colonial Politics of Civic Inclusion

• Author: David Myer Temin
• Published date: 01 June 2018
• Date: 01 June 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717712151
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717712151

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(3) 357 –379

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717712151

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Article

Custer’s Sins: Vine

Deloria Jr. and the

Settler-Colonial Politics

of Civic Inclusion

David Myer Temin1

Abstract

While “inclusion” has been seen as a central mode of redressing ongoing

injustices against communities of color in the US, Indigenous political

experiences feature more complex legacies of contesting US citizenship.

Turning to an important episode of contestation, this essay examines the

relation between inclusion and the politics of eliminating Indigenous nations

that was part of a shared policy shift toward “Termination” in the Anglo-

settler world of the 1950s and 1960s. Through a reading of Indigenous activist-

intellectual Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto

(1969), it demonstrates how the construction of what I call the “civic inclusion

narrative” in post–World War II American political discourse disavowed

practices of empire-formation. Widely considered a foundational text of

the Indigenous Sovereignty Movement, the work repositioned Indigenous

peoples not as passive recipients of civil rights and incorporation into the

nation-state but as colonized peoples actively demanding decolonization.

Deloria’s work provides an exemplary counterpoint to the enduring thread

of civic inclusion in American political thought and an alternative tradition

of decolonization—an imperative that continues to resonate in today’s

North American and global Indigenous struggles over land, jurisdiction, and

sovereignty.

1University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, USA

Corresponding Author:

David Myer Temin, University of Minnesota, 1414 Social Sciences Building, 297 19th Ave S.,

Minneapolis, MN 55455, USA.

Email: temin002@umn.edu

712151PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717712151Political TheoryTemin

research-article2017

358 Political Theory 46(3)

Keywords

Vine Deloria Jr., settler colonialism, decolonization, American political

thought, Indigenous, inclusion

In 1910, the American historian Frederick Jackson Turner—reflecting on the

United States’ annexation of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaii in the

wake of the Spanish–American War—remarked that the United States was

finally “beginning to consider the relations between democracy and empire.”1

From the US post-frontier perspective, the earlier (and ongoing) conquest

and colonization of the lands of Indigenous peoples on the territory the United

States now claimed did not count as empire-formation because such practices

had culminated in the creation of an internally democratic nation-state.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such a vantage point

erased the political practices settlers enacted to replace Indigenous peoples.

Once more insular narratives of state- and nation-formation gained traction in

the settler colonies that made up the first British Empire (the United States,

Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Australia), the currency of “colonial-

ism” as a language of critique became subject to a more complex devaluing

embedded in varied narratives of national political culture. As an instance of

the latter, consider the familiar periodization of American political thought—

from colony to nation-state to empire—as suggestive of the need for more

sustained attention to the organizing spatial categories at work in obscuring

these original and ongoing imperial practices vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples.2

After World War II, this essay argues, a new way of narrating the politics

of inclusion in American political thought reshaped the historiographic and

analytic terms of this disavowal of empire in ways that continue to influence

contemporary democratic theory. While Indigenous peoples have long con-

tested settler-colonial empire—from Pequot minister William Apess to

Cayuga leader Levi General (Deskaheh)—I turn to an important post–World

War II Indigenous critic of colonial rule to highlight the intertwined registers

of interpretive and political erasure that have reconfigured this disavowal of

settler state-formation as a mode of empire-formation. To this end, I recon-

struct Standing Rock Sioux theorist Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your

Sins: An Indian Manifesto, which he wrote in 1969, to explore the problem-

atic of settler-colonial state-formation as it unfolds in the political practices

of the United States.3

The problem I address through Deloria’s writings has two components:

First, if settler colonialism has been relatively occluded in political theory,

then turning to Deloria, a prominent Indigenous theorist and activist,

can contribute to uncovering the links between political practices and