◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

God Is Red I am Vine Deloria Jr. Born in Martin, South Dakota, 1933, on the edge of the Pine Ridge reservation. Standing Rock Sioux. My great-grandfather was a medicine man. My grandfather and my father were Episcopal priests. I took a degree in theology and then a degree in law, which means I studied both of the documents America used to take this continent — the Bible and the deed. I learned the white man's scripture and his law better than he knew them himself, and I used them against him for the rest of my life. I ran the National Congress of American Indians. I wrote some twenty books. I died in Golden, Colorado, in 2005. And I want to tell you the argument I spent my whole life making, because your country has never once understood it. My first book I called Custer Died for Your Sins. It was a joke, and it was not. Here is the argument, and it is the only thing I have to give you. Your religion is a religion of time. Mine is a religion of place. Hear the difference, because everything follows from it. The God you were handed reveals himself in history — in a chosen moment, a covenant, a march forward, a progress toward some end that is always ahead of you and never here. That God can be carried anywhere, because he is attached to nothing. You can pave the whole earth and still worship him, because for you the sacred is a date, not a location. For my people the sacred is a place. This hill. This river. This bend where the thing happened that made us who we are. You cannot move it, you cannot buy it, and you cannot replace it with another hill, because God is not in time waiting at the finish line. God is in the land, under your feet, now. That is what I meant by the title of another book. God is Red — the color of earth, the color of blood, the color of a God you can stand on, not one who floats above the world with no ground to hold him. A people whose sacred is a when will always sacrifice a where. That is your whole history on this continent, and it is your future on this planet. You could not imagine that land might be holy, so you called it resources. You could not imagine a place was enough, so you called stillness backwardness and made a religion of growth. And now the climate itself is presenting the invoice, and you are astonished, as if the earth were a thing outside the covenant instead of the covenant itself. You want to know why the treaties were broken. Every one of them. Four hundred, and not one kept. It was that a nation which locates the sacred in time cannot take a promise about land seriously. The treaty was words on a when, and the land was only a where, and the where always lost. The law was never built to hold. I read the law. I know. And when at last some of you grew hungry for what you had thrown away — for a spirituality rooted in the earth — you did not sit down and learn where you were. You came shopping for ours. You put on the feathers and bought the ceremony. You treated the world's sacred traditions like a delicatessen. You wanted the fruit of place without the discipline of staying. Now hear me, because a thing is coming you cannot yet see from where you stand. At Standing Rock — my nation, my name — thousands will one day stand in the cold to keep a pipeline out of the water, and the whole world will finally watch. They will call it protest. It is not protest. It is people who know where they are, refusing to pretend they don't. So here is what I have to tell you, you who worship the clock. Learn where you are. Not the address. The place — what happened on it, what lives in it, what it asks of you. Stop calling the land real estate. It is the body you are standing on. The sacred is not ahead of you in time. It is beneath you, right now, and you have been walking on it for four hundred years without once looking down. Custer died for your sins. The bill is still coming due.