By JODI RAVE
Lincoln Journal Star
 

LINCOLN, Neb. - On Thursday, Philip J. Deloria sat in the archives at the Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls, S.D., reading the impassioned letters of his grandfather, Vine Deloria Sr., who was a native missionary priest on South Dakota Indian reservations.

Vine Deloria's 1960s letters agonized over issues such as racial injustice and raised questions about his place in an Indian world wrought by continual change. During his time, it was easy for white people to "play Indian" because they could enter and leave that world at will.  Not much has changed, said his grandson, a history professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Philip Deloria examines white America's desire to assume an Indian identity in his book "Playing Indian."
"Why do so many people claim a great-great Indian grandmother? What is this thing white Americans have with Indians? Why is it necessary to bring an Indian ancestor to the front of their genealogical history?" asked Deloria.  "A lot of Indians raised that question. My dad did that in 1969 with his book 'Custer Died For Your Sins,' " he said of Vine Deloria Jr., a renowned Indian scholar and also a CU history professor. "He didn't answer the question."

The young Deloria hopes he can.

"In order to do that you have to go deep into the psyche of Americans," he said, adding that the absence of a singular American identity has prompted people to seek one.

He traces white Americans' attempts to identify with Indians to the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dressed up as Indians.

That defining moment in history marked Americans' desire for freedom from Britain and their quest for an American individuality, said Deloria. America's indigenous people helped them do it, he added.

"Indians are like no other group of people in this country. Indians are associated with the land, and nature, and reality and authenticity. Indians are the people who possess the ultimate meanings and the ultimate truths onwhat America is about," at least that is often the white perception, he  said.

Organizations from fraternal orders, to the Boy Scouts, to athletic teams  and their fans have succumbed to acting out imagined Indian roles.

Indian people have been both empowered and villainized as a result, said >Deloria. This paradox powers Deloria's book.

"There is this simultaneous embracing of Indians, which allows Americans to  make claims of American identity. But at the same time, in order to make a  real physical nation, they have to dispossess those Indians," he said.

One of the best examples in "Playing Indian" examines the 1830s federal  policy of removing native people from their Eastern U.S. homelands and sending them to Indian territory in Oklahoma.

Indian role-playing soon broke out in those areas from which the Indians  were removed, Deloria said.  "The dynamic at work is to get rid of Indians; then you become Indian."  The desire to know Indians peaked in the 1950s when non-Indians sought knowledge of Indian culture directly from Indians. Those days are gone, he  said.

"Today it's all about reading books (on Indians) and then working it out  with a buddy. Books are personal and individual. They can be interpreted  any way you want."

Deloria said this interpreting from afar actually hinders the development  of the social, political and economic relations between whites and native  people.  It loops you right back around to the Revolution, where they imagine a cultural Indian who is the object of desire, who only has to exist in the cultural realm."