Red Earth White Lies Summary

Ibad Baig
History 111
Jay Nelson
03/12/2012

Red Earth White Lies

“Red earth white lies” by Vine Deloria is by all accounts and standards is a ground breaking book which brings into light the troubling picture of cultural bias against the native American Indians, their origin and historic traditions. In his own words he emphasizes the need of dialog between western science and tribal people and says “corrective measures must be taken to eliminate scientific misconceptions about Indians, their culture and their past”. He goes on to say “there needs to be a way that Indian traditions can contribute to the understanding of scientific beliefs at enough specific points so that the Indian traditions will be taken seriously as valid bodies
This can of course only be propagated by completely ignoring volumes of geological and paleontological evidence showing clearly that these creatures were destroyed in a natural cataclysm. Deloria reviews some of this evidence, as well as some of the evidence of Native American tradition, which described this catastrophe in some detail. In fact, native traditions from all over the world, as Ignatius Donnelly and Immanuel Velikovsky observed, tell much of the same story. People like Paul Martin however, studiously ignore this material. It may be noted that the scholarly consensus is now moving decisively away from Martin and his "overkill" theory in favor of Deloria's catastrophe. One of the most recent books on the topic, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes, provides a comprehensive overview of the latest scientific findings, such as the iridium layer at the termination of the Pleistocene, which speaks conclusively of a cataclysm. I wish that Deloria was alive to see such a positive
Deloria takes an entirely different approach to this belief. He uses a combination of Native American folklore and modern geological and climatological scholarship, his scenario of the prehistoric American peoples is a radical departure from the traditional picture we still find in many books nowadays. And despite all of its flaws, it still comes as a breath of fresh air for those of us who were restless or dissatisfied with the current ideas about the past we'd been raised on. How could a few thousand people with nothing more than stone weapons for example, wipe out a continent's worth of large animals and how would that explain the mass extinctions of plant life? Or for that matter, what would drive these original settlers across an icy wilderness and through a Canada still in the glacial grip of an ice age? How would they know that their promised land would be any better, or warmer? Deloria's approach is not unique but largely ignored: interpreting America's geological history by way of the folklore and myths passed down by Native American storytellers. Similar to how many South American myths may have come about by encoding simple astronomical knowledge, so too could major geological events or changes be