[In the following review, Eby discusses the commercial relationship between white America and its use of land versus the Indians' veneration of nature as presented by Deloria in We Talk, You Listen.]

Adding to the already formidable list of "problems" bedeviling white America is the rise, in recent years, of Red Power. Armed not with tomahawks but with briefcases chock-full of broken promises and treaty violations, the Indian has joined other minority groups in demanding his due. Once upon a time white America could count on a docile Indian population content to subsist on mission charity and Congressional dole, with a repast now and then at the tourist trough as a reward for good behavior. Today this eleemosynary epoch seems about to end. The Indian has become militant and aggressive, and the paleface finds few weapons at hand to combat this new Red Menace. It would be a trifle ridiculous for an investigating committee to denounce the Indian as "Un-American," and the U.S. Cavalry—that trusty arbiter of Indian affairs in times past—is engrossed in activities elsewhere.

Perhaps the first stirrings of the "New Indian" were felt in the middle-Fifties when a band of Cherokees put to rout a North Carolina conference of the Ku Klux Klan, ripping off sheets and exposing frightened white faces underneath. More recently the Penobscots have stopped traffic in Maine to extract toll from summer tourists crossing territory claimed by the tribe. Others have pressed suits in federal courts for restoration of stolen land, which just about takes in the entire North American continent. And in their most dramatic venture to date, Indians have occupied Alcatraz and held the whites at bay, inverting the classic confrontation at the beleaguered wagon train. This "New Indian" does not tread respectfully in the American pantheon. He has doubts about Jim Thorp, he dismisses Tonto as an "Uncle Tomahawk," and he labels General George Custer "the Adolf Eichmann of the nineteenth century."

In two books, Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) and We Talk, You Listen, Vine DeLoria Jr. describes the thrust of the Red-Power movement without anointing himself as its oracle or its official spokesman. No one, not even a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, could legitimately speak for half a million Indians represented by more than three hundred tribes, many of them as jealous of one another as outraged at the Great White Father. There is no monolithic organization or unified set of objectives that all tribes have agreed on, unless it be the demand that whites abide by contracts which they (not Indians) have written. DeLoria brings into focus the moods and habitat of the contemporary Indian as seen by a Standing Rock Sioux, not by a research anthropologist or a jobber in the basketry trades. He peels away layers of tinsel and feathers heaped upon the Indian by misinformed whites (beginning with Columbus), and he reveals an uncanny ability for impaling them on the fine points of their own illogic.

Whites are so guilty of stereotyping, says DeLoria, that they lump together all "minority problems" as the struggle of each oppressed minority to enter into the shining world of the affluent majority. The problem of the blacks, for example, has been to wrest an economic base from whites unwilling to surrender what they have. Blacks are trying to forge a weapon which can open doors closed to them in the past. With the Indians it is just the opposite. Since originally they controlled all the land, their historical battle has been to keep the whites from appropriating it. The blacks struggle to obtain what they have never had before; the Indians, to retain possession of that portion of the land not yet taken from them—some fifty-four million acres valued at three billion dollars. (DeLoria seems not to take seriously the demands voiced by some Indian extremists for the return of all of North America to its original owners.) The red man is no landless redneck. His holdings are enormous. What he has to do is to slave off encroachments of slippery whites who argue that Indians fail to "use" their land and who doubtless calculate how productive this land would be if it were put in the soil bank. What the Indian wants are guarantees that existing treaties will be honored, along with a minimum of meddling from bureaucrats, missionaries, and sociologists. The white man, says DeLoria, has given the Indian little more than "poverty and disease." No wonder, then, that in a recent poll only 15 per cent of Indians sampled wanted the United States to get out of Vietnam, while over 80 per cent wanted it to get out of America!

Custer Died for Your Sins contains more information about Indian affairs than does DeLoria's new book, which moves into an area of broader humanistic concerns. We Talk, You Listen is apocalyptical and ecological. It attacks the corporate patterns of American life—which he sees as analogous to feudalism—and defends the tribal variables found in minority cultures, whether Indian, black, or Amish. Already great numbers of Americans have "gone Indian" rather than endure megasystems and superstructures alien to the human spirit. They have adopted pre-Columbian mannerisms and garb, found refuge in tribal communes, and championed causes presumed to be inimical to traditional Western culture. DeLoria finds in these manifestations a desire to return to the Indian concept of land as an entity to be lived with rather than exploited and to the Indian notion of the tribe as a communal family in which objects are shared rather than owned. The ultimate irony of white progress is that its machines and their by-products may succeed in eradicating all human life on this planet. On the day before the world ends, the Indians' veneration of small animals would not seem irrelevant.

For DeLoria the answer seems to lie in returning to simpler frameworks of human existence like those developed by Indians. Yet the simplest course often proves the most difficult one to plot. The message conveyed by slogans like "God is Red" and "Better Red than Dead" makes ecological sense. As poetic utterances they are eloquent and seductive—but they cannot be programmed by a computer. The peculiar tragedy of white America at the present time is that it knows what ought to be done but knows not how to do it. Even if briefly allied together on a last doomsday march, it is likely that the Indian and the white man would bear different drummers.