[In the following review, the critic praises Deloria's humor and hopefulness in his presentation of the American government's broken promises to the Indians in Custer Died for Your Sins.]

All of Vine Deloria's stylistic limitations, all the lifeless passages which smack of going through the motions in order to get a book-length manuscript, cannot defeat the subject matter of this angry polemic [entitled Custer Died for Your Sins].

The condition of the American Indians is, for the most part, intolerable. In the names of manifest destiny, economic growth, expanding the frontier, laissez-faire capitalism and cultural homogeneity, the original inhabitants of America have been slaughtered, uprooted, swindled, chastised, excluded, and despised.

Mr. Deloria, a Sioux himself, sums it all up unsparingly.

The brutality shown by earlier generations of white Americans was, he suggests, frank at least. In our own day the Indians have been deprived of guaranteed government assistance, subjected to cultural fragmentation, and double-crossed by the United States Government.

Despite the fact that many people think so, the Indian treaties are not quaint historical jokes. Every time the government violates an Indian treaty, which it does, Mr. Deloria points out, with deadening regularity, a little more of its credibility is killed off. While 40,000 GIs die in Vietnam in defense of Washington's treaty obligations, the United States goes on breaking some of the most solemn and oldest treaties in its national history.

Mr. Deloria assumes that the true spirit of a powerful nation can only be observed in its dealings with lesser powers. When the country first undertook to contain the Indians, the national argument was the need for space in which to grow. Isn't that called lebensraum?

Somehow in all this Mr. Deloria manages to retain both a biting sense of humor and a hope for the future; that the grace of the Indian under pressure may be the example to leaven the American whole.