[In the following review, Abbey asserts that in Custer Died For Your Sins, Deloria "writes with much humor and even sympathy for what he believes to be the white Americans' pathetic inability to feel and understand the true nature of the situation we are living in."]

Even our Indians are turning against us now. Red Power. All the chickens coming home to roost. In Custer Died For Your Sins the author reminds us—and Vine Deloria, former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, is himself an Indian—that America was discovered not by Columbus, not by Leif Ericson, but by the Indians—over 20,000 years ago. This simple fact has somehow eluded the rest of us, perhaps because the original discoverers of this continent were regarded by the English settlers not as people or human beings but simply as part of the wild life, i.e., as animals.

"They used to shoot us for our feathers," Mr. Deloria complains, going on to point out that the practice of scalping, for instance, was invented in New England by white men. Why? For the same reason that mountain-lion trappers in Arizona nowadays remove the scalps of their victims, as proof of kill, in order to collect the bounty.

Details such as these were never mentioned in our public-school history classes. Why not? The word "genocide" is used a little too easily and carelessly these days (it flows trippingly on the tongue); but in the case of the American Indians, particularly those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the path of our Pilgrim and Puritan forefathers, the term may not be inapplicable. How many Indians are left in New England? Along the Eastern seaboard?

The many parallels between the war in Vietnam and the war against the American Indian have not escaped the American Indian. In his chapter on Indian humor Vine Deloria reports the results of an opinion poll taken among Indians on the question of Vietnam: 15 per cent replied that the United States should get out of Vietnam; 85 per cent that the United States should get out of America.

In filling in the many little gaps in school textbooks on American history, Mr. Deloria accuses the United States Government of ignoring or violating some 400 treaties made with Indian tribes, and contrasts this record with the alleged reason for our "presence" in Vietnam. "History may well record," he writes, "that while the United States was squandering some one hundred billion dollars in Vietnam while justifying this bloody orgy as commitment—keeping, it was also busy breaking the oldest Indian treaty, that between the United States and the Seneca tribe of the Iroquois Nation." He refers here to the Pickering Treaty of 1794, which was signed by, among others, one G. Washington, Pres., and illegally broken in the early 1960's by the construction of the Kinzua Dam on the Allegheny River, which flooded the Senecas out of their ancestral homeland.

Mr. Deloria recounts the long history of Indian grievances in blunt language but without exaggeration or melodrama. He writes also of more contemporary afflictions which the Indians must endure, such as anthropologists, missionaries, the bullet-headed bureaucrats of the B. I. A. (Bureau of Indian Affairs) and other Government agencies, and of such potentially disastrous policies as "termination," by which the Government would have eliminated medical and educational services, and "relocation," an ingenious scheme thought up by someone in Washington whereby surplus reservation Indians are transferred to big-city slums where it is hoped they will sort of fade away and be forgotten. All in the name of "economy," of course.

Despite the sense of injustice and frustration which he and most Indians must surely feel, Mr. Deloria presents his case without the deep bitterness we might expect. Indeed he writes with much humor and even sympathy for what he believes to be the white Americans' pathetic inability to feel and understand the true nature of the situation we are living in. He makes constructive suggestions. He is even hopeful. Not very hopeful, but hopeful.

As for us, what should be our response? It is not enough to indulge in racial self-hatred, as I have seen some of my white brothers and sisters doing lately. Nor can we all go back to Europe; they don't want us either. The only solution, I am afraid, is a dose of justice. Even if it hurts.

As for Mr. Deloria, he has written a good book, not only about Indians and their troubles but about us and our troubles. The two are the same, which is one of the things he is trying to tell us. Custer Died For Your Sins is even better than its title.