Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact [Paperback]

Vine Deloria Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 19, 1997

Vine Deloria, Jr., leading Native American scholar and author of the best-selling God Is Red, addresses the conflict between mainstream scientific theory about our world and the ancestral worldview of Native Americans. Claiming that science has created a largely fictional scenario for American Indians in prehistoric North America, Deloria offers an alternative view of the continent's history as seen through the eyes and memories of Native Americans. Further, he warns future generations of scientists not to repeat the ethnocentric omissions and fallacies of the past by dismissing Native oral tradition as mere legends.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though Deloria (Custer Died for Your Sins) has a broad academic brief?he teaches history, law, religious studies and political science at the University of Colorado?here he ventures into a new area, attacking the way scientists have created "a largely fictional scenario describing prehistoric North America" and suggesting that Indian lore may offer better explanations. Given Deloria's not-so-temperate tone?"Christianity has been the curse of all cultures into which it has intruded"?it is hard to judge all his arguments. He finds flaws in scientific accounts of how Indians once traversed the Bering Strait land bridge; he also reports that geological evidence suggests an earlier Indian presence and notes that no tribal creation stories reflect such a migration. Similarly, he criticizes scientists who argue that Indians killed off North American megafauna of the Pleistocene era. Deloria's fiercely argued study sometimes overwhelms as a narrative, but his charges should provoke more evaluation, as well as examination of the consonance of science and Indian tradition.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Deloria, one of the most outspoken Native American voices of the century, is back?this time to take on the scientists. Demonstrating that a theory is just that until it has been solidly proved, the author of Custer Died for Your Sins (Univ. of Oklahoma, 1988) takes the scientific community to task for insisting on uniformity of opinion within academia while neglecting Native oral traditions about such events as the peopling of the Western Hemisphere and the disappearance of the giant animals of the Pleistocene era. While many will challenge Deloria's arguments, the author's insistence that scientists investigate non-Western knowledge in their search for the truth echoes a cry heard through Native American communities. An important addition to all collections.?Mary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib., N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Fulcrum Publishing; First Edition first Printing edition (August 19, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555913881
• ISBN-13: 978-1555913885
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.9 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #375,492 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

50 of 57 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Provocative and illuminating December 12, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

If "science" is defined as a technique for gaining an understanding of the world around us, many "scientific" disciplines are in fact profoundly unscientific. In "Red Earth, White Lies," Vine Deloria, Jr. clearly demonstrates how conjecture can attain the status of fact, even in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence. Perhaps even more condemning is Deloria's depiction of how alternative ideas, most notably indigenous traditions, are frequently (typically) cast aside without any investigation whatsoever, simply because they conflict with currently accepted norms.

"Red Earth, White Lies" is a wonderfully provocative indictment of how historical sciences, such as anthropology, geology, and ecology (my own field) frequently fail in practice. Nevertheless, perhaps without realizing it, Deloria relies on the very hallmarks of modern science; alternative hypotheses, critical analysis, and crucial evidence, to make his case.

Here, unfortunately, is where "Red Earth, White Lies" loses much of its power. While Deloria succeeds in casting doubt on many beliefs cherished by entrenched academics, he typically does not subject his own hypotheses to the same treatment. Even more unfortunate, Deloria himself employs some of the techniques he most violently condemns in academics, including the selective use of information (the most obvious example is on page 58) and summary dismissal of entire world-views on the basis of a superficial understanding (his entire discussion of evolutionary biology, for example).

Even though "Red Earth, White Lies" occasionally stumbles, Deloria has done all of us a great service, by proving that scientists are only human and that many scientific "facts" are in reality little more than conjectures. If you identify yourself as a "scientist," you will be (and should be) challenged! If you are not a scientist, then perhaps you will see those who are in a whole new light. "Red Earth, White Lies" is a fascinating read, no matter who you are.

34 of 41 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Uneven but essential November 25, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Vine Deloria Jr.'s book is a very useful and merited challenge to a whole host of theories, especially the Bering Strait land bridge, magafauna extinction ("Overkill") and some other things in which U.S. racism, capitalist waste and ruthlessness towards the environment, and scientistic narrowness are shown to be the underlying roots of these theories. However, I can't help but feel that Deloria both throws the baby out with the bathwater based on a kind of "multicultural creationism". For example, his attacks on Stephen J. Gould are almost ridiculous at times (given his prominence, not as a mainstream Darwinian, but as a 'catastrophist' and anti-sociobiologist) and represent the fact that he never got past Gould's first collection of essays. Also, Gould and others have for years defended allopatric speciation, which would allow a species' 'gestation' in 5-10,000 years. This type of narrow, shotgun scholarship makes Deloria subject to exactly the type of criticism he so correctly levels at academia. Also, his knowledge of genetics and evolution seem to leave a lot to be desired, and he clearly does not expect the reader to be scientifically literate (otherwise, he would not be able to make some of the peculiar remarks he makes about speciation). Anyone familiar with modern biology cannot but be amazed at how his work is little more than a reworking of Christian Fundamentalist creationism (or vice versa). Having said that, Deloria's value as an anti-racist, as a defender of the worth and validity and richness of non-white, non-European sources of knowledge is more than worth the occaissional bad science and anti-intellectualism. All I can say is that this is essential reading for anyone learning about the material he covers, and for thinking about how racism and power can determine whose knowledge is 'myth and fantasy' as much as it determines who is the 'terrorist' and who is the 'freedom fighter'. A must read book.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Pulling no punches December 16, 2010

By Emmet Sweeney

Format:Hardcover

This book is valuable and timely, as it rips apart the frankly idiotic notion - peddled by the likes of Paul Martin - that prehistoric man wiped out the Pleistocene megafauna in North America - and presumably everywhere else in the world. Such nonsense can, of course, only be propagated by completely ignoring volumes of geological and palaeontological 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 the same story. People like Paul Martin, however, studiously ignore this material. (How do such people manage to get tenured positions in our universities? Or does that in itself tell us something terrible about the university system?).
Be that as it may, the scholarly consensus is now moving decisively away from Martin and his "overkill" theory in favour 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. It's a pity Deloria did not live to see these developments.