Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto was published by Macmillan in 1969, at the height of the Red Power movement — a year after the founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and in the same year as the occupation of Alcatraz Island. Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) was thirty-six, a former Executive Director of the National Congress of American Indians, and possessed of both legal training and a wit sharp enough to cut through decades of sentimental obfuscation about the “Indian problem.”
The title is both a joke and a theological statement: it plays on the evangelical bumper sticker (“Christ Died for Your Sins”) while proposing that Custer’s death — the one time Indians won — has been paying cultural dividends for white guilt ever since. The humor is characteristic: Deloria’s method throughout is to deploy devastating wit as a weapon against the sentimentality, condescension, and outright theft that have characterized white America’s relationship with indigenous peoples.
The book’s chapters systematically dismantle the institutions that claim to serve Indians: the Bureau of Indian Affairs (which serves itself), Christian missionaries (who destroyed native religion while providing nothing adequate in its replacement), anthropologists (who studied Indians as objects while contributing nothing to their welfare), and the federal government (which signed treaties it never intended to honor and then blamed Indians for the resulting poverty).
Deloria’s argument — revolutionary in 1969 — was that Native peoples are not a “minority group” (like African Americans or Latinos) but sovereign nations with treaty rights: nations that ceded territory in exchange for specific guarantees that the United States has systematically violated. The political demand is not civil rights (inclusion in American society) but sovereignty (the right to govern oneself according to one’s own traditions and values).
Collecting Custer Died for Your Sins
First edition (Macmillan, New York, 1969): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Signed first edition: $200–$600
- Without jacket: $20–$40
The foundational text of modern Native American political thought. Values have risen steadily as Native studies has entered the mainstream and as the book’s arguments about sovereignty have become increasingly central to American political discourse.