"If you mixed an ultraconservative religious leader with an angry American Indian, you'd get Vine Deloria Jr. Deloria, who died in November, has many fans - mostly because of his 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins - and they, no doubt, would disagree.

But his latest book will confirm for nearly everyone else who has read one or more of his two dozen works that he was angry at what he saw as a growing godlessness in contemporary American society. His posthumous The World We Used to Live In is a call for today's American Indians to accept as true many of the stories told by Indian medicine men in earlier centuries.

He didn't even like the term "medicine men" (although it's used in the subtitle: "Remembering the Powers of the Medicine Men"). He writes in his introduction that "a much better description would be the holy ones."

"Certain individuals," he writes, "had experiences, insights and powers that could not be denied when searching for answers to basic questions." Those powers, he adds, were not medicinal but holy. "

Get the Story:
Indian writer unlikely to convert skeptics (The Salt Lake Tribune 7/8)

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