.
[Return to chapter two: about Nationalism.]
[Return to Main Menu.]
.

Black Separatism: Deloria's Prescriptions to African-Americans

by Theodore Walker, Jr.

.

Throughout Deloria's work, and throughout his accounts of the past 500 years, there is consistent attention to historical and social parallels, similarities, and contrasts pertaining to Native American and African-American experiences.

Moreover, Deloria's book -- CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS: AN INDIAN MANIFESTO -- includes a chapter length social ethical reflection on Native America and Afro-America called "The Red and the Black."

[See chapter 8, "The Red and the Black" in CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS: AN INDIAN MANIFESTO (Norman Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989/1969) by Vine Deloria, Jr. of the Sioux nations.]

In "The Red and the Black" Deloria prescribes that African-American retribalize, and that African-American retribalization should include economic rather than merely political/legal goals.

And, Deloria prescribes corporate structured economic tribalism for African-Americans.

Deloria prescribes that African-Americans follow in the direction indicated by CORE's 1969 proposed Community Self-Determination Act which included a proposal for creating a black owned and black controlled Community Development Corporation (CDC).


Deloria says:

"... the CDC was to be the all-purpose corporation by which black poverty was to be eliminated from the black ghettos and self-determination given to ghetto areas ... If the CDC was brand-new for blacks it had a mighty familiar ring to the Indian people ... As Indians viewed the "new" CDC, the blacks were finally ready to tribalize."
(CUSTER, p. 227)

"The primary purpose of the tribe, then and now, was to ensure as beneficial a life as possible for members of the tribe. ... Certainly the CDC proposed by CORE ... purports to do the same."
(CUSTER, p. 230)

In accordance with tribal perspectives, Deloria prescribes:
CORE over SCLC,
Stokely Carmichal over Martin Luther King, Jr.
separatism over integration, and
black power over civil rights.

Moreover,
Deloria reports that, throughout the 60's and 70's, most Native Americans shared this view. Deloria says:

"In our hearts and minds we could not believe that blacks wanted to be the same as whites. And we knew that even if they did want that, the whites would never allow it to happen. "
(CUSTER, p. 180)
"It was therefore no surprise to us when Stokely Carmichael began his black power escapade. We only wondered why it had taken so long to articulate and why blacks had not been able to understand their situation better at the beginning."
(CUSTER, p. 180)
"Civil Rights as a movement for legal equality ended when the blacks dug beneath the equality fiction which white liberals had use to justify their great crusade. Black power, as a communications phenomenon, was a godsend to other groups. It clarified the intellectual concepts which had kept Indians and Mexicans confused and allowed the concept of self-determination suddenly to become valid."
(CUSTER, p. 180)
"So, for many people particularly those Indian people who had supported self-determination a decade earlier, Stokely Carmichael was the first black who said anything significant."
(CUSTER, p. 181)
"There is, therefore, basically no way in which the ideology of the Civil Rights movement could reach Indian communities in a communicative sense. Outside of black power nothing that the Civil Rights people could have said would have indicated ther meaning or opened lines of interaction ..."
(CUSTER, p. 186)
"Separatism can be the means by which blacks gain time for reflection, meditation, and eventual understanding of themselves as a people.
The black needs time to develop his roots, to create his sacred palces, to understand the mystery of himself and his history, to understand his own purpose. These things the Indian has and is able to maintain through his tribal life."
(CUSTER, p. 188)
"They [Native Americans] are becoming distrustful of people who talk equality because they do not see how equality can be achieved without cultural separateness."
(CUSTER, p. 193)

Deloria's black separatist prescriptions are based upon
the expectation-prediction that whites will never accept blacks as equals, and
the conviction that becoming like the white man is not a righteous ambition.
Deloria says:

It is time for both black and red to understand the ways of the white man. The white is after Indian lands and resources. He always has been and always will be. For Indians to continue to think of their basic conflict with the white man as cultural is the height of folly. The problem is and always has been the adjustment of the legal relationship between the Indian tribes and the federal government, between the true owners of the land and the usurpers.
(CUSTER, p. 174)
The black must understand that whites are determined to keep him out of their society. No matter how many Civil Rights laws are passed or how many are on the drawing board, the basic thrust is to keep the black out of society and harmless.
(CUSTER, p. 174)
The problem, therefore, is not one of legal status, it is one of culture and social and economic mobility. It is foolish for a black to depend upon a law to make acceptance of him by the white possible. Nor shoud he react to the rejection. His problem is social, and economic, and cultural, not one of adjusting the legal relationship between the two groups.
When the black seeks to change his role by adjusting the laws of the nation, he merely raises the hope that progress is being made. But for the majority of blacks progress is not being made. Simply because a middle-class black can eat at the Holiday Inn is not a gain. People who can afford the best generally get it. A socio-economic, rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal."
(CUSTER, p. 174)

The black effort to integrate/assimilate will not succeed,
and blacks should not want it to.

Instead of pursuing legal enforcement of integration,
Deloria prescribes that blacks should seek cultural-political-social and economic independance.

"A socio-economic, rather than legal adjustment must consequently be the goal."
(CUSTER, p. 174)

According to Deloria, blacks should retribalize themselves as a separate people with a separate land and a separate nation.

(CUSTER, pp. 179, 180, 188, 193, 194, 196)

Furthermore,
Deloria offers prescriptions for future coalitions between Native Americans and African-Americans.

(This is consistent with other contemporary Native Americans calls for red-black solidarity and with the general history of red-black solidarity.)

From Native American perspectives, the struggle for freedom/liberty is not simply or even mainly about achieving equal civil rights with whites or overcoming class inequalities. Moreover, Deloria and other Native Americans see integration as cultural genocide.

Accordingly,
Deloria reports that during the 1960s, Native Americans were openly resistant to participation in integration and civil rights movements, and,
they were not enthusiastic about the "poor people's campaign" and other struggles focused on class inequality.

Those who seriously favor coalitions with Native Americans must come to terms with this fact: campaigns against segregation and poverty do not adequately capture Native American concerns.

Deloria says:

"People fool themselves when they visualize a great coalition of the minority groups to pressure Congress for additional programs and rights. Indians will not work within an ideological basis which is foreign to them. Any cooperative movement must come to terms with tribalism in the Indian context before it will gain Indian support.
The future, therefore, as between the red, white, and black, (195/196) will depend primarily upon whether white and black begin to understand Indian nationalism. ... Hopefully black militancy will return to nationalistic philosophies which relate to the ongoing conception of the tribe as a nation extending in time and occupying space. If such is possible within the black community, it may be possible to bring the problems of minority groups into a more realistic focus and possible solution in the years ahead."
(CUSTER, p. 195-196)

According to Deloria,
the future of red-black coalition efforts is contingent upon blacks recognizing and affirming that Native American struggles are about the the protection and advancement of tribal existence, tribal and national sovereignty, tribal lands, and tribal religions.

Deloria argues civil rights, integration, class inequalities, poverty, and race-relations are inadequate to Native American concerns.

Similarly,
George Tinker of the Osage nation laments the fact that theologies of liberation frequently reduce fourth world indigenous tribal struggles to third world class and race struggles, and
Tinker prescribes that liberation theologians repent of this oppressive habit.

[See "The Full Circle of Liberation: An American Indian Theology of Place" in SOJOURNERS (Vol. 21, No. 8, October 1992) by George Tinker of the Osage nation.]


African-Americans (and others) seeking coalition with Native Americans should learn to take Native American tribalism, Native American claims to the land, Native American nationalism, and Native American religions seriously.


.
[See chapter 8, "The Red and the Black" in CUSTER DIED FOR YOUR SINS: AN INDIAN MANIFESTO (Norman Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989/1969) by Vine Deloria, Jr. of the Sioux nations.]

[See "The Full Circle of Liberation: An American Indian Theology of Place" in SOJOURNERS (Vol. 21, No. 8, October 1992) by George Tinker of the Osage nation.]


.

.
[Return to chapter two: about Nationalism.]
.
[Return to Main Menu.]


.
.
.
.
most recent update: 4 November 1997
.
.
.
.
NOTICE OF COPYRIGHT: copyright 1997 Theodore Walker, Jr. This copyright covers all content and formatting (browser-visible and HTML text) in this and attached documents created by Theodore Walker, Jr. c@Theodore Walker, Jr.
.