Vine Deloria Jr., 72; Native American Activist Wrote 'Custer Died for Your Sins'

Vine Deloria Jr., author of the scathing bestseller "Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto" and an influential historian and spokesman for Native American rights, has died. He was 72.

Deloria, who taught at the University of Colorado from 1990 to 2000, died Sunday in Denver of complications from an aortic aneurysm, his family said. He lived in nearby Golden, Colo.

"Vine was a great leader and writer, probably the most influential American Indian of the past century -- one of the most influential Americans, period," said Charles Wilkinson, of the University of Colorado School of Law at Boulder and an Indian law expert.

Deloria wrote more than 20 books, but it was his first in 1969, "Custer Died for Your Sins," that brought him to the nation's attention.

In 2002, Wilkinson called it "perhaps the single most influential book ever written on Indian affairs" and described it as "at once fiery and humorous, uplifting and sharply critical."

J.A. Phillips, in reviewing the book for Best Sellers shortly after it was published, wrote that Deloria "asserts the worth if not the dignity of the red man and blasts the political, social and religious forces that perpetuate the Little Big Horn and wigwam stereotyping of his people."

The author's disdain for Gen. George Armstrong Custer never wavered. In 1996, he reiterated his views on the Civil War hero who died at Little Big Horn at a symposium at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West in Los Angeles.

Deloria told The Times then that he continued to view Custer as the Adolf Eichmann of the Plains. Eichmann was the Nazi official in charge of implementing Hitler's extermination of millions of people during the Holocaust, in particular Jews.

"Soldiers were nothing to him, except tools," Deloria told The Times, describing Custer as a psychopath. "The soldiers were not defending civilization. They were crushing another society."

Publication of the powerful "Custer" book followed Deloria's 1964-67 tenure as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians. His leadership in lobbying Congress and setting forth Native American rights issues in speeches and articles during the 1960s is widely credited with forcing a turning point in Indian policy.