Encyclopedia of North American Indians -

Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Deloria, Vine, Sr.

(1901-90)

Standing Rock Sioux (Fort Yates) priest and leader

The Deloria family has produced several distinguished religious leaders. The family name is derived from the name of a French trapper, Des Lauriers, who had been taken into the tribe sometime in the eighteenth century. Vine Deloria, Sr.'s paternal grandfather, Saswe or François, was a Yankton subchief and medicine man who underwent a conversion to Christianity in the 1860s, an event one writer has called "legendary," and the story of which is still told and discussed among the Sioux. An enthusiastic Christian, François welcomed the missionaries who took up residence on the Yankton reservation and sent his children to their school. His son Philip Deloria was a particularly good student. He attended both local and off-reservation boarding schools and was ordained as a priest in 1892. He remained in charge of the Standing Rock Mission until 1925. Philip Deloria was one of the first Sioux Indians to become an Episcopal priest. While he was in charge of the North Dakota Episcopal Mission, he supervised the construction of St. Elizabeth's School.

Vine Deloria, Sr.'s mother, Mary Sully, was the granddaughter of an army-post marriage between General Alfred Sully and a Yankton woman during the 1860s. Vine Victor was the youngest child of Philip and Mary Sully Deloria. He was born on October 6, 1901, in the village of Wakpala, on the Standing Rock reservation.

Vine Deloria's birth occurred eleven years after the massacre at Wounded Knee and less than a decade after Frederick Jackson Turner announced the close of the American frontier. Deloria grew up in the Standing Rock vicarage, but he was familiar with life on a variety of Dakota reservations. His childhood took place during a time of momentous transition as the Sioux adjusted to the end of buffalo hunting and the onset of assimilation. Tribespeople reeled under the multiple impacts of allotment, the sale of reservation lands, the suppression of traditional culture, and the shattered dreams of a failed tribal cattle industry.

When his mother died in 1915, Deloria entered Kearney (Nebraska) Military Academy, an Episcopal educational institution. Although he could not speak English and had never before had a long-term stay away from home, he did well in school. In 1921 he graduated as a cadet major. He enrolled in St. Stephen's College, a predecessor of Bard College, in Annandale, New York. Deloria was a renowned college athlete, and in 1922 Walter Camp named him an honorable mention all-American back. He graduated from St. Stephen's in liberal arts in 1926.

For brief periods, Deloria worked as boy's athletic adviser at the Fort Sill (Oklahoma) federal Indian boarding school and then as a Colorado coal miner before acceding to his father's wish and entering General Theological Seminary in New York City in 1928. He returned to South Dakota in late April 1931 to be ordained as an Episcopal deacon in his father's church. Shortly thereafter his father died. Deloria returned to the seminary and graduated. His first assignment was at the Pine Ridge Mission, where he served under the well-known pioneer Episcopal missionary Father Neville Joyner. In 1932 Deloria married Barbara Sloat Eastburn of New York. That May he was ordained as a priest. They had three children: a daughter, Barbara Sanchez, and sons Vine, Jr., and Sam.

In the 1870s Philip Deloria had been one of the three founders of the Brotherhood of Christian Unity, formerly called the Planting Society. An interdenominational Christian fellowship, it is the oldest continuous all-Indian organization in the United States. When Vine Deloria entered the ministry, he worked diligently in the BCU, serving frequently as an elected officer. He served with distinction during forty active years, seeing ministerial duty on all South Dakota reservations before spending 1951-53 in Dennison, Iowa. He ministered to reservation and urban Indians, mixed congregations, and white parishioners. Because he was fluent in all three Sioux dialects, he preached in the native tongue of his congregations, as well as in English. He served a church in Durant, Iowa, beginning in 1958, and then returned to South Dakota in 1961 to be archdeacon of the Niobrara Convocation, encompassing the Sioux, who made up the largest single ethnic minority within the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. From 1954 to 1958 he worked at the national headquarters of the Episcopal Church as executive secretary for Indian work; he was the first American Indian to be appointed to a major national church position. From 1965 to 1967 he was the vice-chair of that church's National Advisory Committee on Indian Work. His efforts paved the way for the formation two years later of the church's National Committee on Indian Work. During his retirement in South Dakota, Deloria worked in the BCU, taught, and provided ministerial assistance when needed.

Because both of his parents had been previously married and widowed, Deloria had several half-brothers and -sisters. Among the other children of Mary and Philip, however, was Ella Deloria (1889-1971), who graduated from Columbia University in 1914, later studying anthropology with Franz Boas. Among her publications are Dakota Texts (1932) and Speaking of Indians (1944). Following gradually declining health, Vine Deloria, Sr., died on February 26, 1990, in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of eighty-eight. His years of service, his devotion, and his example of selfless giving were honored with addresses, the presentation of gifts to guests, and a memorial dinner at the 118th annual meeting of the Niobrara Convocation in June of that year.





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