Joining the Ongoing Struggle: Vine Deloria, Nancy Lurie, and the Quest for a Decolonial Anthropology

Vine Deloria’s account of anthropology in Custer Died for Your Sins (Macmillan, 1969) has become a touchstone of disciplinary self-critiques, used to dismiss past anthropologists and their vision of the discipline. Yet contemporary critical histories of anthropological practice in Native North America often ignore the specificities of Deloria’s complaints and erase his engagement with contemporary activist anthropologists. My article focuses on one of Deloria’s most important anthropological interlocutors, Nancy Oestreich Lurie. Building on her experience as an action anthropologist, Lurie championed Deloria’s call for a mode of anthropology responsive to Indigenous struggles in a series of publications beginning in 1969 and extending through subsequent decades. Drawing on archival sources, I trace the development of Lurie’s engagement with Deloria in writings calling anthropologists to join the ongoing struggle of Indigenous peoples and in her work with activists from the Menominee Nation in their efforts to protect their land and reclaim their sovereignty.