Vine Deloria Jr. (1933–2005) remains one of the most enduring intellectual forces in American Indian life. This lecture will revisit Deloria’s first book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). Through Custer, Deloria’s critiques of the civil rights movement will be put into conversation with insights foundational to the tenets of critical race theory and one of that movement’s founders, Derrick Bell (1930–2011).
Rev. Robert O. Smith, PhD (Chickasaw), is Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. He is the coauthor, with Aja Y. Martinez, of The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas that Created a Movement (NYU Press, 2025).