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Red Earth, White Lies
Bombshell Frontal Assault on Yuppie Science

I almost don't know where to start with this one.  Usually when I go
looking for a book which a friend or somebody I know has written I have
to order it.  In this case, I found twenty copies of the book in
question sitting at the Borders store in Rockville Md.

Vine Deloria is well known, and not some fringe science writer.  He has
held the position of Chairman of the National Council of American
Indians, and is the author of the familiar "Custer Died for Your Sins".

Roger Dunsmore, author of the Dictionary of Native American Literature
wrote:

"Vine Deloria, Jr., is the most significant voice in this generation
regarding the presentation and analysis of contemporary Indian affairs,
their history, their present shape and meaning."

Renee Sansom Flood, author of Lost Bird of Wounded Knee, notes:

"In Red Earth, White Lies, Vine Deloria, Jr., masterfully challenges the
accepted but grossly inaccurate scientific theories of evolution, radiocarbon
dating techniques, and the Bering Strait migration hoax. He warns coming
generations of scientists, both Indian and white, not to repeat the
ethnocentric   omissions of the past by ignoring Indian oral tradition.
... I have been waiting for this book all of my adult life."

I should start by noting that Red Earth, White Lies is a fun book to
read.  If you can picture a serious scholar (rare enough in itself these days)
who is also a gifted speaker and writer and is capable of writing on
and clarifying sometimes complex topics with something like the dry wit
of a Paddy J. O'Rourke, you'll have a bit of an idea of what's in store.

At the Ceno-Catastrophism convention in Portland a year ago, Deloria told
me that he was tremendously interested in my own presentation regardinng
sauropod dinosaurs, the mathematical and physical demonstration that
nothing heavier than 21,000 lbs. or thereabouts could even stand in our
present world, much less walk around.  He noted that he had been
researching a major project, a compendium of Indian oral traditions and
folklore, and had been out for what sounded like the last 20 years or so
speaking with every chief, every shaman, every medicine man,
storyteller, and keeper of oral traditions of every tribe in North
America.  He noted that if there was anything which used to totally
floor him at first, it was the extent to which virtually every one of
these tribes retained descriptions of pliestocene megafauna and, more
often than not, dinosaurs.  If any of that is true, than much of what
scientists think they know about the history of our Earth is certainly
wrong and grossly so.

Any tool works better at some applications than at others.  A chainsaw,
for instance, works quite well on trees, and poorly on steel I-beams.
Likewise our current science, with its compartmentalization of knowledge
appears well-adapted for various kinds of technological applications,
and is at its best at complex projects such as the Manhatten Project, or
computer technology.  It is precisely when modern science turns its
attention to questions of origins, and of the ultimate nature of
reality, that this same specialization of disciplines and
sub-disciplines and compartmentalization of knowledge, become an
insuperable barrier to understanding.

Deloria notes that:

"Fragmentation of human knowledge by science means that
most explanations must be constructed on an ad hoc basis
with the hope that use of the scientific method will
guarantee that all bits of data are ultimately related.
Unfortunately, the day of the philosopher in Western
society has passed and no single group today serves
the function of surveying the totality of knowledge and
trying to bring it into a coherent and simple explanation
which can be made available to the rest of society.

DeLoria notes that the most major difference between the ways in which
Indians and Western scientists view our physical world is that
scientists see the universe primarily as an inanimate collection of
atoms and molecules, ourselves a temporary abberation caused by chance
associations of inert material, while it is self-evident to Indians that
the universe itself, us included, is a living thing.  That whites
originally adknowledged this obvious reality is inherent in our Indo-European
languages with the exception of English which was stripped of grammar
deliberately, i.e. in the fact that all manner of things which we are
conditioned to view as inanimate all have gender in language.

The general world-view of what I call yuppie science includes as major
tenets such things as the Big-Bang, the nebular theory of our solar system
along with the assumption of a 3 billion - 7 billion year age for our Earth,
uniformitarianism in geology (now grudgingly including a few minor
catastrophes, asteroids etc., provided they are placed some
psychologically comfortable distance into the past), and the theory of
evolution by stochastic processes, guided by "natural selection",
whatever that's supposed to be.

Moreover, the general world-view and axiomatic system has logical
corrolaries of a parochial nature, logical fallouts from the general
system which are necessary to insert into every localized system.
In the case of the Americas, these local corrolaries include the idea of
Indians as well as animal species having migrated across the Bering
Straits, and this is driven by the theory of evolution and the fact that
no Neanderthals or other possible human ancesters are found in the
Americas.  The notion of Indian ancestors having killed off the North
American megafauna is also part of the system because the system does
not allow for recent large-scale catastrophism.

The idea is frighteningly stupid on the face of it.  Killing off all of
the mammoths and other giant animals would require firepower,
organization, logistics, and mobility which nobody in the Americas ever
had.  Even if Indian ancestors had had automatic weapons, they could not
have exterminated the megafauna on foot;  the herds would have simply
filled in behind them.  Nonetheless, this belief is part of the system.

We have seen challenges to individual pieces of this system;  we've seen
Velikovsky's challenge to notions of solar-system stability, and Michael
Denton's challenge to evolution.  Red Earth, White Lies is more than
that.

Red Earth, White Lies is a massive frontal assault upon the entire
ediface of yuppie science.  Deloria heavily documents the fact
that many if not all of these tenets of yuppie science are not only
stupid and massively so, but should probably be categorized as
ethnocentric and racist to boot.

Regarding the supposed killout of megafauna, he notes that:

Since these events, if they did indeed occur, happened
some 12,000 to 15,000 years ago, why should it matter?
It matters immensely because the image which science
has given American Indians is such that modern Indians
are blamed for the extinction of these creatures.
Conservative newspaper columnists, right-wing fanatics,
sportsmen's groups, and scholars in general tend
to see the "overkill" hypothesis as symptomatic
of a lack of moral fiber and ethical concern for
the Earth among Indians...

I can speak here from firsthand personal knowledge.
In 1990, I was invited to speak at Stanford University,
trumpeted as the "Harvard of the West," to celebrate
its one hundredth anniversary. I was asked to speak
on the Indian relationship with the land, and I
tried as best I could to outline the philosophical
principles I thought would be meaningful to the
audience and the values I thought were involved
in the Indian perspective on the natural world.
The first question from the audience when I finished
was a person asking whether I didn't think running
hundreds of buffalo over a cliff was wasteful. The
tone of the question implied that the previous weekend
myself and other invited Indian speakers had destroyed
hundreds of bison somewhere in Wyoming. Since the
only recent slaughter of buffalo that I could remember
was the Super Bowl, I took offense and refused to
answer any more questions.

The chapter dealing with this problem is titled "Mythical Pliestocene
Hit Men".  Deloria makes a total shambles of the Bering Strait
hypothesis, the overkill hypothesis, and any number of other sheboliths
to boot, and describes clear instances of Indian knowledge of geological
events which are conventionally dated in the millions of years, as well
as clear descriptions down to the red fur and saw-blade back of
stegosaurs.

This is a book for the ages;  a book about Indians and tribal peoples,
about catastrophism, and about the failings of our modern science.
Don't miss it.

Ted Holden
medved at digex.com