(Excerpt from this interview)

Indians are the lat hope of the planet earth because we represent the humane alternative to industrial society. If we want to survive in the next fifty years, we have to assert the Indian viewpoint is equal to, or better than, anything the proponents of this industrial society can offer.

The traditional, tribal family structure is better; the traditional community structure is better; our religion is alive and vibrant as opposed to just the recitation of creeds. We are the only alternative the earth has: we are bringing back the buffalo; we are restoring; we have concern for the land.

If they keep building suburbs, factories, and interstates, that will be the end of us all. Genetic diversity will be lost, hybrids will be spawned, and those hybrids cause cancers and other malignancies, and so the whole planet may die. Therefore, Indians have a responsibility to be very aggressive about what they know, and to get out there and get into debates wit these guys to focus peoples' attention on the fact that the earth is only sustainable if you live the way that we used to live. We have to instill the will in the populous to find a modern accommodation to that.

Unless you recognize those fundamental challenges, you can't claim that you have made any significant progress.

We haven't even touched the reforms of federal Indian law, and we're not even remotely close. Not one time has the U.S. Constitution been used to protect Indian rights, it's always been used to strip away Indian rights.

Today, we have got to take the government-to-government relationship and say that we are as embedded in the Tenth Amendment as the states are; basically, anything that we haven't given to the federal government, we have retained. If we do that, we can challenge the doctrine of diminishment the court has created for jurisdictional cases, and it won't be so easy for them to opine that states own the water that runs through a reservation, like they did in Montana v. U.S.

There's no question that in the near future some politician is going to say, "We want to deal with the Indian problem once and for all," and initiate a move to bring back a manifestation of termination. That's why you have all this flack on tribal enrollments, because what they are going to say is, "Look, your Indian blood is so diluted that what we're talking about now is a group of white people with possible Indian heritage."

"Western civilization, unfortunately, odes not link knowledge and morality but rather, it connects knowledge and power and makes them equivalent. Today with an information 'superhighway' now looming on the horizon, we are told that a lack of access to information will doom people to a life of meaninglessness -- and poverty. As we look around and observe modern industrial society, however, there is no question that information, in and of itself, is useless and that as more data is generated, ethical and moral decisions are taking on a fantasy dimension in which a 'lack of evidence to indict' is the moral equivalent of the good deed."

"In recent years we have come to understand what progress is. It is the total replacement of nature by an artificial technology. Progress is the absolute destruction of the real world in favor of a technology that creates a comfortable way of life for a few fortunately situated people. Within our lifetime the differences between the Indian use of the land and the while use of the land will become crystal clear. the Indian lived with his land. The white destroyed his land, he destroyed the planet earth."

"Scientists, and I use the word as loosely as possible, are committed to the view that Indians migrated to this country over an imaginary Bering Straits bridge, which comes and goes at the convenience of the scholar requiring it to complete his or her theory. Initially, at least, Indians are homogenous. But there are also eight major language families within the western Hemisphere, indication to some scholars that if Indians followed the trend that can be identified in other continents, then the migration went from east to west; tourists along the Bering Straits were going To Asia, not FROM it."

Vine Deloria, Jr., Standing Rock Sioux, 1970,1994 - Special from News from Indian Country