Custer Died For Our Sins: Vine Deloria, Jr., Theologia Crucis, and the Work of Settler Repair

Vine Deloria, Jr., one of the most influential indigenous scholars of law and religion in the past generation, was a graduate of a Lutheran seminary, but disavowed it as unable “to produce both answers and behavior that could match [its] creeds.” “I don’t believe they can; I don’t think they even come close,” he opined some thirty years later (*For This Land*, 275). In his classic work *Custer Died for Your Sins* he wrote: “For me, at least, Christianity has been a sham to cover over the white man’s shortcomings. I spent four years in a seminary finding out for myself where Christianity has fallen short" (124). As an example, in his subsequent book *God is Red* he recalls “some aggressive Lutheran pastors” who encouraged AIM activists to occupy a dorm at Augusta College in Sioux Falls during the meet of the National Council of Churches. These pastors wrote up demands for the AIM activists to put forward, thus leading to the establishment of a fund and the Lutheran national council of Indians to supervise spending it. Likening this to white churches “purchasing indulgences for their sins by funding the Indian activists” (46).

In his powerful “Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America,” Deloria proposes a way forward that entails “the beginning of honest inquiry by yourselves into the nature of your situation. And that situation is that I believe that you have taught [humanity] to find its identity in a re-writing of history” (*For This Land*, 79) Taking my lead from this challenge, my paper narrates a Lutheran theological response that both undergirds important work already underway and aims to bolster further commitments on the part of inheritors of white settler history. That the Lutheran pioneer settler story has gloried in its hard-won history of immigrant trials more than a century ago trades in exactly the kind of re-writing of history Deloria decries. 

Beginning with Vitor Westhelle’s *After Hersey*, my “beginning of honest inquiry” interrogates the pseudo-theologies that funded European colonialism and settler claims to Indigenous lands in what became the United States. Deploying an anti-colonial *theologia crucis*, I follow Westhelle’s critique of the history of European colonialism and his effort to clear a space in which “the subaltern speaks with her own authentic voice, she preaches, naming the thing for what it is” (164). I wonder with Westhelle about the ways Martin Luther’s approach to theology might also fund a powerful approach for an anti-settler “naming of the thing for what it is.” 

To this end, I make this theological approach’s tires hit the road in exploring my own settler family history, a tale of land and how my ancestors got it that subsequently became an mythic American story of pioneer life through Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books, and the television show loosely based upon them. Beginning in 2008 when I moved back to St. Paul, Minnesota to teach at Luther Seminary, I narrate my deepening curiosity about the family connection to the Little House stories amidst the looming 150th anniversary of the U.S. - Dakota War of 1862. Over the intervening years, I have found just how deeply steeped the Upper Midwest inheritors of settler culture like me were—and are—in a story of pioneer glory. My own family story actually contributed profoundly to the promulgation of such a pioneer story. Yet only the truth will set us free, and offer pathways to repair. 

Telling the truth is a first step, yet it necessarily leads to building relationships that center listening, learning, and then appropriate steps of repair. Here, as a model of the pathways inheritors of settler colonialism must take, I explore one story of the Northwest Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America whose journey with Minnesota Chippewa Tribe led to the Duluth Reparations in amounts that reflect symbolically the years of the treaties that took lands from the tribe for white settlers. Echoing Dr. Deloria’s call half a century ago, the synod’s efforts center “actions and behaviors that match their creeds,” beginning with looking at their own shameful history and “naming of the thing what it is.” (http://www.togetherhere.org/)