ABSTRACT
Vine Deloria (1933–2005) was a Native American activist and author who taught at the University of Colorado as well as the University of Arizona, where he established the first master’s degree program in American Indian Studies in the United States. In this essay, Deloria rejects “liberation theology” as an inappropriate framework for achieving indigenous peoples’ freedom. Deloria maintains that liberation theology was born of a Western theological, philosophical, and scientific framework that is insufficiently inclusive of non-European worldviews, and therefore has only a very limited conception of what native or indigenous people believe real freedom entails. On his view, true liberation will be achieved only when we realize that Western approaches to understanding are not universally valid; rather, he argues, all knowledge is relative to the type of questions that we human beings formulate. Insisting that knowledge is more a matter of cultural preference than the depiction of some underlying reality about the world, Deloria argues for altering human thinking from a Western focus on narrow “ideas” to an indigenous focus on holistic “visions,” a path that he believes will liberate not only native peoples, but all people.
