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This is the living room of the 800-square-foot house in Denver that held our family of five in the mid-1960s. Every night, my father turned that tiny space into an office, sitting cross-legged in a wide armchair, hunched over the coffee table that held our most valuable possession, a new IBM Selectric typewriter. In the morning, my mom stacked paper and put things away, trying to make the living room livable again.
In 1968, the writer Stan Steiner published a book about a cohort of young Native American activists he called the “new Indians.” My dad, Vine Deloria Jr., was one of them. When he met Steiner, he was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, founded in 1944 to organize across tribal lines, coordinate political strategy, and lobby Washington. “Ten years ago, you could have tromped on the Indians and they would have said, ‘Okay, kick me again. I’m just an Indian,’ ” he told Steiner. Those days of acquiescence were over: My father demanded instead that Americans honor their treaties and recognize the political sovereignty of tribal governments.
Steiner’s book sent New York publishers chasing after the new Indians he’d identified, hoping to find the voice of this activist generation. My father was one of the few able to get a manuscript between covers, the 1969 best seller Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.
As he transformed our living room, my father transformed his life, bringing it into line with what he imagined a writer’s looked like. The transformation wasn’t entirely smooth. At one point, my father lost confidence in the project, and tried to return his advance to his publisher. His editor waved a marked-up page of manuscript at him—Norman Mailer’s, as he recalled—and my dad realized he wasn’t in it alone. He soldiered on.
This portrait, by the Magnum photographer Bruce Davidson, accompanied an excerpt from Steiner’s book published in Vogue. The image captures the writer’s infrastructure our home hosted each night: chair, table, typewriter, scattered books and newspapers, a ream of fresh paper. And, of course, the stimulants: a cup of cold coffee, a sugar bowl, and a cigarette to keep him going.
My father is wearing a new pair of Justin boots, stirrup-friendly, with the sharp toe pointing in your face. He was about a decade removed from the Marines, and a new regime of travel food and chair time is visibly filling out his frame. He’s holding forth, because my father spoke his book before he wrote it, practicing his words in meetings and interviews. My father is in the room’s corner, but not at all cornered; you can see in his face the new force of Indian Country that exploded in those years. My mom was there too, likely asking him to clean things up before the shutter clicked.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “A New Force of Indian Country.”
By Vine Deloria Jr.
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