RED EARTH, WHITE LIES,
by Vine Deloria, Jr.

1995. RATING: 8 1/2

About twelve-thousand years ago, a group of hardy folks from northern Asia crossed hundreds of miles of forbidding tundra wasteland, over an even more forbidding icy land bridge to what we now call Alaska, down a fortuitious narrow corridor between Canadian glacial sheets, and in the space of a few centuries they and their descendants managed to wipe out all of the large animal (and many plant) species throughout North America.

Or at least, that's what many scholars tell us.

Author Vine Deloria takes a much different view. Using a combination of Native American folklore and modern geological and climatological scholarship, his scenario of the prehistoric American peoples is a radical departure from the traditional picture we still find in many books nowadays. And despite all of its flaws, it still comes as a breath of fresh air for those of us who were restless or dissatisfied with the current ideas about the past we'd been raised on. How could a few thousand people with nothing more than stone weapons, for example, wipe out a continent's worth of large animals...and how would that explain the mass extinctions of plant life? Or for that matter, what would drive these original settlers across an icy wilderness and through a Canada still in the glacial grip of an ice age? How would they know that their promised land would be any better, or warmer?

Deloria's approach is not unique but largely ignored: interpreting America's geological history by way of the folklore and myths passed down by Native American storytellers. Similar to how many South American myths may have come about by encoding simple astronomical knowledge, so too could major geological events or changes be passed down to future generations as folktales. The last ice age, major volcanic activity, massive floods and the formations (or drainings) or great lakes can all be gleaned out of Indian stories, Deloria argues, and he cites a number of good examples.

Perhaps the best of these is the notion that Native Americans wiped out the great beasts, including the sabertooth tigers. This was a mostly-unsubstantiated theory born in the 19th century, and has far more speculation behind it than solid evidence. The Indians themselves tell stories of the weather changing very quickly, bringing high winds and terrible cold that killed off the animals and plants. This sounds more reasonable and Deloria also gives a running geological commentary to support this theory.

But many scholars still dismiss it--the same scholars who cannot offer a reasonable explanation for why ice ages start and end, or (as Deloria also points out in several places) stretch and twist the geological evidence to fit their theories until it almost snaps. Why? Perhaps because they can't accept the evidence of rapid climactic change, even when the rocks are telling them this is exactly what happened. Or perhaps, as Deloria also asserts, their refusal to accept such an idea is founded in racism. He cites a number of disturbing examples from the past two centuries to demonstrate how much of our modern paradigm of American prehistory was built on anti-Indian sentiments.

This is not to say that Deloria's book and methods are flawless. It depends, for one thing, on the accurate retelling of these stories over thousands of years--though in his defense, this is not out of the realm of possibility. Storytellers in central Asia, for example, tell stories and sing songs about Alexander the Great that match ancient accounts written down over 2,000 years ago. Or if the Dogon tribe in Africa received their advanced knowledge of the star Sirius from outsiders, as some claim, it was very likely from Egyptian scholars in Alexandria, thus also preserving knowledge over the stretch of two millennia. But there is, of course, a vast gulf between two-thousand years and six- to twelve-thousand.

For the most part, Deloria has modern geological research on his side, though again the science occasionally shows holes. Many of the major floods he accounts to meteor strikes, which could have also been caused by terrestrial (if catastrophic) volcanic or other earthquake-producing activity. Yet his examples of the ridiculousness of some current theories are startling, and in those cases his interpretations are far simpler and make a great deal more sense.

Overall, Red Earth, White Lies is a compelling read and a welcome ladder to the wall of orthodoxy many encounter in the study of prehistory. By all means, reading the standard texts is necessary; but reading Deloria's book is a requirement if you want a broader view of America in millennia past as well as the people who lived here.

This page modified 27-Jul-2000 10:51:21.