God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 30th anniversary edition

Vine Deloria Jr. was a Standing Rock Sioux writer, lawyer and scholar, and this book, published in its thirtieth anniversary edition by Fulcrum Publishing, is his influential argument comparing Native American and Christian religious worldviews, written from within Native intellectual tradition rather than as an outside academic study of it. Its strength is that Deloria writes as both a trained scholar and a Native intellectual voice directly critiquing Christian theological assumptions from that position, a combination that shaped much later Native American religious studies. Its limit is that it is a work of argument and critique by one influential author rather than a neutral ethnographic survey, and it generalizes across many distinct Native nations' traditions in making its comparative case, so claims about any one specific nation's practice need a more focused source.