Vine Deloria Jr.

Vine Victor Deloria Jr. (March 26, 1933 – November 13, 2005, Standing Rock Sioux) was an author, theologian, historian, and activist for Native American rights. He was widely known for his book ''Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto'' (1969), which helped attract national attention to Native American issues in the same year as the Alcatraz-Red Power Movement. From 1964 to 1967, he served as executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, increasing its membership of tribes from 19 to 156. Beginning in 1977, he was a board member of the National Museum of the American Indian, which now has buildings in both New York City and in Washington, DC, on the Mall.

Deloria began his academic career in 1970 at Western Washington State College at Bellingham, Washington. He became Professor of Political Science at the University of Arizona (1978–1990), where he established the first master's degree program in American Indian Studies in the United States. In 1990, Deloria began teaching at the University of Colorado Boulder. In 2000, he returned to Arizona and taught at the College of Law. NBC News called Vine Deloria the "star of the American Indian renaissance."

In 1995, Deloria argued in his book Red Earth, White Lies that the Bering Strait Land Bridge never existed, and that, contrary to archaeological and anthropological evidence, the ancestors of the Native Americans had not migrated to the Americas over such a land bridge. He asserted that the Native Americans either originated in the Americas or reached them through transoceanic travel, as some of their creation stories suggested. Deloria controversially rejected not only scientific understanding regarding the origins of indigenous peoples in the Americas, but also other aspects of the (pre)history of the Western Hemisphere that he thought contradicted Native American accounts. Provided by Wikipedia