C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Deloria Vine

Author:Deloria, Vine [Deloria, Vine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Spring Journal, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

a Jung’s use of the word “naïve” in this context probably is an allusion to the “innocent” quality of “the primitive,” i.e., not contaminated by Western thought and reason, as opposed to an immature naiveté.

b Readers may wonder why Vine Deloria chose the Sioux in particular and not another indigenous tradition. At the most basic level, it is important to note that he was of the Sioux tradition and able to speak to it in ways that claimed responsibility appropriately, as opposed to a comparison to the Pueblo, for instance, or some other tribe. It is also the case, however, that he seems to have found a greater number of affinities between Jung and this particular tradition, making it not only the most familiar but perhaps the most useful as well. The question, however, raises the sticky issue of generalization. On the one hand, Jung was willing to generalize a “primitive” mind and to attribute it both to people of the past and tribal and indigenous people of his present. When he wishes to draw a firm line between the West and its others, Deloria is willing to follow this line of argument (thus his shorthand conflation of “tribal/primitive”). At the same time, Deloria understood all too well the sometimes radical differences among American Indian cosmological traditions. Missing, in some important ways, from this discussion, are the insights Deloria previously developed in God is Red (1973) which suggest the importance of particular land bases to spiritual practice. We suspect that, with a more sustained editorial dialogue, Deloria would have engaged this important

conceptualization of space. Readers are directed to God is Red , as well as to the essays in Spirit and Reason , in order to think through these issues in their own further dialogue with Deloria’s ideas.

c It is worth noting that during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when a number of civil rights activists were paying for their commitment with their lives, Vine Deloria Jr. commented to his family members that he was not worried about a violent political death, since he knew that he would not die in that manner.

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