SOURCE: A review of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, in Journal of Religion, Vol. 75, No. 1, January, 1995, pp. 161-62.

In following review, Swanson lauds how Deloria has updated his God Is Red for the 1990s.

The second edition of God Is Red is a badly needed updating of a groundbreaking book. Before it was first published in 1973, scholars tended to portray Native traditions either as though they were frozen in a timeless past or as though they were precarious survivals of premodern times. By contrast, Vine Deloria presented the Native religions as a viable alternative for modern Indian people. Just as Jewish theologians had started with the holocaust, Deloria started with the religion of contemporary Indian people as they had emerged from the nineteenth-century massacres, from the twentieth-century policies of termination, and finally from the Indian renaissance of the early 1970s.

The book was also groundbreaking...