ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have dedicated this book to Vine Deloria Jr., Jack Forbes, and
Howard Adams, three late Indigenous activist-scholars who pio
neered the development of Native American studies programs and
scholarship in universities in the 1970s.
My mentor, and a mentor and inspiration to many, Vine Delo
ria Jr. (1933-2005), Yankton Dakota of the Great Sioux Nation,
impressed upon me the necessity for Indigenous sovereignty to be
the framework and groundwork for the decolonization of Native
American history. Sovereignty, he argued, is not only political but
a matter of survival, and the denial of sacred lands and sites is a
form of genocide. I met Vine when he recruited me to work with
the Wounded Knee legal defense following the 1973 siege. I served
as an expert witness at the historic fe deral court hearing in Lincoln,
Nebraska, in 1974, when Vine and a team of lawyers initiated use
of the 186 8 Sioux-US treaty to validate Sioux jurisdiction over the
Wounded Knee defendants being tried in federal courts. Vine also
persuaded me to edit and publish the court testimony of Sioux elders
and others from the two-week hearing, which would constitute an
oral history of the Sioux Nation and its continuing struggle for sov
ereignty. The 1977 book, with Vine's introduction, The Great Sioux
Nation: An Oral History of the Sioux Nation and Its Struggle fo r
Sovereignty, was issued in a new edition in 2013. Vine was already
a best-selling author when I met him, and he published dozens more
influential books and articles. He established early Native American
studies programs at the University of California at Los Angeles, Uni
versity of Arizona, and University of Colorado.
Even before I met Jack Forbes (1934-2orr) in 197 4, his 1960
book, Apaches, Navajos, and Spaniards, was central to the thesis