Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (cite: Deloria, 1969) is a 1969 book by Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux). It is one of the foundational texts of the Native American sovereignty movement and remains among the most widely read works of Indigenous political writing.
Deloria addresses multiple audiences simultaneously: Indigenous peoples organizing for sovereignty, settler liberals whose sympathy substitutes for justice, and the academic establishment (particularly anthropologists) whose study of Indigenous peoples has served their own careers more than Indigenous communities. The critique of anthropology is pointed and influential — Deloria argues that Indigenous peoples have been studied to death while their land continues to be taken, and that the knowledge produced by this study serves the colonial apparatus, not the studied communities.
The book’s directness, humor, and refusal of sentimentality set a tone that influenced decades of subsequent Indigenous intellectual work.