Deloria's Argumentative Analysis

This is revealed to be an antagonism when Deloria splits the hairs between conflict at the level of an experience (“a series of land transactions involving some three hundred Indian tribes and a growing U.S. government”) and the level of ontology (“settlement phrased as a continuous conflict of two mutually exclusive religious views of the worldviews”). Deloria speaks to this again when he writes that “[t]he fundamental factor that keeps Indians and non-Indians from communicating is that they are speaking about two entirely different perceptions of the world.” The inability to speak across the divide, as exemplified in both Deloria and Wilderson’s work, occurs not due to a simple ideological difference, but rather due to a fundamentally irreconcilable

Obviously, the first question to arise here is if this is a “specific Indigenous group” at all. Do they count? Should they count? Latinos themselves certainly think so. In little over ten years, the amount of Latinos identifying as Indigenous in the United States has tripled from 400,000 to 1.2 million. Though, aside from the qualification of self-identification, the second rejoinder will sure be that Latinos are not in and of themselves a massive Indigenous group, but rather have ancestors from specific tribal groups themselves. This, however, often fails to deal with the violence of settler colonialism and the ways in which Western modernity demands diaspora and the loss of identification. The Indigenous aspect of these people’s lives is the violence and cultural genocide that took away their culture. As Gail K. Sheffield points out, the “American Indian experience…also includes people who, because they were Indian, were separated from the tribal context (emphasis original).” The specific citation of Latinos here is not in an attempt to erase the specific groups from which many derive nor is it to claim them as a homogenous group, but rather to show the ways in which Latinos with Indigenous ancestors are, themselves, a function of genocide. The hatred of the Indigenous by large portions of Latinos only reveals the internalized racism which settler colonialism has installed. The massive cultural violence and genocide of Latin America is not simply the creation of la raza cosmica, but of a group of people defined by genocide