''Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact'' is a book by Native American author Vine Deloria, originally published in 1995. The book's central theme is to criticize the

scientific consensus Scientific consensus is the generally held judgment, position, and opinion of the majority or the supermajority of scientists in a particular field of study at any particular time. Consensus is achieved through scholarly communication at confer ...

regarding the

history of the Americas The human history of the Americas is thought to begin with people migrating to these areas from Asia during the height of an ice age. These groups are generally believed to have been isolated from the people of the "Old World" until the coming o ...

and the

age of the Earth The age of Earth is estimated to be 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years. This age may represent the age of Earth's accretion (astrophysics), accretion, or Internal structure of Earth, core formation, or of the material from which Earth formed. This dating ...

. He stated that in this book "We will encounter a number of amazing inconsistencies in the manner in which science describes the world we live in and the role it has chosen for American Indians to play in a largely fictional scenario describing prehistoric North America.

Overview

The book's particular focus is on a criticism of current

models of migration to the New World It is believed that the peopling of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (Paleo-Indians) entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and we ...

, in particular the

Bering land bridge Beringia is defined today as the land and maritime area bounded on the west by the Lena River in Russia; on the east by the Mackenzie River in Canada; on the north by 72° north latitude in the Chukchi Sea; and on the south by the tip of the ...

theory. Deloria attempts to expose what he thought were fundamental weaknesses in this theory by detailing supposed archeological inconsistencies and positing alternative hypotheses that he believed align better with his understanding of the origins of Native Americans. He argued that there was an earlier presence for indigenous peoples in the Americas than what the

archaeological record The archaeological record is the body of physical (not written) evidence about the past. It is one of the core concepts in archaeology, the academic discipline concerned with documenting and interpreting the archaeological record. Archaeological t ...

provides. In a similar vein, he criticized the so-called "

overkill hypothesis The Late Pleistocene to the beginning of the Holocene saw the extinction of the majority of the world's megafauna, typically defined as animal species having body masses over , which resulted in a collapse in faunal density and diversity acro ...

", which proposes that humans migrating into the Americas were partially responsible, by overhunting, for the sudden and rapid extinction of North American

megafauna In zoology, megafauna (from Ancient Greek, Greek μέγας ''megas'' "large" and Neo-Latin ''fauna'' "animal life") are large animals. The precise definition of the term varies widely, though a common threshold is approximately , this lower en ...

during the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( ; referred to colloquially as the ''ice age, Ice Age'') is the geological epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fin ...

epoch. Deloria believed that this hypothesis was racist; he contended that the Pleistocene extinction had no parallel on such a scale in

Eurasia Eurasia ( , ) is a continental area on Earth, comprising all of Europe and Asia. According to some geographers, Physical geography, physiographically, Eurasia is a single supercontinent. The concept of Europe and Asia as distinct continents d ...

, which also experienced the sudden arrival of human hunters. Deloria likened the dominant migration theory to "academic folklore" and contended that even though it was regularly cited as fact, it was not critically examined within the field of archeology. Further, he charged that prevailing theories did not mesh with Native American

oral tradition Oral tradition, or oral lore, is a form of human communication in which knowledge, art, ideas and culture are received, preserved, and transmitted orally from one generation to another.Jan Vansina, Vansina, Jan: ''Oral Tradition as History'' (19 ...

s, which he contended contain no accounts of inter-continental migration. He argued for a Young Earth with only one

Ice Age An ice age is a long period of reduction in the temperature of Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental and polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers. Earth's climate alternates between ice ages, and g ...

, for a worldwide flood, and for the survival of

dinosaur Dinosaurs are a diverse group of reptiles of the clade Dinosauria. They first appeared during the Triassic Geological period, period, between 243 and 233.23 million years ago (mya), although the exact origin and timing of the #Evolutio ...

s into the 19th century.

Criticism

John Whittaker, a Professor of Archaeology at

Grinnell College Grinnell College ( ) is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was founded in 1846 when a group of Congregationalism in the United States, Congregationalis ...

, referred to Deloria's ''Red Earth, White Lies'' as "a wretched piece of Native American

creationist Creationism is the religious belief that nature, and aspects such as the universe, Earth, life, and humans, originated with supernatural acts of divine creation, and is often pseudoscientific. Gunn 2004, p. 9, "The ''Concise Oxford Dictionary' ...

claptrap that has all the flaws of the Biblical creationists he disdains...Deloria's style is drearily familiar to anyone who has read the Biblical creationist literature...At the core is a wishful attempt to discredit all science because some facts clash with belief systems. A few points will suffice to show how similar Deloria is to outspoken creationist author

Duane Gish Duane Tolbert Gish (February 17, 1921 – March 5, 2013) was an American biochemist and a prominent member of the creationist movement. A young Earth creationist, Gish was a former vice-president of the Institute for Creation Research (ICR) ...

or any of his ilk." Michael D. Gordin notes the book's close ties to

Immanuel Velikovsky Immanuel Velikovsky (; rus, Иммануи́л Велико́вский, p=ɪmənʊˈil vʲɪlʲɪˈkofskʲɪj; 17 November 1979) was a Russian-American psychoanalyst, writer, and catastrophist. He is the author of several books offering Pseudohi ...

's cosmographical works, especially the revindication of oral myth and tradition as central to revising both history and myths' role in the study of history. Deloria had entered Velikovsky's circle in 1974, calling the psychologist "perhaps the greatest brain that our race has produced." Gordin concludes Deloria's rejection of the Bering land bridge and "attack on any affinity between Native tradition and Western culture and science" was derived from Velikovskian catastrophism, though Velikovsky himself rejected any hint of creationism. Deloria's son, Philip J. Deloria, takes up his father's theme of "deep-time" historians. Despite admitting a wish that the book "had been more attentive to evidence, historiography, interpretation and argument," he notes that it did reveal problems with "supposedly neutral science-based narratives of the deep past," many of which have since been revised or replaced altogether. Vine Deloria, he suggests, wanted those writing about the deep past to stop "universalizing their own epistemic position" and to accept that Indigenous histories might have something to teach them. Deloria, Philip J. “Red Earth, White Lies, Sapiens, and the Deep Politics of Knowledge.” In Mackenthun, Gesa, et al. Decolonizing "Prehistory": Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2021. pp. 413-426.

Overview

Criticism

See also

References

Further reading