Deloria, Comets, and Aliens

Lately, I’ve been delving a bit into Vine Deloria’s imposing and impressive corpus in an effort to understand Native American religion in a more thoughtful way. A number of folks nudged me to start with Deloria’s God is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973; Rev. Ed. 1992, 2003). It’s a fantastic book (so far!) with some intriguing perspectives on Native American religion that coincide with some of what I know, but also ground it in a richer, more regionally nuanced, and more political view of the world. This did not surprise me as I’ve read enough Deloria to appreciate both his insights and his sometimes offbeat style.

I was not prepared, however, for how complicated (and even contradictory) some of his arguments would become in God is Red or some of the more heterodox perspectives he would embrace in the book. On the one hand, I recognize that Deloria was attempting to cover a vast amount of territory in this book, Native American religious attitudes, beliefs, and rituals are not always appropriate for public discussion, and, of course, Native American religion has changed over time. It is inevitable that any treatment of Native American religion would be complicated.

That said, I was particularly surprised to see a lengthy discussion of Immanuel Velikovsky’s work. Velikovsky is one of the key mid-century “pseudoarchaeologists” who have attracted my attention recently. He argued, most famously in Worlds in Collision(1950), that sometime around 1500 BC, Jupiter ejected the planet Venus from its famous red spot. Venus took the form of a comet which looped very close to earth at least twice before assuming its current place in the solar system. The galactic drama that this event created accounted for any number of Bronze Age stories from the sea turning to blood and the parting of the Red Sea in Biblical narratives to earthquakes, tsunamis, and social collapse on a global scale as Earth’s axis shifted, rotation slowed, and general cosmic comportment upset. Needless to say contemporary archaeologist, astronomers, physicist, historians, and the like have a fairly dim view of Velinkovsky’s arguments, but they had enough traction in the 1960s and 1970s to prompt no less than Carl Sagan to refute them in print and by the mid-1970s, the American Association for the Advancement of Science convened a major conference to refute Velinkovsky’s ideas. Of course, today, they continue to hang about the pseudoarchaeological fringes and pop up in comments sections of nearly any article that has to do with the end of the Mediterranean Bronze Age or cataclysmic destruction. 

Deloria reckoned that at least some of the ire directed by academics toward Velinkovsky stemmed from his position outside the academy, his popularity with a general audience, and from the fact that he was probably right. Deloria then goes on to suggest that Biblical scholars struggled with Velinkovsky’s thesis partly because they found it impossible to reconcile their symbolic or metaphysical reading of the Old Testament with the possibility that it was literally correct and explained by Velinkovsky. Native American groups, in contrast, whose deep commitment to spaces and places had far less trouble accommodating their traditions to the cosmic events that Velinkovsky proposed. For Deloria, the failure of the Western scientific establishment to appreciate Velinkovsky’s ideas paralleled the inability of the Biblical (and archaeological) to reconcile their views of Near Eastern history with the possibility that scriptural texts were literally true. In contrast, Native American groups, with their strong attachment to physical places in their lived landscapes, had less of a problem with literal interpretations of their religious traditions (made manifest in the literal presence of sacred sites in their daily lives). More importantly for Deloria, however, was that Velinkovsky’s heterodox science was both true, but also so incommensurate with European and American scholarly, religious, and lived traditions that they could not accommodate it and therefore had to reject it as a threat to their superiority and authority.

Deloria then goes a step a further and connects Velikovsky’s ideas to Zecharia Sitchin’s argument that technological, social, and political advances in the Near East happened as a result of prolonged contact with extraterrestrials. According to Sitchin, these ancient aliens came to earth to mine gold which they then used (somehow) to reinforce their planets thinning atmosphere. These ancient aliens soon discovered that it was easier to breed humans to do the hard work of mining. Ultimately, these ancient workers rebel against their alien overlords and constructed societies based essentially on the same social organization that they had endured. Thus the hierarchical basis of Near Eastern society and the similarities across any number of ancient civilizations relate back to their common origins among these rebellious human workers. Deloria admits that some of Sitchin’s ideas are implausible, but at the same time argues that they have clear parallels with conventional arguments for the development of Near Eastern society. Here he invokes the work of no less a personage than Samuel Noah Kramer. More importantly, for us, Deloria argues that colonial practices inherent in, say, British colonial attitudes in North America and India reflect the legacy of Near Eastern world views, which, in turn, derived from the division between alien overlords and their slaves and the notion that the world was there to be exploited.

In contrast, Deloria shows that Native Americans did not arrange the world hierarchical, nor did they see nature as a resource to be exploited. The traditions among some groups of visitors from the skies, suggest, however, to Deloria that Native American groups did have some contact with the ancient aliens and perhaps even interbred with them to some extent. That said, he still seems fairly certain that Native Americans are racially and, one would guess, genetically as well as socially and historically distinct from Near Eastern groups who the aliens bred as slaves. 

Needless to say, this is pretty weird. 

It is hardly surprising that many scholars of Deloria feel most comfortable simply ignoring his digressions into the world of pseudoarchaeology or aligning it more broadly with Deloria’s interest in presenting Native American oral traditions as a valid counterweight to modern science, which he deemed racist and colonialist. Deloria develops some of these ideas in a more sustained way in his book Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Fact (1997). 

Craig Womack has recently offered another reading of Deloria’s dalliance with spacemen, comets, and pseudoarchaeology. In a 2014 article, he suggested that we might best understand Deloria’s embrace of these counter cultural and often anti-establishment arguments as a kind of performative camp (sensu Susan Sontag). For Womack, then, Deloria’s willingness to accept Velinkovsky’s and Sitchin’s pseudoarchaeological views of the world is as much about his willingness to defy scholarly conventions and pry apart the practices of white knowledge making. This is consistent with Deloria’s larger goals of challenging academic science, archaeology, anthropology, and the study of religion. Womack suggests that Deloria is does this not only by emphasizing the roots of these disciplines in racism and colonialism, their complicity in genocide, and their hierarchical, elitist, and exclusionary practices, but also by mocking their epistemic foundations. Elevating heterodox scholars like Sitchin and Velinkovsky to the status of valid and significant interlocutors and contributors to understanding the nature of white (western, European, colonial) religion effectively inverts the paradigm long favored by white science for understanding Native American religious practices, history, and society. In other words, Deloria is using pseudoarchaeology as a tool to demonstrate the cultural situation of archaeology more broadly as a discipline, by emphasizing the arbitrary and ultimately fragile nature of scientific knowledge when viewed from the perspective of an outsider. Womack seems to argue that Deloria’s effort to exaggerate and parodies academic knowledge inverts the parodic and exaggerated approach used by white scholars to understand Native American religious traditions. 

(Lest we think this approach to using camp to lay bare the assumptions that shape archaeological practice, we can appreciate David Macaulay’s brilliant send-up Motel of the Mysteries (1979) which drew in which excavators from the future excavate and hilariously misinterpret the campy confines of a modern travel motel!)

It is worth observing that Sun Ra was also inspired by Immanuel Velinkovsky’s work to such an extent that his biographer, John Szwed playfully notes in his 2000 book, that Ra’s account of his own alien abduction echoes “Velikovsky revised by von Daniken—Worlds in Collision reimagined through Chariots of the Gods?” I suppose we have to replace Jupiter with Saturn, but this certainly adds an interesting subtext to the song “Rocket Number Nine Take Off for Planet Venus.”  I unpack some of my thoughts on Sun Ra here.

Sun Ra’s embrace of campy costumes and over-the-top pronouncements (not to mention the wonderfully campy aesthetic present in his 1979 film Space is the Place) hints at a similar willingness to flaunt convention as a way to critique both the serious world of jazz music, but more importantly (at least for here), the way in which the exclusionary practices of science, archaeology, and white society fall short of their emancipatory claims. The future imagined by Sun Ra presents a freedom that is as disciplined as it is absurd, is as grounded in the traditions of Black and jazz music as it is transformative, and is as committed to disrupting conventional notions of power, authority, and science as it is to elevating arts, music, and performance to new and transformative roles in society. In this way, Sun Ra and Deloria embrace pseudoarchaeology as a way to induce a kind of discursive whiplash that playfully emphasizes the painful contradictions and shortcomings of established (and establishment) knowledge making.  

Unfortunately, recent public efforts to undermine pseudoarchaeology have emphasize its use by white supremacists, its association with Nazi archaeology, and its flawed forensic, methodological, and epistemic foundations. None of this is wrong, per se, but it runs the risk of reducing the claims of Sun Ra, Vine Deloria, and other significant thinkers who do not conform to racist paradigms common to some strains of pseudoarchaeology to the status of “Not All Pseudoarchaeologists!” After all, it is difficult to align the beliefs of Deloria or Sun Ra with those of white supremacists or to see Velinkovsky or Sitchin, both Jews, with the goals of the Nazism. 

In a previous post (that was probably a bit impulsive and impolitic) I referred to the tendency of aligning pseudoarchaeology with white supremacy as “white washing” pseudoarchaeology which served both to bolster the claims of disciplinary (and academic) archaeology with the forces of good and to marginalize groups ethically and politically who use pseudoarchaeology as a tool to advance their own sense of identity. In some cases, this is commendable, of course. We all have a responsibility to weaken the claims of white supremacists and Nazis.

At the same time, folks like Deloria and Sun Ra demonstrate how pseudoarchaeology can represent an important “weapon of the weak” and form the basis for playful, but also politically incisive critiques of the colonial foundations of science. Craig Womack concludes his paper on Deloria and “the Spacemen” with a reference to the call to “Keep Austin Weird” and the suggestion that we apply that to Native Studies as well.

I think that this could easily extend to archaeology. After all, “Keep Archaeology Weird” is much nicer than “Not All Pseudoarchaeologists.”