October 02, 2026

Laugh Without Bitterness

When a people can laugh at themselves and laugh at others and hold all aspects of life together without letting anybody drive them to extremes, then it seems to me that this people can survive.

Deloria wrote this in 1969's Custer Died for Your Sins, a sharp and often very funny critique of federal Indian policy, anthropologists, and churches that claimed to help Native people while working to erase them. He was describing how reservation communities absorbed centuries of broken treaties, forced relocation, and boarding school abuse without collapsing into permanent rage. Humor, he argued, was not denial but a method for processing grief and injustice while staying capable of demanding change. The line speaks to forgiveness because it treats release not as forgetting harm but as refusing to let harm run every day that follows.