Custer Died For Our Sins: Vine Deloria, Jr., Theologia Crucis, and the Work of Settler Repair

Fifty years ago, Dr. Vine Deloria’s challenged American white settler churches to begin an “honest inquiry by yourselves into the nature of your situation,” a situation where “you have taught [humanity] to find its identity in a re-writing of history.” Turning to Vitor Westhelle’s *After Hersey*, my “beginning of honest inquiry” interrogates the pseudo-theologies that funded European colonialism and settler claims to Indigenous lands in what became the United States. Deploying an anti-colonial *theologia crucis*, I follow Westhelle’s critique of the history of European colonialism allowing “naming the thing for what it is.” This theological approach then funds a critical look at my own family story of pioneer life in the Upper Midwest chronicled famously by my relative Laura Ingalls Wilder. I conclude with a case study of the Northeastern Synod of the ELCA engaging in truth telling and repair in relationship to the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe.