peoplehood
l'être-peuple
Term coined by Vine Deloria Jr. (*God Is Red*, 1973), which he himself places in quotation marks—in English, his writing language, not a word from an Indigenous language. He names the process by which a community constitutes itself as a religiously distinct people: it identifies as unique in relation to the rest of creation, and makes this distinction the foundation of a religion that belongs to the group rather than the individual. Deloria contrasts this with Christian salvation, conceived as a personal matter offered to all humanity: a religion of *being-people* makes no claim to universality and converts no one, for it is the religious property of a precise community.
The concern in almost every instance is to identify the community and distinguish its uniqueness from the rest of the creation and to emphasize "peoplehood" or personality.
The phrase comes from Deloria, a Sioux thinker who writes in English and himself places the word in quotation marks: “l’être-peuple” is merely a makeshift French rendering, marked as such. What it fills is a precise gap. French has peuple, nation, communauté—words that name a collective, not the act by which that collective asserts itself as distinct from the rest of humanity and makes that distinction the very foundation of its religion.
For Deloria, this act of naming is less about description than separation: the concern in almost every instance is to identify the community and distinguish its uniqueness from the rest of the creation and to emphasize “peoplehood” or personality (“the concern, nearly everywhere, is to identify the community and assert its uniqueness against the rest of creation, by insisting on peoplehood or personality”). It is this operation—naming oneself, distinguishing oneself, erecting oneself as a chosen people—that he calls “peoplehood.”
From this he draws a clear institutional consequence: most tribal religions make no pretense as to their universality or exclusiveness (“most tribal religions make no claim to universality or exclusivity”). A religion of peoplehood does not convert, because it is not portable: received at the community’s birth, it is offered to no one else. Christianity, by contrast, locates salvation in an individual decision meant to apply to all people—hence the missionary enterprise, foreign to tribal religion as Deloria describes it.
Not to be confused with continuing unity, which describes what the community becomes after one of its own dies: peoplehood defines the very boundary of who belongs to the group, prior to any question of death or land. It extends sacred geography without merging with it—where the latter roots a people in a place, peoplehood roots it in a name. Like Black Elk’s sacred hoop, it conceives a whole that cannot be reduced to the sum of its members, but where the circle gives form to what peoplehood first gives a name. And like the second axiom of Mary Graham—a kinship extending even into the land—it makes belonging, not the individual, the starting point; but Graham describes a fabric of clans, whereas Deloria describes a religious distinction claimed against the rest of humanity.