Ella Cara Deloria

Deloria was born in 1889 in the White Swan district of the Yankton Indian Reservation, South Dakota.[3] Her parents were Mary (or Miriam) (Sully) Bordeaux Deloria and Philip Joseph Deloria,[5] the family having Yankton Dakota, English, French and German roots. (The family surname goes back to a French trapper ancestor named Francois-Xavier Delauriers.) Her father was one of the first Sioux to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Her mother was the daughter of Alfred Sully, a general in the US Army, and a Métis Yankton Sioux. Ella was the first child to the couple, who each had several daughters by previous marriages. Her full siblings were sister Susan (also known as Mary Sully)[6] and brother Vine Deloria Sr., who became an Episcopal priest like their father. The noted writer Vine Deloria Jr. is her nephew.

Deloria was brought up among the Hunkpapaya and Sihasapa Lakota people[2] on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, at Wakpala, and was educated first at her father's mission school, St. Elizabeth's[7] and then at All Saints Boarding School[8] in Sioux Falls.[3] After graduation, she attended Oberlin College, Ohio, to which she had won a scholarship. After two years at Oberlin, Deloria transferred to Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1915.[5]

She went on to become

"one of the first truly bilingual, bicultural figures in American anthropology, and an extraordinary scholar, teacher, and spirit who pursued her own work and commitments under notoriously adverse conditions. At one point she lived out of a car while collecting material for Franz Boas."[9]

Throughout her professional life, she suffered from not having the money or the free time necessary to take an advanced degree. She was committed to the support of her family. Her father and step-mother were elderly, and her sister Susan depended on her financially.[1]

In addition to her work in anthropology (see below), Deloria had a number of jobs, including teaching (dance and physical education at Haskell Indian Boarding School[5]), lecturing and giving demonstrations (on Native American culture), and working for the Camp Fire Girls and for the YWCA as a national health education secretary.[10] She also held positions at the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota, and as assistant director at the W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion.

Deloria had a series of strokes in 1970,[11] dying the following year of pneumonia.

Deloria met Franz Boas while at Teachers College, and began a professional association with him that lasted until his death in 1942.[10] Boas recruited her as a student, and engaged her to work with him on the linguistics of Native American languages.[12] She also worked with Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, prominent anthropologists who had been graduate students of Boas. For her work on American Indian cultures, she had the advantage of fluency in the Dakota, and Lakota dialects of Sioux,[13] in addition to English and Latin.

Her linguistic abilities and her intimate knowledge of traditional and Christianized Sioux culture, together with her deep commitment both to American Indian cultures and to scholarship, allowed Deloria to carry out important, often ground-breaking work in anthropology and ethnology. She also translated into English several Sioux historical and scholarly texts, such as the Lakota texts of George Bushotter (1864-1892), the first Sioux ethnographer (Deloria 2006; originally published in 1932); and the Santee texts recorded by Presbyterian missionaries Samuel and Gideon Pond, brothers from Connecticut.[14]

In 1938–39, Deloria was one of a small group of researchers commissioned to do a socioeconomic study on the Navajo Reservation for the Bureau of Indian Affairs;[15] it was funded by the Phelps Stokes Fund. They published their report, entitled The Navajo Indian Problem. This project opened the door for Deloria to receive more speaking engagements, as well as funding to support her continued important work on Native languages.

In 1940, she and her sister Susan went to Pembroke, North Carolina to conduct some research among the self-identified Lumbee of Robeson County.[15] The project was supported by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the federal Farm Security Administration. Since the late 19th century, these mixed-race people, considered free people of color before the Civil War, had been recognized as an Indian tribe by the state of North Carolina, which allowed them to have their own schools, rather than requiring them to send their children to schools with the children of freedmen. They were also seeking federal recognition as a Native American tribe.[16] Deloria believed she could make an important contribution to their effort for recognition by studying their distinctive culture and what remained of their original language. In her study, she conducted interviews with a range of people in the group, including women, about their use of plants, food, medicine, and animal names. She came very close to completing a dictionary of what may have been their original language before they adopted English.[17] She also assembled a pageant with, for and about the Robeson County Indians in 1940 that depicted their origin account.[18]

Deloria received grants for her research from Columbia University, the American Philosophical Society,[19] the Bollingen Foundation,[20] the National Science Foundation,[21] and the Doris Duke Foundation,[22] from 1929-1960s.

She was compiling a Lakota dictionary at the time of her death.[23] Her extensive data has proven invaluable to researchers since that time.[12]

• In 1943, Deloria won the Indian Achievement Award.[24]
• In 2010, the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, Deloria's alma mater, established the Ella C. Deloria Undergraduate Research Fellowship in her honor.[9]

• Bucko, Raymond A. 2006. "Ella Cara Deloria", in Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. by H. James Birx. SAGE Publications; ISBN 0-7619-3029-9
• Cotera, María Eugenia. 2008. Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, And the Poetics of Culture. Array Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Deloria, Philip J. 1996. "Ella Deloria (Anpetu Waste)." Encyclopedia of North American Indians: Native American History, Culture, and Life from Paleo-Indians to the Present. Ed. Frederick E. Hoxie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 159–61. ISBN 0-3956-6921-9.
• DeMallie, Raymond J. 2009. Afterword. Waterlily. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-1904-5.
• Finn,Janet L. 2000. "Walls and Bridges: Cultural Mediation and the Legacy of Ella Deloria." Frontiers 21.3: 158–82.
• Gambrell, Alice. 1997. Women Intellectuals, Modernism, and Difference: Transatlantic Culture, 1919–1945. Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 0-521-55688-0
• Gardner, Susan. 2007. 'Weaving an Epic Story': Ella Cara Deloria's Pageant for the Indians of Robeson County, North Carolina, 1940-41. Mississippi Quarterly 60:1, 33-57.
• Gardner, Susan. 2000 'Speaking of Ella Deloria: Conversations with Joyzelle Gingway Godfrey, 1998-2000. American Indian Quarterly 24:3, 456–81.
• Gardner, Susan. 2003. "'Although It Broke My Heart to Cut Some Bits I Fancied': Ella Deloria's Original Design for Waterlily.' American Indian Quarterly 27:3/4, 667–696.
• Gardner, Susan. 2009. "Introduction," Waterlily new edition. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-0-8032-1904-5
• Gardner, Susan. 2007. "Piety, Pageantry and Politics on the Northern Great Plains: an American Indian Woman Restages Her Peoples' Conquest[1]." "The Forum on Public Policy," the online journal of the Oxford Roundtable [Harris Manchester College, Oxford, England].
• Gardner, Susan. 2014. "Subverting the Rhetoric of Assimilation: Ella Cara Deloria (Dakota) in the 1920s." Hecate 39.1/2: 8-32.
• Gere, Anne Ruggles. 2005. "Indian Heart/White Man's Head: Native-American Teachers in Indian Schools, 1880–1930", History of Education Quarterly 45:1.
• Gibbon, Guy E. 2003. The Sioux: the Dakota And Lakota Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.
• Heflin, Ruth J. 2000. 'I Remain Alive:' The Sioux Literary Renaissance. Syracuse Univ. Press. ISBN 0-8156-2805-6
• I Remain Alive: the Sioux Literary Renaissance.[2]
• Kelsey, Penelope Myrtle. 2008. Tribal Theory in Native American Literature. University of Nebraska Press; ISBN 978-0-8032-2771-2
• Medicine, Bea. 1980. "Ella C. Deloria: The Emic Voice." MELUS 7.4: 23–30.
• Murray, Janette. 1974. Ella Deloria: A Biographical Sketch and Literary Analysis. Ph.D. thesis, University of North Dakota.
• Rice, Julian. 1992. Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-1362-0.
• Rice, Julian. 1993. Ella Deloria's Iron Hawk. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 978-0-8263-1447-5.
• Rice, Julian. 1994. Ella Deloria's The Buffalo People. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-1506-2.
• Rice, Julian. 1998. Before the Great Spirit: The Many Faces of Sioux Spirituality. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0-8263-1868-1. (Includes extended quotation and analysis of stories and cultural commentary from several of Deloria's unpublished manuscripts.)
• Rice, Julian. 1983. "An Ohunkakan Brings a Virgin Back to Camp," American Indian Quarterly 7.4: 37–55.
• Rice, Julian. 1984. "Why the Lakota Still Have Their Own: Ella Deloria's Dakota Texts." Western American Literature 19.3, 205–17. Reprinted in Native North American Literature. Ed. Janet Witalec. New York: Gale Research, Inc., 1994: 243–44.
• Rice, Julian. 1984. "Encircling Ikto: Incest and Avoidance in Dakota Texts," South Dakota Review 22.4: 92-103.
• Rice, Julian. 1984. "How Lakota Stories Keep the Spirit and Feed the Ghost." American Indian Quarterly 8.4: 331–47.
• Rice, Julian. 1989. Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow. New York: Peter Lang. ISBN 0-8204-0774-7.
• Rice, Julian. 1992. "Narrative Styles in Dakota Texts," in On the Translation of Native American Literatures. Ed. Brian Swann. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 276–92. ISBN 1-56098-074-5. Reprinted in Sky Loom: Native American Myth, Story, and Song. Ed. Brian Swann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 73–93. ISBN 978-0-8032-4615-7.
• Rice, Julian. 1997. "Ella C. Deloria." Dictionary of Literary Biography: Native American Writers of the United States. Ed. Kenneth Roemer. Detroit, Washington, D.C., London: Bruccoli Clark Layman, Gale Research, 47–56. ISBN 0-8103-9938-5. (Includes an extended analysis of Waterlily.)
• Rice, Julian. 1998. "It Was Their Own Fault for Being Intractable: Internalized Racism and Wounded Knee," American Indian Quarterly. 221/2: 63–82. (An interview Deloria conducted twenty years after the massacre at Wounded Knee with the mixed-blood wife of a white employee at the Pine Ridge Agency. Deloria condemns her condescending attitude toward the victims.)
• Rice, Julian. 2000. "Akicita of the Thunder: Horses in Black Elk's Visions." In The Black Elk Reader. Ed. Clyde Holler. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 59–76. ISBN 0-8156-2835-8. (Includes an analysis of "The Gift of the Horse" from Deloria's Dakota Texts.)
• Rice, Julian. 2004. "Double-Face Tricks a Girl." In Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America. Ed. Brian Swann. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 397–407. ISBN 0-8032-4300-6.
• Rosenfelt, W. E. 1973. The Last Buffalo: Cultural Views of the Plains Indians: the Sioux Or Dakota Nation. Minneapolis: Denison.
• Sligh, Gary Lee. 2003. A Study of Native American Women Novelists: Sophia Alice Callahan, Mourning Dove, And Ella Cara Deloria. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press.
• Ullrich, Jan. 2008. New Lakota Dictionary. Lakota Language Consortium. ISBN 0-9761082-9-1. (includes a detailed chapter on Deloria's contribution to the study of the Lakota language)
• Visweswaran, Kamala. 1994. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. Univ. of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-2337-6

• Ella Deloria Archive. American Indian Studies and Research Institute, Indiana University Bloomington.