Philip J. Deloria

Deloria is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,[2] and the son of Barbara and Vine Deloria Jr. (both Yankton Dakota). His father Vine was a scholar, writer, and activist for Native American rights who earned national recognition for his 1969 book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.[4] Philip J. Deloria's paternal great aunt Ella Deloria (Yankton Dakota) worked as an ethnologist, and Ella's sister Mary Sully was an artist.[5] Deloria's grandfather, Vine Deloria Sr. and great grandfather Philip Joseph Deloria, also known as Thípi Sápa (Black Lodge), were Episcopal priests.[6][7] Philip J. Deloria is also the great-great grandson of U.S Army officer and painter Alfred Sully, and the great-great-great-grandson of painter Thomas Sully.[6][8]

Deloria graduated from the University of Colorado in 1982 with a B.M.E. in music education.[9] In 1988, Deloria completed his M.A. in journalism and mass communications at the University of Colorado, as well.[9] Deloria received his Ph.D. in American studies from Yale University in 1994.[10] Deloria worked as a professor at the University of Colorado in the Department of History from 1994 to 2000, before taking up a professorship at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in both the Department of American Culture and the Department of History.[9] Deloria was the associate dean of undergraduate education in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's College of Literature Science and the Arts and was the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor.[10] In 2018 he was made the first tenured professor of Native American history at Harvard University.

Deloria is the author of two non-fiction books and a number of articles and book chapters.

Deloria's 1999 text, Playing Indian, addresses the historical phenomenon of "playing Indian", whereby non-Native people in the United States construct national and personal identities through the performance of Indian dress and ritual. Playing Indian won the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Program for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.[11]

Deloria's second book, Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), explores stereotypes of Native American people which confine them to the past and analyzes the seeming disunity between Indian people and modernity. Indians in Unexpected Places received the John C. Ewers Prize for Ethnohistorical Writing in 2006 from the Western History Association.[12]

Deloria additionally produced, directed, and edited PBS program Eyanopapi: Heart of the Sioux.[13]

• Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN 978-0-300-08067-4.
• Indians in Unexpected Places. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999. ISBN 978-0-7006-1459-2.
• Blackwell Companion to American Indian History, ed. Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. ISBN 978-1405121316
• C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions: Dreams, Visions, Nature, and the Primitive, ed. New Orleans: Spring Journal Press, 2009.
• Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2019.