Ella Cara Deloria (January 30, 1888 – February 12, 1971), also called ?npétu Wa?té W?n (Beautiful Day Woman), was an educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist of Yankton Sioux background. She recorded Sioux oral history and legends, and in the 1940s wrote a novel, Waterlily, finally published in 1988.
Deloria was born in the White Swan district of the Yankton Indian Reservation, North Dakota. Her parents were Mary Anne Bordeaux Deloria and Philip Robert Deloria, the family having Yankton Dakota Sioux, English, and French roots. (The family name goes back to a French trapper ancestor named Delaurier.) Her father was one of the first Sioux to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Although Ella was the first child to the couple, they each had seven daughters by previous marriages; she was followed by twenty further children.
Deloria was brought up on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, at Wakpala, and was educated first at her father's mission school and All Saints Boarding School in Sioux Falls, and then – after a brief period at the University of Chicago – at Oberlin College, Ohio, to which she had won a scholarship. After two years at Oberlin she transferred to Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1915.
Throughout her professional life, she suffered from not having the money or the free time necessary to take an advanced degree, largely because of her commitment to the support of her family; her parents were elderly, and her sister suffered from brain tumours. In addition to her work in anthropology (of which more below), Deloria had a number of jobs, including teaching (dance and physical education), lecturing and giving demonstrations (on Native American culture), working for the Camp Fire Girls and for the YWCA, and holding positions at the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota, and (as assistant director) the W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion. Her nephew was the writer and intellectual, Vine Deloria, Jr.
Deloria had a stroke in 1970, dying the following year of pneumonia.
Deloria met Franz Boas while at Teachers College, and began a professional association with him until his death in 1942, also working with his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She had the advantage for her work on Native American culture of fluency in both the Yankton and Lakota dialects of Sioux, both of which she had used as a child, as well as the eastern dialect of Sioux (in addition to English and Latin).
Her linguistic abilities and her intimate knowledge of traditional and Christianised Sioux culture, together with her deep commitment both to Native American culture and to scholarship, allowed Deloria to carry out important, often ground-breaking work in anthropology and ethnology, as well as to produce translations in to English of historical and scholarly texts in Sioux (such as the Lakota texts of George Bushotter and the Santee texts of Gideon and Samuel Pond). She was compiling a Sioux dictionary at the time of her death.
Deloria won the Indian Achievement Award in 1943, and was the recipient of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (1948) and the National Science Foundation (1960s).
1988: Waterlily (reprinted 1990, University of Nebraska Press; ISBN 0-8032-6579-4)
1993: Ella Deloria's Iron Hawk (single narrative, ed. Julian Rice. University of New Mexico Press; ISBN 0-8263-1447-3)
1994: Ella Deloria's the Buffalo People (collection of stories, ed. Julian Rice. University of New Mexico Press; ISBN 0-8263-1507-0)
Non-fiction
1928: The Wohpe Festival: Being an All-Day Celebration, Consisting of Ceremonials, Games, Dances and Songs, in Honor of Wohpe, One of the Four Superior Gods... Games, of Adornment and of Little Children
1929: The Sun Dance of the Oglala Sioux (American Folklore Society)
1932: Dakota Texts (reprinted 2006, Bison Books; ISBN 0-8032-6660-X)
1941: Dakota Grammar (with Franz Boas) (National Academy of Sciences; reprinted 1976, AMS Press, ISBN 0-4041-1829-1)
1944: Speaking of Indians (reprinted 1998, University of Nebraska Press; ISBN 0-8032-6614-6)
Jan Ullrich, New Lakota Dictionary. (2008, Lakota Language Consortium). ISBN 0-9761082-9-1. (includes a detailed chapter on Deloria's contribution to the study of the Lakota language)
Julian Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (1992, University of New Mexico Press; ISBN 0-8263-1362-0)
Raymond A. Bucko, "Ella Cara Deloria", in Encyclopedia of Anthropology ed. H. James Birx (2006, SAGE Publications; ISBN 0-7619-3029-9)
Janette Murray, Ella Deloria: A Biographical Sketch and Literary Analysis (Ph.D. thesis, 1974 — University of North Dakota)
Anne Ruggles Gere, "Indian Heart/White Man's Head: Native-American Teachers in Indian Schools, 1880–1930" (History of Education Quarterly 45:1, Spring 2005)
Cotera, María Eugenia. Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, And the Poetics of Culture. Array Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008.
Deloria, Ella Cara. Waterlily. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988.
Gibbon, Guy E. The Sioux: the Dakota And Lakota Nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2003.
Rosenfelt, W. E. The Last Buffalo: Cultural Views of the Plains Indians: the Sioux Or Dakota Nation. Minneapolis: Denison, 1973.
Sligh, Gary Lee. A Study of Native American Women Novelists: Sophia Alice Callahan, Mourning Dove, And Ella Cara Deloria. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2003.
