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Ella Cara Deloria

Ella Cara Deloria (January 31, 1889 - February 12, 1971) was a Native American anthropologist. She was specialized in anthropology, ethnology, translations, linguistics, and novel writing. She was best known for recording Native American oral history and the study of Native American languages.

Early Life

Ella Deloria was born on January 31, 1889, on the  Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation. She grew up on reservations in South Dakota and later moved to the Pine Ridge Reservation. She was the first child of Reverend Philip Joseph Deloria and Mary Sully Deloria. Growing up, Ella’s father was a Dakota priest; her uncle was Philip Joseph Deloria, who is a professor of History at Harvard University. Her paternal grandfather was a tribal leader, which led her to get a Euro-American education.

Ella Deloria was raised with her young sister Susan and brother Vine. Deloria was pressured to show others as a role model because she was the minister's child. As an elder child, she took the childcare responsibility and worked on the farm as well. At the age of twelve, she had an injury while riding horses and lost her right thumb, which caused a handicap.  

Ella Deloria was brought up at St. Elizabeth's because the community members were primarily Hunkpapa; the Blackfoot Teton range comes under the Lakota tribes; the Deloria family adopted the Yankton-Yanktonai Dakota language. Therefore, Deloria, a Yankton, grew up speaking the Lakota language and the Sioux languages. However, she did speak in the Yankton-Yanktonai Dakota dialect with her father. She is fluent in both Yankton-Yanktonai Dakota and Lakota languages.

Academic Career

Ella Deloria started her primary education at St Elizabeth’s school and later studied All Saints Episcopal missionary school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, till 1902. After winning a college scholarship, she studied at Oberlin College in Ohio from 1910 to 1913. Then transferred her degree to Columbia Teachers College, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1915. During her final years at Columbia, she met Franz Uri Boas, a professor of the Anthropology department at Colombia University who is known as the father of American Anthropology. Then, Boas hired her for paid work to help his students translate Lakota texts for a course on Linguistics. After graduating college, she taught at All Saints School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and worked for the YMCA as a health education secretary for Indian schools from 1919 to 1923. Later, she worked as a physical education teacher at the Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas.

Anthropological Career

In 1927, Boas heard about Ella Deloria through his student Martha Warren. Later, he visited Deloria in Oklahoma and proposed to resume the work on the Dakota Language that she started with him in New York. They started a summer-paid work contract by George Sword, a policeman, to translate written texts, including newspapers. Later, she resigned from the teaching physical education position at Haskell Indian Nations University and received a contract-based linguistic work under Boas upon her request.  On January 18, 1928, she was offered funding through Boas to rewrite the Riggs Dictionary of Santee (1890) and record it in Teton, Dakota, or Lakota. In the same year, on January 28, Boas guaranteed her eight months of regular employment with the collaboration of Columbia University. She started working on a project to study Dakota psychology, “the habits of action and thought” of children and adults under Otto Klineberg. At the same time, Boas asked Deloria to write Dakota forms in the Riggs dictionary, with the aim of reorganizing the dictionary as per the verb forms. In the summer, she returned to South Dakota to continue her fieldwork for a comparative psychology project and prepare a psychological test based on their culture.

Other than this, she collected song texts for ethnomusicologist George Herzog and did ethnographic research with Ruth Benedict until 1932.  

In 1933, she did fieldwork among Assiniboine in Montana, where she started looking at the changes of their traditional culture.  In 1934, she started working among the Santee of Prairie Island in Minnesota. Based on this fieldwork, she came up with “Santee Legends” and explained the native Dakota through twenty texts with literal and free translations.  By the end of 1936, she finished Bushotter Texts and started working on the Sword manuscript from 1937 to June 1938, as per Boas’s request.

From 1939 to 1940, Deloria and Boas worked on the final version of Dakota Grammar, a classic of American Indian language description, and published by 1941.

After the death of Boas in 1942, Ruth Benedict continued support for Deloria and helped her with the book writing on The Dakota Way of Life. With the support of the American Philosophical Society, she completed the first draft of this book in 1947. Benedict died in September 1948 before the final editing meeting of The Dakota Way of Life. And it stuck her life with no money. However, she continued her work with the support of small grants and money provided by Hiram E. Beebe. However, her major works, including The Dakota Way of Life, remained unpublished during her lifetime. The Dakota Way of Life was published by the University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, in cooperation with the American Indian Studies Research Institute, Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1988.

In between, in 1955, she returned to St Elizabeth church, South Dakota, where she did her primary education upon an urgent request and stayed there until 1958 to support Indian children. In 1958, she returned to the University of South Dakota to continue her studies in Dakota. Later, she worked briefly at the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City and served as an assistant director of the W.H.Over Museum at the University of South Dakota.

After retiring, Deloria continued to live in Vermillion, South Dakota, to go for field trips to isolated communities. She suffered a stroke in the summer of 1970 and died on February 12. 1971.  

Publications

• Dakota Texts (1932): a collection of translated and edited Teton Dakota stories

• Speaking of Indians (1944): An introduction of American Indians to general audience

• Short Dakota Texts, Including Conversations. International Journal of American Linguistics 20 (1):17-22. 1954.

• Some Notes on the Yankton. Museum News 28:3-4,5-6. 1967

• Waterlily: “Waterlily” 1988 (completed 1948, but published later posthumously) One of Ella’s highest achievements was her novel, which was about the daily life of a Teton Sioux woman. The novel set about to use the work Deloria had collected and described Dakota's life before it was altered by the American Western expansion. She completed it in 1948, but it wasn't published until 1988.

•The Dakota Ways of Life (1988): it was about the social, cultural, and spiritual understanding of the Dakota People.

• Buffalo People Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Edited by Julian Rice

• Iron hawk Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993. Edited by Julian Rice.

Contribution to Anthropology

In 1927, she started a 15-year research and writing program with Boas and later Ruth Benedict at Columbia University. She helped him research the linguistics of Native American languages, translate the recorded Indigenous languages in 19th-century texts, and provide valuable information of her culture. According to her writings to her spiritual advisor, Bishop Hugh L. Burleson, in August 1928, Francis Boas was interested in getting the language recorded clearly for future reference in the comparative language of primitive people, so he wanted her to work with him.’ Ella was the first to use storytelling in anthropology. Her writing was a way for her to record oral histories and create an ethnography that is still being used by Native researchers today. Ella’s writing in the form of novels is interesting since the reader does not have to be an anthropologist to read and understand the story. This gave information about native American culture to people outside of anthropology.

Area of Study

Her areas of interest include socio-cultural anthropology, ethnography, and translating Native American languages. She worked with the Sioux and Dakota Nations. She was focused on comparative linguistics and the documentation of oral histories and myths as well.

What Prevented Her from Fame

Unlike other minority anthropologists whom Boas mentored, he left Ella Deloria in the dark, possibly due to her challenging one of his colleagues, James Walker. Walker wrote and published about the Lakota people's myths, rituals, and beliefs, which, at the time, were not supported by research. Boas asked Deloria to verify Walker’s work, and by doing so, she found that Walker had not separated the stories from the oral traditions. When she told Boas about this, he made her look further into the Lakota myths. As a woman of color, challenging an influential white man who was a well-respected member of the anthropologist field and colleague of her mentor, Deloria, was left behind.Being a woman in anthropology already put Ella in a position that made her be seen as less than her male collegues during her time. Moreover, she had personal and financial challenges where she had to work with limited funding and was responsible for taking care of the family, which made her travel a lot, so she could not only spend her time on research and publication. Despite these challenges, she still made a name for herself through her work with the Dakota and Sioux nations and publishing her book, which created a new form of storytelling within anthropology.

References

Deloria, Ella Cara. The Dakota Way of Life. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022.

Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. "Ella Cara Deloria." Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed December 7, 2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ella-Cara-Deloria.

Prater, John. "Ella Deloria: Varied Intercourse: Ella Deloria's Life and Work." Wicazo Sa Review 11, no. 2 (1995): 40–46.

U.S. Department of the Interior. "Ella Cara Deloria (U.S. National Park Service)." National Park Service. Accessed December 7, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/people/ella-cara-deloria.htm.

AWIS. "Ella Cara Deloria, a Sioux Ethnographer and Linguist." AWIS. Accessed December 7, 2022. https://awis.org/historical-women/ella-cara-deloria/.

Other websites

• Encyclopædia Britannica