(1889-1971)
Yankton Sioux linguist and author
A member of a prominent Sioux family, Ella Deloria was one of the first truly bilingual, bicultural figures in American anthropology. She translated thousands of pages of ethnographic texts written in the Sioux language, wrote in both the Lakota and Dakota dialects herself, and compiled a Lakota grammar and dictionary. These activities helped insure the survival and continued strength of the Sioux language.
The familial nature of Deloria's biculturalism can be traced to her grandfather, François Des Lauriers, who served the Yankton Sioux both as a traditional spiritual leader and as a political intermediary in negotiations with the federal government. Her father, the Reverend Philip Deloria, and her brother, the Reverend Vine Deloria, Sr., were native clergymen who between them brought thousands of Sioux Indians into the Episcopal Church. Her nephews Vine Deloria, Jr., and Philip S. Deloria have also played prominent roles in Indian affairs since the 1960s.
Ella Deloria was born on January 31, 1889, in the White Swan district of the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. The following year the family moved from Yankton to the St. Elizabeth's mission at Wakpala, on the Standing Rock Reservation. Between home and mission, Deloria grew up speaking all three of her language's dialects—the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota variations—and possessing a fluent knowledge of the subtleties of Sioux culture. Deloria proved equally adept at her non-Indian, religious education. She excelled at both the St. Elizabeth's mission school and, beginning in 1902, the All Saint's School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where she performed well enough to win a scholarship to Oberlin College. After two years at Oberlin, Deloria transferred to Columbia University in New York, where in 1914 she graduated with a B.A. in education.
While at Columbia, Deloria gave public lectures on Indian subjects, demonstrated Dakota dances, and worked with school and Campfire Girls groups to develop a wider appreciation of native cultures. Equally important, she began working for the anthropologist Franz Boas, translating the manuscripts of George Bushotter, a Lakota who had collaborated with the anthropologist James Dorsey in 1887 and 1888 and who had left behind over a thousand pages of material written in the Lakota dialect. In 1914 Deloria returned as a teacher to the All Saint's School while her sister Susan finished her studies. Two years later, with their mother seriously ill, the two returned home to Wakpala. Their mother died shortly thereafter, and the sisters remained at home in order to assist their father. Although Deloria had become comfortable in the non-Indian world of New York City, she plotted her life in terms of her Dakota kinship obligations to her family.
In 1923, at age thirty-five, Deloria embarked upon her own career, becoming a physical-education instructor at the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas. Working conditions at Haskell proved to be less than satisfactory, however, and when Boas contacted her in 1927 about continuing the translation of the Bushotter materials, she moved back to New York. Over the next decade Boas and Deloria established a close professional relationship, with Deloria working in the field—collecting language materials and ethnographic information in South Dakota—and then traveling to New York for the more collaborative work of translation and synthesis. In 1932 she published Dakota Texts, which consists of sixty-four oral narratives recorded in Dakota with both literal and free English translations.
Deloria found working for Boas intellectually challenging, but she constantly teetered on the brink of economic disaster, frequently having to plead for more work and better compensation. She had skill and practical experience equal to that of any of Boas's famous protégés, but she barely received a research assistant's wage. At one point she and her sister lived out of a car while gathering material for Boas. Deloria's obligations to her father, who had suffered a series of strokes, complicated matters still further. Funding for her research was always sporadic, and in 1938 it dried up almost completely. She patched together periods of employment with a private group studying Navajo affairs, with the Episcopal Church, and, in 1940, with the Farm Security Administration.
Deloria's diminishing economic reliance on Boas (who died in 1942) forced her to assert herself as a scholar in her own right. In 1943 and 1944 she received research grants from the American Philosophical Society that allowed her to begin an ethnographic study of the Dakotas, Camp Circle Society. In 1944 she published a popular book, Speaking of Indians, and in 1948 she received a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation to continue her research. During this period she also completed the manuscript for Waterlily, an "ethnographic novel" that paints a precontact Dakota world through the eyes of native women.
The same sense of obligation—part Dakota kinship, part Christian religious training—that had led her to tend her parents at the expense of her career reemerged in 1955 when she reluctantly agreed to take over the school at her father's mission. In 1958, however, she vowed to devote more time to Camp Circle Society, and again pieced together part-time museum and lecture work. In 1961 Deloria was appointed assistant director of the W. H. Over Museum at the University of South Dakota at Vermillion, where she began assembling a lexicon of Siouan language material. The following year, at age seventy-three, Deloria and the university's Institute for Indian Studies received a large National Science Foundation grant to compile a Sioux dictionary. This long-awaited triumph was tempered, however, by the death in 1963 of her sister and lifelong companion, Susan.
After months of grieving, Deloria returned to the dictionary, the project having been continued (although without additional funds) through 1968. In 1966 and again in 1968, Deloria spent two months of the year teaching Sioux language and culture at St. Mary's Indian School for Girls in Springfield, South Dakota. She remained active in the late 1960s, conducting workshops for the Nebraska Teacher Corps and working for six months on a claims report for the Yankton tribe. Ella Deloria continued working on her dictionary, publishing articles, and giving lectures until shortly before her death on February 12, 1971.
Deloria overcame numerous difficulties—her lack of an advanced degree, constant economic hardship, and race, gender, and age biases—to produce an astonishing body of work. The Bushotter manuscript and others by George Sword and Jack Frazier, which make up a significant part of the corpus of Lakota-Dakota ethnography, owe their existence in English translation to Ella Deloria, as do numerous other documents. The Deloria-Boas grammar has become a standard source in Lakota linguistics, and the Deloria dictionary is being reworked for publication. In addition, through her practice of teaching and writing in Siouan dialects and encouraging teachers to use their native tongue, Deloria not only protected the language but, as the author Julian Rice has recently argued, projected a native-language literature decades before a readership existed. Her personalized efforts to instruct non-Indians in Sioux culture fulfilled the familial mission of bridging the two cultures. Deloria's literary and anthropological legacy is only now beginning to find a wider audience—both Indian and non-Indian—through publication, republication, and critical analysis.
Ella Deloria, Waterlily (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Julian Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992).
Philip J. Deloria
Lakota ancestry
University of Colorado at Boulder
