Ella Cara Deloria

Ella Cara Deloria (January 31, 1889 – February 12, 1971), also called Aŋpétu Wašté Wiŋ (Beautiful Day Woman), was a Yankton Dakota (Sioux) educator, anthropologist, ethnographer, linguist, and novelist. She recorded Native American oral history and contributed to the study of Native American languages. According to Cotera (2008), Deloria was "a pre-eminent expert on Dakota/Lakota/Nakota cultural religious, and linguistic practices." In the 1940s, Deloria wrote a novel titled Waterlily, which was published in 1988, and republished in 2009. Life Deloria was born in 1889 in the White Swan district of the Yankton Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Her parents were Mary (or Miriam) (Sully) Bordeaux Deloria and Philip Joseph Deloria and had 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) 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 Hunkpapa and Sihasapa Lakota people on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, at Wakpala, and was educated first at her father's mission school, St. Elizabeth's Church and Boarding School and then at All Saints Boarding School in Sioux Falls. After graduation in 1910, she attended Oberlin College, Ohio, to which she had won a scholarship. After three years at Oberlin, Deloria transferred to Columbia Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and graduated with a B.Sc. and a special teaching certificate in 1915. 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." 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.