Their Own Frontier: Women Intellectuals Re-Visioning the American West

7. Ella Cara Deloria: Telling the Story of Her People

7 ella cara delori a Telling the Story of Her People Maria Eugenia Cotera The modern questor now takes up the search His quest the same, his methods only changed. He studies, records; carefully he weighs Each point, for light upon his inquiry: “Whence came his people? Whither are they going? What struggle have they known? What victories?” Out of his notes, he weaves an epic story. —Ella Cara Deloria, The Modern Questor in her presidential address given at the one hundredth meeting of the American Anthropological Association, in 2003, Louise Lamphere called for a reassessment of the “official history” of American anthropology. Citing a past tendency to view the development of anthropology in the United States as a succession of “great men,” Lamphere suggested that in the light of anthropology’s changing face—its turn to cultural critique, its current interest in reconceptualizing fieldwork , and its recognition and embrace of the perspectival nature of ethnographic writing—scholars revisit the past and explore historical figures at the margins of the anthropological establishment. Lamphere focused her attention on anthropologists who labored at the margins of the discipline and who—perhaps because of their marginal status—introduced key innovations “that have resonance with our contemporary preoccupations.” Among these innovations Lamphere noted “four sources of creativity”: first, the rise of “Native ethnography” and the transformation of fieldwork, in particular the objectivist norms at the heart of participant observation; second, the development of “ethno11 . (Opposite Top) Ella Cara Deloria wearing Native Yankton Sioux dress. No date. Courtesy of the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain sd. 12. (Opposite Bottom) Ella Cara Deloria in mid-life. No date. Courtesy of the Dakota Indian Foundation in Chamberlain sd. 246 Cotera graphic writing” from the “standard ethnographic present to more dialogical forms”; third, the interest in anthropology as a site of cultural critique; and fourth, the emergence of anthropologists as “public intellectuals ” who artfully combine activism with their scholarly work.1 In her considerable contributions to the discipline, Dakota anthropologist Ella Cara Deloria quietly traversed all of these categories: she simultaneously embraced and transformed the still-evolving fieldwork methodologies of the 1920s and 1930s; she developed an ethnographic writing style that evoked the intersubjective and dialogic nature of the fieldwork experience; and she used her ethnographic research and writing as a forum for addressing the needs of indigenous peoples. At the heart of her interventions was not an argument with the anthropological establishment itself but rather a strategic plan to use the tools of anthropology (its emergent status as a forum for public debate and its credibility as a “science” of human nature and social relations) to tell the story of her people, the Dakotas. That Deloria was even able to tell this story seems a minor miracle given the economic, social, and professional barriers that she and other Native intellectuals of her generation faced. But tell it she did, and in its telling she created a substantial body of ethnographic information that clarified major misconceptions about Plains Indian languages and cultures. I too wish to tell a story of survival, the story of Ella Cara Deloria’s circuitous travels between the place she called “home” and the centers of metropolitan meaning-making about that place and the people who inhabited it. Not quite a tragedy, and somewhat less than a triumph, the story of Deloria’s engagements with anthropology is one worth telling. Native Speaker: Ella Cara Deloria among the Anthropologists Ella Deloria was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in the middle of a driving snowstorm in January 1888. The blizzard that accompanied her birth was portentous. The winter of 1890 would bring not only another bitter storm but also the final, devastating blow to Sioux armed resistance against U.S. intrusion into their territories—the Massacre at Wounded Knee. The decades following would lead to dramatic ella cara deloria 247 and painful changes in Sioux lifeways. As a child, Ella Deloria was witness to these heartbreaking transformations, and she made it her life’s work to intervene against the “storm” of colonialism by documenting Dakota culture both before and after Wounded Knee. In some ways, Deloria was destined for leadership among her people . She was descended from a long line of leaders among the Yankton band of the Dakotas: her paternal grandfather, Saswe, was a chief among the Yankton and a medicine man widely recognized for both his leadership and his...