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Chapter 4 “All My Relatives Are Noble” Recovering the Feminine in Waterlily Deloria knew perfectly well what was expected of ethnographic writing, and produced reams of it. But she was not at ease with it, and rebelled in letter after letter. What a relaxation it must have been to speak of Waterlily and her family rather than of “Ego” and “his affines.” To be the omniscient author about and within her culture! . . . In Waterlily, Deloria’s presence could disappear among the People, an omniscient author within and concealed by her culture, everywhere and nowhere. Susan Gardner, “Though It Broke My Heart . . .” Through all the centuries of war and death and cultural and psychic destruction have endured the women who raise the children and tend the fires, who pass along the tales and the traditions, who weep and bury the dead, and who never forget. There are always the women, who make pots and weave baskets, who fashion clothes and cheer their children on at powwow , who make fry bread and piki bread, and corn soup and chili stew, who dance and sing and remember and hold within their hearts the dream of their ancient peoples—that one day the woman who thinks will speak to us again, and everywhere there will be peace. Meanwhile we tell the stories and write the books and trade tales of anger and woe and stories of fun and scandal and laugh over all manner of things that happen every day. We watch and we wait. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop ​ I n the summer of 1940, just six months before she began the process of transforming ten years of field notes into three separate manuscripts— The Dakota Way of Life, Speaking of Indians, and Waterlily—Ella Deloria found herself in Pembroke, North Carolina. She had been drawn there by the promise of six months of steady pay. Her assignment—under the joint 146 Native Speakers auspices of the Farm Security Administration and the Indian Service—was to study the linguistic and cultural practices of a mixed-race community in Robeson County.1 The community, variously known as the “Croatans,” “Cherokees,” “Siouans,” or “Su-ons,” claimed Indigenous origin and had been petitioning the federal government for recognition since shortly after the Civil War. Though they were recognized as an Indigenous population by the state of North Carolina, they had yet to receive federal recognition.2 Deloria’s task was to use her ethnolinguistic expertise, not to determine whether the Indians of Robeson County constituted an “authentic” Indian tribe, but to “work up a community pageant” that would raise national awareness about the group and their culture.3 She was to accomplish this task in consultation with both anthropologists like Benedict and Boas and artists like noted playwright Paul Green, the state poet of North Carolina , who had written and directed his own pageant entitled the “The Lost Colony.”4 This was the kind of assignment that Zora Neale Hurston would have relished. Throughout the 1930s Hurston experimented with the idea of folk performance, frequently translating the folklore she collected into performance genres. In fact, earlier that year, she had been close by, teaching theater at North Carolina College for Negroes and attending a weekly playwriting seminar taught by Paul Green. She even considered collaborating with Green on a play based on her short story “John De Conqueror.”5 While Deloria was a scientist first and foremost, she was no novice to performance genres. She had studied “pageantry construction and production ” while at Columbia Teacher’s College, and shortly after her graduation she produced—with the open prairie as its backdrop—a bilingual DakotaEnglish pageant that depicted “the Church’s Mission to the Dakotas” for the annual convocation of the Episcopal Church.6 In the late 1920s, when she was teaching at Haskell, Deloria wrote and produced a pageant for the 1927 homecoming celebration. Entitled “Indian Progress: A Pageant to Commemorate a Half Century of Endeavor Among the Indians of North America,” Deloria’s production consisted of a series of tableaux representing the different historical phases of North American Indian life up to the 1920s. As Ann Ruggles Gere notes, “Indian Progress” was an important dramatic departure from previous years’ celebrations, which typically featured a dramatization of Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” Because it was written from a Native perspective, “Indian Progress” replaced Longfellow’s mythical Indians with “actual people,” and thus “bolstered Indian pride.”7 If Deloria initially thought that she might replicate her Haskell success...

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