Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture

Chapter 1: Standing on the Middle Ground: Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Methodology

Chapter 1 Standing on the Middle Ground Ella Deloria’s Decolonizing Methodology 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. “The Modern Questor,” Ella Cara Deloria To me it seems like a religious duty to get everything as right as I possibly can, for future scholars. Perhaps this sounds silly; but I have an idea that this is my work, which none other can do. You see, I represent a middle era, in the development of my tribe. I lived the early years of my life in the heart of the Sitting Bull country, spoke the language and heard many myths as a child. I am related, according to the social kinship system of my tribe, with everyone in it. Then I was sent to school. I went on and on, and by one lucky break after another, I was a college graduate, in due time. With my college training, coupled with my Indian background lived in the days when it was a really Indian background, I stand on middle ground, and know both sides. I do not say I am the best educated Indian that ever will be; that is not so; but no matter how far a younger student should go, he could not know both sides, because that other, the Indian side, is gone. That is why I feel as though I have a mission. Ella Cara Deloria to John D. Rockefeller Jr. (1934) 42 Native Speakers ​ I n a biographical sketch that she sent to anthropologist Margaret Mead in the 1950s, Ella Cara Deloria recalled her formative years as a “collector ” of D/L/Nakota tales.1 Telling her own artful story, Deloria remembered how she used to escape from her mission school, St. Elizabeth’s, to spend long hours absorbing the tales of the elder Hunkpapaya and Sihasapa Lakotas, who were there “to visit their children . . . and to draw rations at the substation.” Lingering at the Lakota encampments until her family had to “send out an alarm” to locate her, Deloria absorbed the details of a world that she would later document—a world under siege from both “friends” and enemies who wished to transform it. “I kept my eyes and ears open,” she recalled, “and [I] remember pretty much all I ever saw and heard of Teton life in the past. That was the foundation on which I based my subsequent interest in Dakota linguistics and ethnology.”2 By the 1930s, this curious and watchful young girl had become a preeminent expert on D/L/Nakota cultural, religious, and linguistic practices. The leading figures of anthropology—Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead—frequently acknowledged her as such in their letters of recommendation and in their proposals for funding. For example, in a letter to the American Philosophical Society, Benedict stressed Deloria’s “special qualifications,” which included her familiarity and facility with languages, her rigor and seriousness, and her insider’s understanding of Dakota cultural norms. For Benedict, these qualifications “counterbalanced her lack of academic status.” Noting that Boas had “never found another woman of her caliber” in all his years working with American Indian consultants, Benedict claimed that the “intense and personal training” Boas gave Deloria “outweighed the kind of training which often leads to a PhD degree.”3 However, as is evident in Benedict’s qualified praise, though Ella Deloria may have earned the respect of her colleagues in the anthropological establishment , she achieved neither a PhD in the field, nor ultimately the credit that was her due. While Ella Deloria could have pursued any number of professional careers, she chose to dedicate herself to anthropology, a profession that she pursued with equal measures of enthusiasm and skepticism. Like Boas and his other students, Deloria recognized that nineteenth-century anthropological writing had contributed to the colonial project, but she also realized that Boasian anthropology—notwithstanding its reputed break with the poisonous racial ideologies of Victorian ethnology—still bore an uncomfortably close relationship to neocolonial relations of rule. Moreover, as the descendant of a long line of Indian leaders in the Episcopal Church, Deloria was surely aware that this new “science of man” was playing an increasingly [3.139.97.157] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 02:14...