Ella Cara Deloria is quoted often in my research, and, more importantly, Ella Cara Deloria is quoted frequently in my household. As a member of a Lakota band of Oceti Sakowin peoples, a sibling band to the Dakota people, I consider her to be a vital part of my academic and community lineage. Reading The Dakota Way of Life provides an opportunity to reexamine the breadth and depth of the scholarly work Ella Deloria conducted on the Oceti Sakowin people. Throughout this review, when I reference the Oceti Sakowin people, I mean the Tribal Nations encompassing Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota-speaking communities, which Ella Deloria studied throughout her career.
The Dakota Way of Life demonstrates the kinship values Ella Deloria wrote about extensively, but through a scholarly framework. The manuscript for this book passed through many caring academic hands before reaching publication. It was initially drafted in the mid-1940s and went through many revisions, with the final edits completed by Raymond J. DeMallie and Thierry Veyrié. Each version of the manuscript was handled with care by scholars who have contributed to the growth of anthropology and to Indigenous studies across disciplines. I recognize the care of Ella Deloria’s manuscript as a type of academic kinship that developed over decades. The scholars who edited The Dakota Way of Life understood the essential contributions of Ella Deloria’s data gathering and the many hurdles she faced throughout her lifetime.
One cannot speak about Deloria and her ethnographies without speaking about kinship. Her ability to navigate the collection data from a Dakota perspective is essential to present-day Indigenous scholars who grapple with the Western academy’s push against biases. A valuable attribute of her work is that she relied “heavily on her own life experience” and incorporated “her field interviews anecdotally to validate more general points” (xxi). At the time, Deloria struggled with writing from a “scholarly” perspective.
Still, in the present day, her voice is needed for up-and-coming junior Indigenous scholars trying to infuse their deep passion for tribal communities with the necessary rigor to produce ethical scholarship. Without examples like Ella Deloria’s ethnographies, scholars like me would continue to feel isolated in academic fields that dismiss our auto-ethnographic fieldwork and self-reflexive writing.
Kinship is carried throughout the text and with the afterword written by Ella Deloria’s nephew, Phillip J. Deloria. He notes that although the text is not formally separated into sections, one could efficiently structure the argument into three parts: camp circle life, kinship analysis, and the Dakota individual. I agree with his statement that any scholar attempting to analyze Dakota livelihood could utilize The Dakota Way of Life to understand the basis of Dakota culture, and also, its points of difference and similarity with regard to other Indigenous cultures, viewed in the light of the precarious transition from pre-reservation life to the founding of reservation life. I have utilized these materials in my research to draw connections between creative practices like poetry and jewelry-making as ways to demonstrate humility and ceremonial values within Lakota culture.
The book’s introduction describes how Ella Deloria dedicated most of her academic life to linguistic scholarship and gathering data on the ceremonial life of the Oceti Sakowin people. She is often described as a “perfectionist” who worked methodically and was hyperaware of the scrutiny she encountered as a woman and a Dakota scholar. Much of her fictional and non-fictional writing was not published in her lifetime. Her novel, Waterlily (1980), is based on the ethnographic materials she gathered throughout her lifetime, but it was not found and published until after her death. Speaking of Indians (1944) is one of the first comprehensive ethnographies by Ella Deloria, and, reading the most recent addition, The Dakota Way of Life, we understand the publishing limitations Deloria faced throughout her career. The arrival of this text in the scholarly world is a testament to her diligence even when she knew the work might not be immediately published.
First and foremost, The Dakota Way of Life is suitable for any Indigenous studies researcher working with material from the Northern Plains of what is now the United States. Secondly, one can glean from the text, from both the presentation of her life’s work and the afterword, the ways Ella Deloria contributes to the growing fields of affect studies, especially within queer studies and ethnic studies, as scholars pay attention to emotions in analyzing cultural material. Deloria's passion for her ethnographic work, and the subsequent care of the editors, demonstrates the value of collaborative effort when doing ethnography in tribal communities. There is still much more to be said about the life of the Oceti Sakowin people, but Ella Cara Deloria has established the foundation for this ethnographic work.
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[Review length: 783 words • Review posted on March 24, 2024]