Ella C. Deloria, named Anpetu Wastéwin (Beautiful Day Woman) in Dakota, was born to a prominent Yankton Dakota family in 1889 on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Her father, one of the first Sioux Episcopal priests, moved the family to the Standing Rock Reservation in South Dakota where he was assigned to head St. Elizabeth’s Church and boarding school on the reservation. As a result, Deloria was raised in a Christian home that followed Dakota traditions in a Lakota community, shaping her to become fluent in Lakota, English and Dakota languages. At first she attended St. Elizabeth’s school for several years, then she attended All Saints, an Episcopal boarding school in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. She went to Oberlin College in 1910, later transferring to Columbia Teachers College where she earned a BS in 1915. During her senior year she met anthropologist Franz Boas, professor at Columbia University, who hired her to speak Lakota for his students in a Linguistics course. This transformative event introduced her to the formal study of American Indian languages and cultures and set her on the career path that she pursued the rest of her life.

After teaching Indian education at All Saints, teaching health education in Indian schools for the YMCA, and then dance and physical education at Haskell Indian School in Kansas for 13 years, Boas contacted her to resume Lakota language studies with him in New York. Over the next decade, with research supported by Columbia University, she studied the language and conducted fieldwork with Dakota and Lakota elders in South Dakota and Minnesota. Her collaboration with Boas produced a grammar of Lakota language which remains a classic in the study of Lakota language, and she translated, edited and re-transcribed a Lakota text on the traditional Lakota religious ceremony, the Sun Dance. On the advice of Ruth Benedict, Deloria recorded numerous Lakota myths and sacred stories, some of which have been published, and she studied commonalities and differences in the performances of the structures of Sioux sacred ceremonies by different branches of the tribe, but this work remains unpublished. Deloria also received funding from the National Science Foundation to work on a Lakota dictionary, work that remains uncompleted.

Ella C. Deloria was the most prolific scholar of Lakota culture. Although much of Deloria’s research remains unpublished, several important works have been published including:

“The Sundance of the Oglala Sioux” (1929), published by AFS

Speaking of Indians (1944)

Waterlily (1988)

Phyllis M. May-Machunda