Born on January 31, 1889, to Mary and Reverend Philip J. Deloria on the Yankton Reservation, Ella Cara Deloria spent much of her life deeply immersed in the Dakota and Lakota oral storytelling traditions.1 As a member of the Dakota nation, Deloria was familiar with both storytelling traditions because shortly after she was born, her family moved to the Standing Rock Reservation, where she was exposed to the Lakota dialect and also began attending boarding school. In 1910 Deloria graduated from All Saints Boarding School and continued her education at the University of Chicago, Oberlin College, and Columbia College. At Columbia College, Deloria met the famed anthropologist Franz Boas, who hired her in 1927 to correct and retranslate Dakota and Lakota texts collected by early nineteenth-century missionaries and ethnologists who desperately wanted to preserve traditional oral stories as a record of a primitive people rapidly nearing extinction.
In 1938...
