Ella Cara Deloria - Life

Life

Deloria was born in the White Swan district of the Yankton Indian Reservation, South Dakota. Her parents were Mary Anne Bordeaux Deloria and Philip Joseph Deloria, the family having Yankton Dakota Sioux, English, and French roots. (The family name goes back to a French trapper ancestor named Delaurier.) Her father was one of the first Sioux to be ordained as an Episcopal priest. Although Ella was the first child to the couple, they each had seven daughters by previous marriages; she was followed by twenty further children.

Deloria was brought up on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, at Wakpala, and was educated first at her father's mission school and All Saints Boarding School in Sioux Falls, and then – after a brief period at the University of Chicago – at Oberlin College, Ohio, to which she had won a scholarship. After two years at Oberlin she transferred to Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and graduated with a B.Sc. in 1915.

Throughout her professional life, she suffered from not having the money or the free time necessary to take an advanced degree, largely because of her commitment to the support of her family; her parents were elderly, and her sister suffered from brain tumours. In addition to her work in anthropology (of which more below), Deloria had a number of jobs, including teaching (dance and physical education), lecturing and giving demonstrations (on Native American culture), working for the Camp Fire Girls and for the YWCA, and holding positions at the Sioux Indian Museum in Rapid City, South Dakota, and (as assistant director) the W.H. Over Museum in Vermillion. Her nephew was the writer and intellectual, Vine Deloria, Jr.

Deloria had a stroke in 1970, dying the following year of pneumonia.