Work and Achievements
Deloria met Franz Boas while at Teachers College, and began a professional association with him until his death in 1942, also working with his students Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict. She had the advantage for her work on Native American culture of fluency in both the Yankton and Lakota dialects of Sioux, both of which she had used as a child, as well as the eastern dialect of Sioux (in addition to English and Latin).
Her linguistic abilities and her intimate knowledge of traditional and Christianised Sioux culture, together with her deep commitment both to Native American culture and to scholarship, allowed Deloria to carry out important, often ground-breaking work in anthropology and ethnology, as well as to produce translations in to English of historical and scholarly texts in Sioux (such as the Lakota texts of George Bushotter and the Santee texts of Gideon and Samuel Pond). She was compiling a Sioux dictionary at the time of her death.
In 1938-39, she was part of a small group of researchers hired to construct a socioeconomic study on the Navajo Reservation for the Bureau of Indian Affairs that was funded by the Phelps Strokes Fund. This study resulted in a report, The Navajo Indian Problem, that was published. This well received project opened the door for her to receive more speaking engagements and funding to continue her important work on native languages. In 1940, she and a sister went to Pembroke, North Carolina to conduct some research among the Lumbee tribe, again with financial backing from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Lumbees were in the process of pursuing federal recognition and Deloria believed she could make an important contribution to their effort by studying their distinctive culture and language. In her study, she diligently conducted interviews with Lumbee women about plants, food, medicine, and animal names. And she also conducted a comparative study between some of the native languages and Lumee slang words. She came very close to completing a dictionary of their original language before the addition of English and various other language phrases. She also assembled two successful pageants for and about the Lumbee people in 1940 and 1941 that depicted their origin account that allegedly connects the Lumbee to the Lost Colony of the Outer Banks region.
Deloria won the Indian Achievement Award in 1943, and was the recipient of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation (1948) and the National Science Foundation (1960s).
In 2010, the Department of Anthropology of Columbia University, Deloria's alma mater, established the Ella C. Deloria Undergraduate Research Fellowship in her honor.
Read more about this topic: Ella Cara Deloria
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