The Mentoring of Miss Deloria: Poetics, Politics, and the Test of Tradition

Abstract:When she met Franz Boas in 1915 at the age of twenty-six, Ella Cara Deloria was a senior at Columbia Teachers College. The Yankton Dakota woman impressed Boas enough for him to invite her to translate Dakota texts in his linguistics class. What followed was a thirty-three-year mentoring relationship that was reciprocal not only between Deloria and Boas but eventually with Ruth Benedict as well. Boas also proposed that Deloria, in addition to translation, document “all the details of everyday life as well as of religious attitudes and habits of thought of the people,” and Benedict came to encourage Deloria to provide similar data. During these collaborative years, ending with Benedict’s death in 1948, Deloria challenged prevailing anthropological narratives while confronting stereotypes about American Indians and women. She made periodic visits to New York to complete manuscripts, but her devotion to family and obstacles at home overshadowed her work. A more complete analysis of the Deloria/Boas/Benedict mentoring relationship deserves further illumination mainly because Deloria’s legacy should be considered with an understanding of the hurdles she faced. She flourished within her own community, especially later in life, and also in the anthropological world she discovered, but eventually she prevailed as an American Indian woman of her era, a dedicated and insightful family member, teacher, and writer who was constricted in her own time, influential to ours, and worthy of remembrance for her determination in the face of the many obstacles she shouldered.