Ella Cara Deloria

Ella Cara Deloria (1889–1971) was a Yankton Dakota teacher and ethnologist. After studying, among other places, at Columbia University in New York, she initially taught at several schools for Native American students. From 1927 she worked with the ethnologist Franz Boas, and from 1928 she conducted about ten years of field research among Lakota, Dakota, and Cheyenne groups. She published scholarly articles, a bilingual collection of Dakota stories, and a study of Dakota culture. Her manuscript for “Waterlily,” written in the 1940s, was first published in 1988.