"All My Relatives Are Noble": Recovering the Feminine in Ella Cara Deloria's Waterlily

Abstract

Through all the centuries of war and death and cultural and psychic destruction have endured the women who raise the children and tend the fires, who pass along the tales and the traditions, who weep and bury the dead, and who never forget. There are always the women, who make pots and weave baskets, who fashion clothes and cheer their children on at powwow, who make fry bread and piki bread, and corn soup and chili stew, who dance and sing and remember and hold within their hearts the dream of their ancient peoples—that one day the woman who thinks will speak to us again, and everywhere there will be peace. Meanwhile we tell the stories and write the books and trade tales of anger and woe and stories of fun and scandal and laugh over all manner of things that happen every day. We watch and we wait. My great-grandmother told my mother: Never forget you are Indian. And my mother told me the same thing. This, then, is how I have gone about remembering, so that my children will remember too. Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop This book is dedicated to my Indian mother, Pretty Face, who, in her humble way, helped to make the history of her race. For it is the mothers, not the warriors who create a people and guide their destiny. Luther Standing Bear, Dedicatory, Land of the Spotted Eagle (1936) In the early 1940s Dakota anthropologist Ella Deloria began talking to her mentor, feminist anthropologist Ruth Benedict, about the possibility of transforming her ethnographic research into a novel that would [End Page 52] bring Plains Indian culture to life for the American reading public. In writing Waterlily, a historical novel that documented early nineteenth-century Dakota life through the experiences of two generations of Dakota women, Ella Deloria clearly hoped to humanize anthropological discourse on Plains Indian culture and refocus the ethnographic lens on the lives of women in Dakota culture.1 That Deloria chose to reformulate her ethnographic research into a nonscientific form suggests her dissatisfaction with the scope of social scientific discourse, both in terms of its potential audience and its descriptive limitations. Moreover, that she reached far back into history for her subject matter suggests an impulse to set the record straight, to reveal the hidden hand that women had played in the history and culture of the Dakota community. Because it is a novel that moves beyond the strictly ethnographic to speak to audiences and issues outside of the academy, critical evaluations of Waterlily must likewise move beyond an exploration of its relationship to ethnographic meaning making and examine the ways in which the novel offers an alternative (and even utopian) mode of imagining history, agency, and consciousness. With this in mind, I propose a reading of Waterlily that explores its representational strategies for evidence of a decolonizing imagination at work—an imagination that forecasts the interventions of contemporary tribal feminist writing. While this proposal may seem less than shocking given the fact that this is a novel written by a Native woman about Native women, my reading of Waterlily departs from a good deal of the extant scholarship on the novel. Indeed most critical interpretations of Waterlily focus either on the anthropological context in which it was written or on its "cross-cultural" function as a text that reveals the psychological underpinnings of Dakota culture to a predominantly white audience. Because these critical approaches presume that Deloria was speaking to a non-Indian audience, they do not address the significance of Waterlily to the internal politics of Indian communities in the 1930s and 1940s. In this article I will expand the critical terrain around the novel to elucidate the implications of Deloria's fiction for the project of tribal revitalization, a project that was central to the political thinking of...