The Dakota Way of Life by Ella Deloria, ed. by Raymond J. DeMallie and Thierry Veyrié (review)

Reviewed by: The Dakota Way of Life by Ella Deloria, ed. by Raymond J. DeMallie and Thierry Veyrié Christopher Pexa (bio) The Dakota Way of Life by Ella Deloria (Raymond J. DeMallie and Thierry Veyrié, eds.) University of Nebraska Press, 2022 ELLA DELORIA'S ETHNOGRAPHY, The Dakota Way of Life, gathers in 581 magisterial pages material that had previously existed as a finished but unpublished manuscript. The book's long editorial provenance—and the failure of publishers to bring it (and her novel, Waterlily) to light while she lived—is certainly part of its significance for contemporary readers: first completed in 1945, the manuscript passed between numerous hands until DeMallie began editorial work on it in the 1980s. Deloria hailed from Standing Rock and was Ihánktuŋwaŋ or Yankton Dakota, but her main focus here is the Thíthuŋwaŋ or Teton people, the Lakota-speaking bands of the Ochéti Sakówiŋ Oyáte or People of the Seven Council Fires. As in her other writings, but especially in Speaking of Indians (1944), Deloria foregrounds kinship as underpinning Dakota life at all scales: the individual (chapters 11–13); the family or immediate relatives (chapters 8–10); the tʿiyošpaye tʿípi, the "group of relatives living" together or extended family (chapters 1–7), and ultimately the oyáte, or all Ochéti Sakówiŋ people. Throughout, Deloria's savvy accounting of the richness of Dakota life, whether at the level of the everyday or of the philosophical, is astonishing. Deloria's use of "Dakota," because she writes as a Dakota woman, implies Dakota-, Nakota-, and Lakota-speaking people, or who she names "Santees," "Yanktons," and "Tetons" (2). She explains her focus on Tetons or Lakota as their being "the largest division" who "were able to retain their culture for a longer period than the Yanktons east of the Missouri, or the Santees still farther east" (2). This framing of cultural preservation/loss is typical of Deloria's time and was no doubt influenced by her close relationships with the anthropologists Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. But despite the influence of salvage anthropology, Deloria's wry humor and ability to track continuities between past and present express the persistence of Dakota values and ways of life that Deloria documents. While the content of the volume is remarkable, so is its curation. Raymond DeMallie's role in caring for and shaping Ella Deloria's work is documented in the book's introduction as well as in a moving afterword by Deloria's great End Page 148 nephew/grandson, Philip Deloria, who evokes DeMallie's close kinship with the Deloria family over some sixty years. Despite this intimate connection, I found myself wishing for clearer tracking of the choices made by DeMallie and Veyrié. The text is presented without noting specifically how the editors "excised . . . repetitions, reduced the excessive length of some of the prose, . . . revised some of the wording to improve clarity, mitigated some of the stylistic excesses, and added footnotes and scholarly context" (xxvi). In striving to produce an air of seamlessness, Deloria's hesitations, her repetitions—in short, the effort of decades of intellectual labor, of interviewing community members and relatives, of translating Lakota language into English—are effectively erased. The book's editors account for this choice as a way of avoiding an even longer text, but I found that this fluent presentation domesticates the very real challenges Deloria encountered in her fieldwork. Likewise, DeMallie's and Veyrié's endnotes are also often couched in binaries—especially those of the sacred/secular and the natural/supernatural—that were alien to pre-reservation Dakota life and ways of knowing. To be fair, these annotations follow Deloria's own usages. But hers are far from unequivocal and reflect instead the difficult translational dynamic Deloria navigated as a Yankton Christian woman and ethnographer. For instance, when Deloria glosses the term "wakʿą" (or wakȟáŋ)as "sacred," the editors note that "wakʿąis the Dakota spiritual concept of the supernatural" (376). But Dakota lifeways were historically not theistic, and Deloria's own explanation of lightning and hail images on a tipi links them to "those unfortunate men and women...