I’m teaching the Canadian Indigenous literature survey class again this semester. One of the students in that course lent me her copy of Ella Cara Deloria’s Waterlily. She’s Dakota, from Standing Buffalo Dakota Nation in Fort Qu’Appelle, about an hour east of Regina, and Waterlily is one of her favourite books. I can see why. Deloria was Dakota; she was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota and grew up at the Standing Rock Reservation. She was also an ethnographer and linguist who worked with Franz Boas and published three books in her lifetime: Dakota Texts, a bilingual (Dakota and English) collection of stories (1932); Dakota Grammar (1941), which she wrote together with Boas; and Speaking of Indians (1944). I have a copy of Dakota Texts, and in my forthcoming book (warning: shameless plug coming), Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, which is currently available for preorder, I briefly talk about one of the stories Deloria tells. She worked as a teacher, museum director, and anthropologist. She also wrote fiction. Along with Waterlily, which she completed in 1948 but which was not published until 40 years later, nearly two decades after Deloria’s death, she wrote Iron Hawk, a novel (I think–I haven’t read it), and The Buffalo People, a collection of stories. Both of those were published posthumously as well.
During my PhD research, I read about various creative forms of presenting social science research. One of those was the ethnographic novel: conveying the results of, say, ethnographic or autoethnographic research by telling a story in which the characters are fictional but their context is based on research data. Waterlily is an example of an ethnographic novel. It tells the story of the life of the title character, a young woman in a Dakota community, from her childhood to marriage and motherhood, during the nineteenth century. At first, I thought the historical context might’ve been older than that, because for almost the first half of the book, there’s no sign that settlers exist in any way. Then we find out that’s not the case. We see the destructive effects of contact with those outsiders, including the dwindling herds of buffalo and the scourge of smallpox. But those intruders are not the novel’s focus. Instead, we learn, in detail, what life was like for the Dakota in (I’m guessing) the 1840s or 1850s. It’s a fascinating portrait of what is, for me, a completely different way of living, of looking at the world. Waterlily herself might be a little flat as a character, but it’s the world of which she’s a part that makes this book worth reading.
I had questions as I read, particularly about the way Deloria depicts sexuality and gender roles; I wondered if those aspects of the text might reflect the 1940s and Deloria’s Christianized environment a little more than the 1840s. There’s no sense in which anyone might be two-spirit, for instance, although perhaps that wasn’t something the Dakota practiced. But the book conveys a detailed portrait of social roles and obligations, ways of making a living, sacred rituals, and the absolute importance of generosity. There’s also a clear sense of how much Dakota people practiced self-control, and how information in a high-context culture is communicated in careful, subtle ways.
I found Waterlily fascinating. It provides a glimpse into a way of life that settlers did not value, and in fact did their best to destroy. They–or rather we–were unsuccessful in that attempt, partly due to the work of people like Deloria, but also through other forms of resistance to colonization. We all ought to be grateful for that. There are so many ways to think about the world, and the one that the ancestors of people like me brought from Europe is not the only one that has value. It’s important for we settlers to remember that. So thanks, Naomi, for the loan of the book. I’ll return it to you at our first class after reading week.