"Different by Degree": Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston,

and Franz Boas Contend with Race and Ethnicity

Roseanne Hoefel

The American Indian Quarterly, Volume 25, Number 2, Spring 2001,

pp. 181-202 (Article)

Published by University of Nebraska Press

DOI: 10.1353/aiq.2001.0023

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aiq/summary/v025/25.2hoefel.html

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“Different by Degree”
Ella Cara Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, and Franz Boas Contend
with Race and Ethnicity

roseanne hoefel

What did or could African American folklorist and writer Zora Neale Hurston
(1891–1960) and American Indian ethnographer and linguist Ella Cara Deloria
(1888 –1971) have in common? According to their correspondences housed at
the American Philosophical Society (aps) in Philadelphia, they have more in
common than those who have been conditioned to think of race in dualistic
terms and apart from class might assume. Both Hurston and Deloria spent a
good part of the 1920s and 1930s marshalling their expertise for the father of
modern anthropology, Franz Boas. Both women were stunned by what had
passed for “folklore” about their respective communities and could hardly
bear it. In a 24 May 1938 correspondence with Boas, Deloria explained that she
had been reading a couple of manuscripts for a publishing house: “It is amaz-
ing what people write about Indians. I have criticized both [manuscripts] quite
unfavorably; but I had to, they were so trashy; I should not like to be thought to
pass on them.” It became their mission, thus, to offer antidotal efforts through
extensive, rigorous fieldwork.
Both Hurston and Deloria were extremely dedicated to their intellectual and
professional mentor, Boas. Hurston seemed more inclined to iconize him (sign-
ing a 10 October 1929 letter, for instance, “Much love and reverence”), while
Deloria occasionally expressed covertly her resentment of white expectations
of her. Both women were resilient in the face of relentless racism, though they
demonstrated their tenacity differently: Deloria, through eloquent candor, and
Hurston, through fearless wit. Likewise, both suffered tremendous financial
stress, though Deloria’s was more often pronounced and varied because of her
dire socioeconomic straits, which impinged on her familial obligations. Hur-
ston’s hardship, according to extant letters located at aps, primarily delayed her
pursuit of a doctorate and—according to Lorraine Roses and Ruth Randolph’s
biographical and critical insights—resulted in part from mismanagement of
funds.1 Most noteworthy, incongruous, and, for me, disquieting is that both re-
markable researchers and historians died not only impoverished but in relative

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obscurity—unlike Boas, Ruth Benedict, or Margaret Mead, for example, who

reaped the benefits (including recognition and lasting veneration in the field)
of Hurston’s and Deloria’s tireless dedication.
The sociohistorical evolution of the discipline provides an illuminating
context for the contributions these women of color would make to the field.
The treatment of race in sciences such as anthropology underwent significant
changes between the eugenics movement of the early 1920s and the post–
World War II emphases on cultural determinism and race relations as the
prominent fields of inquiry. Ruth Benedict and Ashley Montague both desper-
ately tried to disabuse readers of the race constructionism and fanaticism that
led to the atrocities of the Holocaust.2 Boas laid the foundation as early as 1910
for an environmentalist model of race and culture, though the powers that be
had little use for it then; and Boas’s posthumous collected essays in Race and
Democratic Society (1945) debunk the primacy of biology and heredity through
skeptical interrogation of the race concept.3 This is, to be sure, a far cry from
the April 1877 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine wherein anthropolo-
gists report on the craniometry of the “Gorilla,” “Chimpanzee,” “Bush-
woman,” and “European.” 4
Beyond doubt, confronting, resisting, and redressing such an establishment
did not make Boas terribly popular. As early as 1894, in “Human Faculty as De-
termined by Race,” Boas wrote: “The overlapping of variations is significant in
so far as it shows that the existing differences are not fundamental.” 5 He ar-
gued that fundamental to anthropological psychology is the “necessity of look-
ing for common psychological features.” 6 Further, “about the question of the
difference of mental ability in different races,” Boas stated in a 1907 lecture en-
titled “Anthropology,” “The evidence . . . does not sustain the claim of superi-
ority. . . . [W]e must guard against the inference that divergence from the Eu-
ropean type is synonymous with inferiority.” 7 Not surprisingly, thus, respected
racists like Lothrop Stoddard publicly and professionally belittled Boas as a pa-
thetic Jew pitifully trying to pass as white.8 Yet, in his extensive study of North-
west Coast art, for instance, Boas offered an increasingly confident analysis
aimed at contradicting the evolutionist biases parading as truth by reporting
the “variety of history; the profound influences of diffusion; the formal, sym-
bolic, and stylistic variations . . . and ultimately the role of imagination and
creativity” among the Native peoples he worked with and studied.9
Nevertheless, the sociocultural pressure to collectively perpetuate racial and
ethnic categories penetrated Boas’s life and work. In the 1925 U.S. v. Cartozian
case, Boas was asked to testify to the European origin of Americans who—
though they migrated to Asia Minor—would beundeniably white. 10 Boas’s con-
flictedness in this labeling enterprise punctuated his career. Two years later, for
example, Boas would publish Primitive Art and claim in its conclusion:

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What distinguishes modern esthetic feeling from that of primitive people is

the manifold character of its manifestation. . . . [T]he complexities of our so-
cial structure and our more varied interests allow us to see beauties that are
closed to the senses of people living in a narrower culture. It is the quality of
their experience, not a difference in mental make-up that determines the dif-
ference between modern and primitive art production and art appreciation.11

Aldona Jonaitis astutely points out, however, the Western prejudice inher-
ent in elevating Northwest Coast art by equating it with the art of “advanced”
cultures.12 Although Boas promoted the cause of serious and ethical scholar-
ship, postcolonial thinkers still scrutinize his assumptions and consider the
contemporary question of cultures controlling their own legacies. Jeanette
Armstrong urges our genuinely empathetic critique of the histories of domi-
nant culture relationships to Native peoples:

Imagine the writer of [the] dominating culture berating you for speaking out
about appropriation of cultural voice and using the words “freedom of
speech” to condone further systematic violence, in the form of entertainment
about your culture and your values and all the while yourself being disem-
powered and rendered voiceless through such “freedoms.” . . . Imagine in-
terpreting for us your own people’s thinking towards us, instead of interpret-
ing for us, our thinking, our lives, our stories. We wish to know, and you need
to understand, why it is that you want to own our stories, our art, our beau-
tiful crafts, our ceremonies, but you do not appreciate or wish to recognize
that these things of beauty arise out of the beauty of our people.13

While Boas made countless efforts to raise consciousness as a social scientist

about the latter, his progress on the former was inconsistent and ambivalent.
Although one can appreciate the courage with which Boas and his colleagues
defied the primitivizing impulse of a fundamentally and intrinsically racist
anthropological enterprise, Boas was also an intellectual product of that tradi-
tion: by seeking the “pure” precontact condition of indigenous peoples and
recording the last remnants of an allegedly “dying” or “disappearing” culture,
Boas fueled the nostalgia for the “primitive” and the imperialist illusion of a
“vanishing” race.14
And though Boas was not inclined to value the preservation of the cultures
he studied, his students/apprentices/colleagues of color like Deloria and
Hurston were. They could discern the reflection in literature, folklore, and art
of a self-preserving response to the colonial and postcolonial world as active
subjects of survival, not passive victims of the agenda embedded in theories of
the disappeared. As American Indian and African American persons them-
selves, Deloria and Hurston did not fall into the bind of substituting positive

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for negative stereotypes or of reifying their peoples. Instead, they permitted

them the full spectrum and complexity of human beings with intricate histo-
ries and complicated cultures. They did not subscribe to the political motiva-
tion of many anthropologists who preceded them: to understand the mental
world of the “savage mind” or “primitive,” exaggerating as needed insurmount-
able differences between themselves and their “objects” of study.
On the contrary, Hurston and Deloria literally embodied Boas’s emphasis
on subjectivity. In fact, they inverted the condescending model of the anthro-
pologist as parent by becoming respectful or playful daughters of their collab-
orative informants/elders.15 In a 21 August 1928 correspondence, for example,
Deloria describes the kinship ties that made her both a “daughter” and a
“daughter-in-law” to those she needed to interview. Even after her father had
a stroke that muted him, Deloria explains in a 6 November letter of the same
year that the “old time Indians” visiting in tents offered her an opportunity to
collect stories.
Significantly, I would argue, this deference as daughters also informed their
dynamic with “Papa Franz.” In a 29 March 1927 reply to Boas’s 24 March letter
notifying her that the Investment Securities Corporation had informed him of
her $200 loan request, payable in eight monthly sums, Hurston— evidently
feeling duty bound to answer or account to him— explained to Boas her need
for a used car (costing $200). Considering that mobility was essential to Hur-
ston’s collection of folklore throughout the Southeast, one could argue that
this purchase ought to have been a work expense. In fact, Hurston tried on this
occasion and others to make Boas aware of the harsh realities of her “field”
work, for example, explaining that her material was not typed because of the
difficulty of lugging a machine along country roads.
Also worth noting in this instance is the inevitable influence on Hurston of
her mentor/employer/father-figure-of-a-sort’s professional and intellectual
ambivalence. In the aforementioned letter, Hurston notes: “The Negro is not
living his lore to the extent of the Indian. . . . His Negroness is being rubbed off
by close contact with white culture.” This claim presupposes an essential “In-
dianness” immune not only from white perturbation but from influences in
the Southeast, especially of interaction with African Americans. Jack Forbes
and Katja May have documented extensively the relationship of the Creeks,
Cherokees, and Seminoles with African Americans, pointing up a perplexing
omission on Hurston’s part.16 When Hurston wrote to Boas on 21 April 1929
from her beloved Eau Gallie, Florida—which she would later call home—she
reported having “more than 95,000 words of story material, a collection of
children’s games, conjure material, and religious,” arguably contradicting her
statement above. Hurston considers in this letter the analogous customs of the
pantheists and the Catholics, posing such a series of questions in order to defer
to Dr. Boas’s ultimate authority:

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Is it safe for me to say that baptism is an extension of water worship as a part

of pantheism just as the sacrament is an extension of cannibalism? Isn’t the
use of candles in the Catholic church a relic of fire worship? Are not all the
uses of fire upon the altars the same thing? Is not the christian ritual rather
one of attenuated nature-worship, in the fire, water, and blood? Might not the
frequently mentioned fire of the Holy Ghost not [sic] be an unconscious fire
worship. May it not be a deification of fire?
May I say that the decoration in clothing is an extension of the primitive
application of paint (coloring) to the body?

Further presupposition shapes Boas’s next correspondence with Hurston

six weeks later, in this case concerning African Americans and their innate
penchant for “rhythm,” as it were. Boas offered Hurston $250, plus travel ex-
penses, for four month’s work on “the special ability of the Negroes” in music
(17 May 1929). In the previous 21 April letter, she mused about the centrality of
the drum, especially to and for the “primitive” sensibility:

May I say that all primitive music originated about the drum, and that singing
was an attenuation of the drum-beat. The nearer to the primitive, the more
prominent the part of the drum. Finally the music (the singers) reach that stage
where they can maintain the attenuation independently of, and unconscious
of the drum. Such is the European grand opera. Unrithmic attenuation. I
mean by attenuation, the listener to the drum will feel the space between
beats and will think up devices to fill those spaces. The between-beat becomes
more and more complicated until the music is all between-beat and the con-
sciousness of the dependence upon the drum id [sic] lost.

This and other correspondence reflect the meticulousness of Hurston’s an-

thropologically informed thought processes and methodology. To offer another
illustration, in a follow-up letter written five months later, Hurston explained
that she wrote her findings to Boas’s assignment verbatim, the rationale for
which offers insight to her method, the seriousness with which she took and
treated her work, and the importance to her of honoring authentic voices: “to
insure the correct dialect and wording that I shall not let myself creep in un-
consciously.” Taking issue with previous, “alleged” anthropologists, Hurston
complains, based on her own more astute findings, that “Odum and Johnson . . .
could hardly be less exact. They have made six or seven songs out of one . . .
and one song out of six or seven. . . . English ballads being mistaken for Negro
songs.” Hurston contends further that, unlike her, “[Odum and Johnson] have
distorted. . . . Some of it would be funny if they were not serious scientists.” In
script, tellingly, Hurston inserts here: “Or are they?” She thereby calls into
question the caliber and integrity of her predecessors’ reports, much as Deloria
would do with George Sword’s and James Walker’s accounts of the Sun Dance.

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The following year, both Hurston (8 June 1930) and Boas (13 June 1930) re-
ferred to efforts to have Hurston’s “angel” (Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy
patron of black arts, who sponsored Hurston’s field trips and writings, as well
as the work of Langston Hughes—from 1927 to 1932, contributing about
$15,000) underwrite not only her research but the degree(s) she wished to pur-
sue. Four years later, according to a 20 August 1934 Hurston letter, Lippincott—
one of three publishing houses courting Mules and Men, Hurston’s landmark
anthropological text—would insist that this collection be both “very readable”
and “a reference book.” In this same letter, Hurston asked Boas to write an in-
troduction, hoping that it would counter what she disdained as the “enormous
amount of loose writings” and “preposterous stuff ” she had seen on folklore
by other (alleged) anthropologists. In a follow-up correspondence a couple of
months later (23 October 1934), Hurston’s unwavering high regard for Boas is
abundantly clear: “I say nothing of my tremendous esteem for you, for fear that
it may sound like bribery . . . [for] the introduction.” As is customary in her
letters, Hurston sends “[her] love” not only to Boas but to his colleagues as
well: Drs. Reichard, Benedict, and Klynberg and “all the rest.”
By December of that year, Hurston reported that her patron, Mrs. Mason,
had donated toward all of Hurston’s pursuits, save her doctorate, at which point
Hurston applied for a Rosenwald Scholarship. Hurston confided in Boas:
“This is going to call for rigorous routine and discipline, which everybody
seems to feel that I need.” We learn in this 14 December 1934 letter that Hurston
had been on her own since she was fourteen, by which early age she was or-
phaned and had been shuttled between relatives: “It is hard to apply [oneself ]
to study when there is no money to pay for food and lodging.” In spite of it all,
though, Hurston concludes: “But oh, Dr. Boas, you don’t know how I have
longed for a chance to stay at Columbia and study.” Five days later (19 Decem-
ber 1934), she explained the terms of her coveted scholarship: the Julius Rosen-
wald Fund granted her $100 per month for two years, $500 for folklore travel,
and $100 in starter costs.
Also like Boas and perhaps in part explaining her affinity with him, Hurston
boldly critiqued the conventions of representation within her field; in her case,
it was within the African American literary tradition. Conventions by black
male writers constrained her and “precluded originality and denied creation in
the arts.” 17 Tellingly, Stetson Kennedy—for whom Hurston wrote “The Ne-
gro in Florida” as part of the Federal Writers Project— did not publish his cri-
tique in early 1938. Indicting the propaganda and protest literature that placed
black characters only in relation to whites, Hurston cites in third person her
own brave departure from what she deemed limiting convention in Jonah’s
Gourd Vine, wherein her characters live without apology and according to their
own self-contained rhythms. I would argue that this very defiance enabled

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Nella Larsen, a Harlem Renaissance contemporary also much pained by the

male and largely gay establishment, in turn, to refuse the “romantic evocation
of the fold” and instead to focus on working-class blacks’ confrontation with
race in an urban context, as Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Gwendolyn Brooks, and
Toni Morrison would later reckon with as well.18
Hurston remained true to her anthropological training, even in the autobio-
graphical Dust Tracks on a Road,19 which Françoise Lionnet dubbed autoeth-
nography: “the defining of one’s subjective ethnicity as mediated through lan-
guage, history, and ethnographical analysis . . . a ‘figural anthropology’ of the
self.” 20 Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s biographer, also marveled at Hurston’s
capacity to negotiate the academic collection of old material and the insightful
perceptions of a storyteller that she marshals in the unfolding of history, geog-
raphy, mythology, kinship, education, work, travel, friendship, love, religion,
politics, philosophy, and other cultural topics.21 Hurston inserts herself, par-
ody, and jokes through a dialogical style that contrasts with the Boasian “pure
objectivity” to which she alludes.22
Thus, unlike the envious damnation of Hurston by Richard Wright or the
small-minded denunciation of her by white critics like David Littlejohn,23
Hemenway praised Hurston as the only Harlem Renaissance artist to under-
stand the folk process as involving “behavior—performed interpretations of
the world which influence action . . . no separation of subject and object, of
mind and material.” 24 In her ethnography and fiction, Hurston asserts the “so-
cial construction, preservation, and exchange of individual and tribal histories
as the key to successful female quests.” 25 Participatory storytelling preserves
ancestral narrative in several of the genres Hurston crafts. It is, thus, another
form of the “modification” or “reinterpretation” of ideas, the borrowings,
echoes, and revisions that constitute the truly original in art.26 Similarly, Hur-
ston deemed imitation and mimicry the ironic context and essence of the orig-
inal.27 According to Henry Louis Gates Jr.,

The narrative voice Hurston created, and her legacy to Afro-American fiction,
is a lyrical and disembodied yet individual voice, from which emerges a sin-
gular longing and utterance, a transcendent, ultimately racial self, extending
far beyond the merely individual. Hurston realized a resonant and authentic
narrative voice that echoes and aspires to the status of the impersonality,
anonymity, and authority of the black vernacular tradition, a nameless, self-
less tradition, at once collective and compelling, true somehow to the un-
written text of a common blackness.28

Elsewhere, too, Hurston clarifies her method and savvy as both informant and
folklorist. Early on in Mules and Men, for example, Hurston explains:

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You see we are a polite people and we don’t say to our questioner, “Get out of
here!” We smile and tell him or her something that satisfies the white person
because, knowing so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing. The
Indian resists curiosity by a stony silence. The Negro offers a feather-bed re-
sistance. That is, we let the probe enter, but it never comes out. It gets smoth-
ered under a lot of laughter and pleasantries.29

As a mediator, according to Susan Willis, Hurston must transform Boas’s

endorsed Mules and Men in which a semifictional Zora guides readers through
central Florida and New Orleans.30 Faulted by Sterling Brown for its absence
of militancy, Hurston’s book is rich in detail and humor. Two years later, Their
Eyes Were Watching God endured the same criticism from Alain Locke and
Richard Wright, who condemned its nonproletarian stance. Nevertheless,
Hurston’s anthropological fieldwork won her a Guggenheim to study in Haiti,
which culminated in Tell My Horse.31 Hurston thereby bridged the gap be-
tween the literary potency of testimony and the “primitive” authority of old
life. By offering a perspective that originates within the black community, Hur-
ston significantly links “a literary technique—viewpoint—and its broader
humanistic implications in the depiction of black humanity in literature.” 32
Changing the adjective black to American Indian, this would yield a fairly ac-
curate description of Ella Cara Deloria as well. Like Hurston, she was at the
mercy of those who would support her studies and research. The church for
which her father served as Episcopal priest supported her attendance at the
University of Chicago and at Oberlin approximately two decades prior to
Hurston’s formal education. Vine Deloria Jr., her nephew and a prolific cul-
tural critic, reminds us in his elucidating introduction to Deloria’s Speaking of
Indians that this book was published by New York’s Friendship Press, an affili-
ate of the National Council of Churches. This audience and context inform my
later discussion of this work.
As Paula Gunn Allen contends: “Ella Deloria extends the tradition of the
American Indian woman as repository and purveyor of culture. We have seen
how the position of the woman in the mythic structure of tribal cosmologies
has allowed her historically to develop a storytelling function within her com-
munity. What may not be so apparent, perhaps, is the process by which she
emerges as a conscious writer.” 33 Born of mixed ancestry in 1888 (according to
her birth certificate and enrollment data) as the daughter of a Yankton Sioux
who became an Episcopal priest among the Tetons at the Standing Rock Reser-
vation, Deloria was raised by Christian parents who spoke both English and
Dakota. Deloria’s father was the son of a powerful medicine man, Saswe, who
had a vision of four generations of sons. Because his sons and his first two wives
died, Deloria’s father invested her, among his five daughters, with the respon-

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sibility of this vision. She became “the inheritor of the traditions of the family
and was treated as if she were the son to whom Philip could pass down the sto-
ries.” 34 After Ella, her parents had Philip, Susan, and Vine Victor (twelve years
her junior). When Philip died at age ten, Ella found herself at age twelve trying
to rally her father from a deep depression. Thus, in her early adolescence, De-
loria deepened the culturally instilled compassion for her elders and came to
believe that what was precious to the old should be known only by generations
that can and will appreciate such.35
Formally educated first at the Wakpala mission school and later at the All
Saints’ Boarding School in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Deloria eventually spent
two years at Oberlin followed by two at Teacher’s College, Columbia, where she
earned a Bachelor of Science in 1915.36 When Deloria’s mother, Philip’s third
wife, died in 1916 —a year after Ella obtained her B.S. degree at Columbia—
her father’s faith was so shaken that he gradually returned to the old ways. At
this juncture, Deloria largely assumed the role of provider, both for the needs
of her father and for those of her sister, who suffered brain tumors, and her
youngest brother. Eventually, Deloria had to sell their trust land. Ironically and
tellingly, her December 1935 correspondence with Boas discusses the impossi-
bility of personal pronouns being used for food, natural objects, or land be-
cause none of these can be possessed. Indeed, they cannot.
During a perplexing hiatus in Deloria’s relationship with Boas from 1915 to
1927, Deloria taught for several years. In her late thirties, she began anthropo-
logical field research under Boas’s tutelage. In a letter dated 11 November 1926
to Miss Beckwith, a mutual friend who served as the liaison between them when
she was at Haskell Institute, Deloria wrote, “I enjoyed working under him and
shall always remember him as a keen, admirable intellect . . . the cause of my
earning my first sizeable check—$18/month, of which I was justly proud.”
Beckwith, according to Boas’s 6 April 1927 reply to Deloria, had forwarded him
her kind note. As a result, Boas requested a week with Deloria in late May or
early June: “I am very anxious to get some good material on Dakota because
what we have isn’t quite up to our modern scientific standards and I want your
help.” After Deloria expressed her eagerness and her need to brush up on
Boas’s recording method (17 April), he offered her $30 per month for the sum-
mer for the revision of sections 137– 68 of the Bushotter texts (17 June).
On 26 January of the following year, Boas offered Deloria $200 per month
and field expenses for one and a half years if she would do a critical study of
the psychological tests by which racial differences could (still can?) allegedly be
established. Because Boas believed that cultural factors play a significant part
in differences of any sort, he asked Deloria to observe “habits of action and
thought” and to develop with a psychologist a test suited to Dakota life, which
would then be applied to whites to test the disparity in giving a test prepared

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for one group to another. By 21 October 1929, Boas had asked Deloria to re-
search the old sign language, and Dr. Klineberg, one of Boas’s most prominent
colleagues, hoped that Deloria would discern “how motor habits in different
races are established by social habits.” They also requested that she observe
how beadwork among women influenced form perception. Other cultural dif-
ferences they wished her to study included the conditions in which unexpected
emotional repressions occur and when mother, father, and daughter-in-law
taboos inhibit individuals.
Though largely productive, this working relationship was stressful for Delo-
ria. In 1929, again at Boas’s request, Deloria finished the translation of George
Sword’s account of the Sun Dance, about which she gathered more informa-
tion. But she was not able to corroborate Sword’s personification of particular
natural phenomena, much to Boas’s disappointment. Later, Deloria declined
Boas’s invitation in 1936, due to familial obligations, to rework the South Da-
kota stories she had collected; yet the following year he sent her former Pine
Ridge physician James Walker’s manuscript, asking her to authenticate it by in-
terviewing elders at that reservation and at Rosebud. Deloria was unable to
find anyone who remembered the symbolism of the ritual acts Walker detailed
decades earlier in The Sun Dance but was bound not to reveal (because of their
secret nature) until his informants were deceased. After Deloria’s concerted ef-
forts to no avail, Boas condescendingly scolded her in a 1 June 1938 letter: “I do
not know how serious an effort you have made to get the material I want. . . .
[O]n the whole I confess I am not well satisfied with what you got for me dur-
ing the last few months.” The paucity of corroborating evidence, however, left
Deloria only to conclude in a 12 May 1939 letter that the materials in question
“were the work of a clever storyteller.” As for Hurston with regard to Odum’s
and Johnson’s earlier work on “Negro music,” Deloria’s more thorough inves-
tigation revealed another story. In each case, the significance of a “second opin-
ion” in matters conceivably informed by ethnic stereotypes or racial biases
cannot be overstated.
Despite this disconcerting agreement to disagree, Deloria continued to re-
cord for Boas thousands of pages in both Lakota and English on all facets of tra-
ditional life: Sioux kinship roles, tepee and camp circle social systems, praying
for power, education by example, and the economics of giving, among other
aspects. In addition to her 1932 collection of myths and legends, Dakota Texts,
Deloria translated and compiled extensive editorial notes for Gideon and Sam-
uel Pond’s collection of Santee myths from their missionary days and Bushot-
ter and Sword’s texts, all of which constitute invaluable data on Lakota seman-
tics. In Dakota Texts alone, Deloria includes free translation of all sixty-four
stories told directly to her by storytellers, which she transcribed in Lakota; she
also provides supplementary literal translations for the first sixteen to more
clearly evoke Lakota thought patterns, customs, and metaphors.

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Deloria’s 25 August 1935 letter conveys her observations upon arrival at the
Pine Ridge Reservation when Lucy Cramer, Felix Cohen, and Mr. Derker of the
Indian Office met with the women there regarding the new Oglala constitution
proposed under the Wheeler–Howard Act. Deloria noted for Boas the inter-
esting difference between the women’s formal speech and their colloquial Da-
kota among themselves. Their concerns included exclusion from council meet-
ings, “too pleasant for the men to come to any hurried agreement.” Before
offering Boas an example of the misunderstanding that results from careless
interpreting, Deloria summarizes the women’s grievance: “Now, if you let us
manage it, they said in effect, we can talk it out, and agree on it because we shall
be thinking what is best for our children, instead of how pleasant to meet and
eat the government’s food: and we can persuade our men to see it our way. We
are the boss in our homes anyway, what power have the men?”
Like Hurston, thus, Deloria tried to enlighten Boas regarding gender dy-
namics. Similarly, she alerted him to the literal and figurative cold realities of
her daily routine. In a 7 February 1936 letter she reports: “The blizzard and
storm has already lasted nearly three weeks. . . . I have not been to see my medi-
cine man, as the roads are all blocked. Car travel is very unsure . . . the tem-
perature . . . 32 below.” And yet Deloria’s passion for this work compelled her
to persevere. In the same letter, she wrote to Boas: “I do love working with you
on Dakota.” While she produced an unpublished Sioux ethnography, Camp
Circle Society according to Boas’s 7 June 1937 letter, he was pleased that the
American Ethnological Society had published other materials “under the title
‘Dakota Texts.’ ” In a letter dated 7 July 1937, Boas wrote to “certify” Deloria’s
“thorough grasp of the grammar and spirit of the [Dakota] language . . . thor-
oughly conversant not only with the forms but also with the very intricate psy-
chological background.” In 1941, Deloria and Boas published Dakota Gram-
mar, a three-dialect dictionary wherein Deloria presents kinship terminology,
among other rare features.
Such was the process, then, by which Deloria “emerged as a conscious
writer,” to borrow Gunn Allen’s apt phrasing. Deloria’s well-known giftedness
as a linguist (she spoke all three dialects of Sioux) won her a growing reputa-
tion as an insider anthropologist. The Bureau of Indian Affairs hired her in
1938 –39 to write about the “Navajo Indian problem”—reminiscent of the
aptly dubbed “half-named” Negro “problem” to which W. E. B. Du Bois refers
in The Souls of Black Folk. In a 12 February 1938 correspondence, Deloria ex-
plains to Boas her translation of the report of three Indians, known as the “Il-
legal Committee,” who had traveled to Washington dc “to kick against the In-
dian ‘New Deal.’ ” Deloria reports, “Their leader, Ben American Horse, was
arrested and fined $50 for opposing Mr. Collier’s program.” On 30 June of the
same year, Deloria sent Boas a rich description of her learning on the Oneida
and the differences in kinship. This deepening and broadening of Deloria’s

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knowledge base apparently had consequences, for in that same letter she re-
ports, “I can’t get any federal work, because I have the reputation of being so ed-
ucated!” Understandably, Deloria would refer to the government as an “im-
personal organization.” When the bishop of Arizona asked her to head a
mission school for Navajo orphans and another implored her to be a liaison
between the Navajo and the government agency on their reservation, she re-
ported the infeasibility: “It is like trying to conciliate and get cooperation from
such a heartless monster of a machine”—a “frankenstein,” as her 12 May 1939
inscription would cast it.
In 1940, Deloria began her work with the North Carolina Lumbee, the orig-
inal language of which she believed she could have reconstructed if she had not
lost a wealth of scholarship in two steamer trunks that she could no longer af-
ford to store. She and her sister Susan staged two pageants at Pembroke. On
7 August 1940, Deloria wrote a fascinating letter to Boas that bears out the
blending of the races alluded to earlier:
These people are the supposed “Croatans” who call themselves Indians but
are very much mixed up. A study sponsored by the Indian Office some time
ago and conducted by some physical anthropologist from Harvard—Dr.
Carl Selzer I think—showed only ten out of every hundred as showing more
than half Indian blood, or half Indian blood. How they arrived at this I don’t
know. They took blood tests, though I don’t see how that would prove race,
and cephalic indexes, and also they studied the hair for its straight or curly
properties. It is true that they are largely mixed with negro blood, because
some show it undeniably; but also there are as many that are so white, with
blue eyes and blond hair and with very fine features that I should not guess
were Indian, except for their reticent manner.
Deloria wrote also of their regret in not being able to find any folklore, tra-
dition, or language, speculating: “Might that be due to some time in their his-
tory when all the mothers were non-Indian? I notice that in the Sioux country,
children of white men and Indian mothers are steeped in folk-lore and lan-
guage, but children of white mothers and Indian fathers are often completely
cut off from the tribal folk-ways.” Understandably yet oddly, thus, the drama
that Washington Farm Security Official Dr. George Mitchell—an economics
professor at Columbia—had requested, according to Deloria, might have to
be based on “imaginary” findings: “I have been referred to Paul Green of
Chapel Hill (Univ. of N.C.) who is the state poet and who wrote the pageant
‘The Lost Colony’ which is produced at Roanoke Island N.C. with consider-
able success each summer. Drawing on his imagination from the statement in
Governor White’s report that the Croatans invited the remnants of the de-
serted colony to go and live with them.” As Deloria reports in anticipation of
Jack Forbes’s book:

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It is contended by white historians of the locality that some of them had ne-
gro slaves and cohabited with them; and that the tribe also harbored excaped
[sic] sailors, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. And there has been later intermarriage
between French Huguenots, and Scotch settlers, and some Germans.
But because of the evident negrow [sic] blood in many, the name Croatan
has come to be used with a contemptuous meaning by local white people, so
the Indians got it changed to Cherokee, because they read somewhere that
some theory gives the idea that they stemmed form the Cherokees of North
Carolina. But when that did not do the trick, they again read a paper by
Swanton saying they were probably Cheraws, a Siouan group. So in recent
years they have been working to get a bill passed calling them the “Souans.”
“Su-ons” is the local pronunciation. But some want to remain Cherokee.

It will prove instructive here to discuss the chameleon race/ethnicity debate

that peppered the twentieth century, as the historical context of Indian–black
relations even prior to that time both precipitates and informs the Boasian an-
thropolitical context. For example, as early as the 1670s, South Carolina was
sending American Indians in “tens of thousands to the West Indies and other
markets.” 37 When a 1693 Cherokee delegation at Charleston requested the re-
turn of relatives sold to Jamaica, they were denied. According to Forbes, most
of these slaves (such as the Choctaws) hailed from Florida and the Mississippi
region:

The ancestry of modern-day Americans, whether of “black” or “Indian” ap-

pearance, is often (or usually) quite complex indeed. It is sad that many such
persons have been forced by racism into arbitrary categories which tend to
render their ethnic heritage simple rather than complex. It is now one of the
principal tasks of scholarship to replace the shallow one-dimensional images
of non-whites with more accurate multi-dimensional portraits.38

This rarely discussed dimension of our history may offer some insights to the
varied relational dynamic between those of Native and those of African ances-
try in the centuries that followed.
When Indian Territory became Oklahoma in 1907, it also became a white
majority state wherein nonwhites were demoted to second-class citizens (as
the later discussion of the alchemy of race will demonstrate). Indian-owned
black slaves or intermarried free African Americans among the Five Civilized
Tribes (Cherokees, Muscogees/Creeks, Seminoles, Choctaws, and Chickasaws)
enrolled as tribal members after the Civil War. The Choctaws and the Chicka-
saws did not permit these new enrollees political or social participation; simi-
larly, the Cherokees and the Creeks impeded their social and political equality.
However, while the Cherokees and Creeks shared the racialist thoughts of the
dominant culture regarding persons of African descent, they did not subjugate

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their newly adopted tribal members. One senses the residue of the whites’ con-
tinued efforts to divide and conquer, rooted in much earlier history (e.g., the
arming of blacks to attack Indian villages as in the South Carolina invasion
against Cherokees in 1715). Also informing this scheme was the 1790 Natural-
ization Act, which allowed only white males citizenship because of their alleged
“rationality of mind” and the conveniently constructed association of others
with instincts and bodily functions “that must be harnessed.” The ideology of
racism (and, I would add, sexism) as an American theme, according to a De-
loria letter of 7 May, “ ‘empower[ed]’ white people’s historical actions . . . as if
it did not matter what people of color ever thought or did” (emphasis added). In-
deed, “American” identity was based on gender and race exclusion. In fact,
white settlers frequently lied to Native peoples that blacks had spread diseases
and then offered to pay Indians the equivalent of about thirty-five deer skins
for bringing in fugitive slaves.
The infiltration of such race division mentality surfaces in the literatures of
the period. A thematic recurrence in slave narratives, for instance, was “irre-
pressible” Indian blood. Stories collected and published in the 1930s refer re-
peatedly to Indian relatives or black Indians. According to Katja May, many
Indians suppressed their guilt through hostility toward blacks. Meanwhile, De-
loria wrote on 24 –25 May, “early anthropologists like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
and Henry Morgan, who studied Native American folklore, kinship, and reli-
gion, also predicted the Indians’ ‘inevitable extinction’ in the face of ‘superior’
Western civilization. Co-existence seemed inconceivable.”
This “superior” civilization is, presumably, white. And, as Matthew Frye Ja-
cobsen has demonstrated in his remarkable sociopolitical history of European
immigrants and the alchemy of race, “whiteness and its fluidity [constitute] a
history of power and its disposition . . . race is not just a conception; it is also
a perception.” 39 One must not underestimate, then, the potency of the conflu-
ence of factors that informed the milieu in which Ella Deloria and Zora Neale
Hurston worked: “Political debates over slavery, naturalization law, and im-
migration drew on the sciences of anthropology and craniometry, but these
bodies of knowledge had arisen in answer to questions about peoplehood gen-
erated by the politics of exploration, expansion, colonialism, slavery, and re-
publicanism in the first place.” 40 In his 1904 “The History of Anthropology,”
Franz Boas acknowledges that scientific approaches to classifying humanity
stemmed from “passions that were aroused by the practical and ethical aspects
of the slavery question.” 41
In that context, then, Dr. Mitchell hoped that a pageant by Deloria and her
sister would inspire them by evoking some unity and pride in “their past his-
tory, such as we have been able to imagine, and in their present efforts indus-
trially, socially, educationally, religiously.” It is not surprising, given the dis-

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dainful climate, that they would want a pageant to “cast them in a better light.”
As is still miserably the case, the media plays a role in the distortion that fuels
detrimental stereotypes. Deloria’s letter refers to sporadic crimes by drunk In-
dians, “not so prevalent as the nearby newspapers make it appear. They like to
balloon up the least thing that discredits the Indians, and it gives the whole
group a bad name. As a matter of fact the majority are very docile people.” De-
loria informs Boas that their disenfranchisement began with the North Caro-
lina Constitution of 1835 when state Senator Hamilton McMillan “argued that
here was a separate race of people, industrious and tax-paying, and that the
state owed them schools. A bill went through the state legislature, and a sepa-
rate school system was voted to them.” The enculturated racism and resent-
ment precluded coalition building with those of African descent. In fact, ac-
cording to Deloria, they would
have nothing to do with the Negroes, and the white people will have nothing
to do with them because of their negro strain, and altogether it is a pretty des-
perate situation. But the people enjoy life among themselves and they do en-
joy foregathering, through their churches entirely. They are a gentle people,
naive and very helpful to strangers, but also always careful of seeming too
bold. They have been snubbed a lot I think; they act so sort of stepped on
whenever they are thrown with white people, in the stores and so on.
Perhaps Deloria’s own humble stance allowed this particular sensitivity. The
story of Deloria being “commissioned” for this project, in fact, proffers some
insight to her unassuming nature. While the Farm Security Administration
fronted the money for this five-month endeavor, Deloria was actually hired by
the Indian Office, and this required that she don a title. Although Deloria chose
“Head community worker,” the office appointed her “Assistant Anthropolo-
gist, grade 11.” Deloria was thankful for the first financial break she had ever re-
ceived (this “put [her] in the $2600 a year class”) and suspected that it was a
function of her professional designation, which secretly delighted her.
Deloria’s postscript depicts the other hardships these people faced:
P.S. These people are called Indians by North Carolina, but the Indian Bu-
reau does not recognize them as such. They have been trying to get themselves
enrolled so as to enjoy the benefits of schooling in government schools, and
student loans for college, and the right to go into the Indian service. That is
why Dr. Selzer made the study, but the findings were not sufficiently heavy to
influence the Indian Office to change its attitude. The ten out of each hundred
may get student loans, I hear; but it is not generally advertised, so as to safe-
guard the many who are barred, I heard.
In an update a month later, Deloria offered Boas a multifaceted picture:

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Some of the members of the same family are blue-eyed and have hair as
flaxen and straight as Scandinavians; and then their very own brothers or sis-
ters may have black kinky hair and dark skin. I have seen only very few who
look like Indians to me; and even then I can’t be sure.
They are very gentle, quiet people and most cordial and friendly to visitors.
They certainly have been nice to me. But they are most pathetic in that they
are discriminated against by the white people in the county and they feel hurt,
and have been for generations. The whites resent them because of their negro
strain which they can’t lose if they try, because it is against the law in Carolina
for them to marry any but their own people.

The most sobering of Deloria’s descriptions is the disembodied effort to re-

trieve spirituality. In addition to the “pretty terrible” revivals,

there was a Mohawk Indian here two winters ago from St. Regis. And he or-
ganized the “long House” for a group that want to be Indian. Taught them
dances and songs, and instructed them to go through the routine each week.
So they built themselves an immense hall of logs, misunderstanding Long
House for Log House; and made it 100 x 60. I was in it yesterday. There is a
stage, and some gourd rattles, and a drum, and a piano. On the stage the mem-
bers danced in snake formation, and kept up this monotone of a song and
beat the rattles, according to instructions—without the slightest idea what
was supposed to underlie the ritual. They don’t have feasts down here; so they
simply went through this for three hours, disbanded, and went home. . . . But
the oddest part was that in one corner they had a shelf of Indian “relics” ob-
tained from western tribes. And there they had a Dakota Episcopal prayer-
book, a particular edition which came out in 1920’s sometime, and it had my
father’s name in it, for he was one of the four revisers of it! They read those
prayers as part of the ritual, “for the president of the United States, the gov-
ernor of this state and all others in authority.”

Anyone would agree that the layered ironies here border on the surreal.
After providing the Lumbee with a validating pageant that remarkably tran-
scended the factions of that region, Deloria returned home. In 1955, she and her
sister were hired together to operate their former school, St. Elizabeth’s Mis-
sion Home in Wakpala, South Dakota. In an 11 March 1957 letter to “My dear
Mrs. Sulzberger”— one of the few correspondences and telegrams pertaining
to Deloria housed at the Princeton archive for the Association on American In-
dian Affairs (aaia; Box 88 F.5)—Deloria expresses thanks for being honored
with a nomination to the aaia Board of Directors: “My interest in Indian Af-
fairs far exceeds my abilities and knowledge, but I am eager to learn.” Also
humbling herself, she gently corrects Mrs. Sulzberger’s assumptions: “I do not

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have a Ph.D. How that ‘Dr.’ started I do not know. . . . [I am] destined to re-
main plain Miss Deloria.” A couple of years later, on 6 May 1962, upon learn-
ing from Corinna Lindon Smith that she was up for reelection to the board of
the aaia, Deloria modestly replied: “I have not the slightest hope of being re-
elected, but should that happen I shall of course continue my deep interest . . .
as a loyal member.”
By the early 1960s, Deloria was working on the Sioux dialects at the Univer-
sity of South Dakota W. H. Over Museum. She was completing the Santee
Sioux dictionary in 1963 when her sister died. aaia Secretary Alden Stevens
sent a letter of sympathy, her support network of elders, family, and anthro-
pology mentors having dissipated. Deloria died eight years later, leaving a
legacy of varied service to her thus enriched communities: as national health
education secretary for the ywca and as recipient of a special diploma from
Columbia Teacher’s College for “demonstrating exceptional professional abil-
ity,” 42 among other honors.
Deloria’s receipt of the 1943 Indian Achievement Award from Chicago’s In-
dian Council Fire was one of many accolades accrued during her lifetime of
devoted study and preservation of “a scheme of life that worked”—the last line
of a Stephen Vincent Benet poem Deloria used as an epigraph to her ethnog-
raphy Speaking of Indians:
They were neither yelling demon nor Noble Savage.
They were a people.
A people not yet fused,
Made one into a whole nation, but beginning
As the Gauls began, or the Britons that Caesar found.
As the Greeks began, in their time.
They were a people, beginning—
With beliefs,
Ornaments, language, fables, love of children
(You will find that spoken of in all the books.)
And a scheme of life that worked.43
Though Deloria goes on to describe Sioux kinship within the Christian prop-
aganda framework expected by her publisher and readers, she is able to embed
praise of her Dakota culture, even of its secular features. For example, during
an impressive moment early in the book when a young Dakota female inter-
preter demonstrates her quick wit, Deloria writes:
That sort of word-making is quite possible in Dakota; and it comes natural to
users of languages having that capacity. Of course, not every speaker does it
with equal felicity, because it depends also on imagination—a variable power

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in any race. Only the keen, clever minds can consistently do it with the best
effect. A magnetic Dakota orator is one who, possessed of the other necessary
qualities, has in addition unusual skill in this respect. But sometimes even
the most prosaic come out with words that surprise and delight you by their
aptness.44

To be sure, Deloria herself possessed the extraordinary “capacity” to delight

readers, for instance, in her use—among other skillful strategies— of meta-
phor: “After one wash [of a patchwork quilt in which scraps of cloth are, un-
fortunately, not of fast color] there would be a blurring out of tones, a blend-
ing of each two neighboring colors along the seams. That’s about the way
culture areas are.” 45 As she delineates the difficult social and spiritual adjust-
ment it was for the Dakota to become farmers, because they were used to liv-
ing cooperatively and happily in large family groups, we learn that everyone
played her or his part: “for the sake of . . . honor, all kinship duties, obligations,
privileges and honorings being reciprocal. . . . a fast net of interpersonal re-
sponsibility.” 46 Even the buffalo played an integral part “as host to a whole na-
tion”: By “covenant [the buffalo] belonged to all . . . the embodiment of
sacrifice that others might live.” 47 The buffalo thereby became “chief of all
spirits serving as mediums for driving supernatural good.” 48 Each of these
facets and countless other cultural insights would also surface frequently in her
ethnological novel Waterlily, as I have demonstrated elsewhere.49
Despite the fundamental centrality of the buffalo before its desecration by
white encroachment and ruthless slaughter, Boas insisted on a rather static
view of culture, which Deloria with a citation from his Anthropology and Mod-
ern Life brings under scrutiny even as she begins part 3, chapter 9 of Speaking
of Indians, “The Old Order Changeth”: “ ‘As long as there are no stimuli that
modify the social structure and mental life, the culture will be fairly stable. Iso-
lated tribes appear to us and to themselves as stable, because under undisturbed
conditions the processes of change of culture are slow.’—Franz Boas.” 50 In no
uncertain terms, then, Deloria in this chapter recounts the profoundly dis-
turbing invasive pressure, “awful in its power, insistent in its demands,” that
came, unbidden, “like a flood that nothing could stay.” 51 Wreaking havoc with
the very meaning of Dàkota, or “state of peace,” “it had roiled the peacefulness
of the Dakotas’ lives, confused their minds, and given them but one choice—
to conform to it, or else!” 52
Here as elsewhere, it is interesting rhetorically to note Deloria’s shift in au-
dience: away from her Christian underwriters and toward herself and her
people. Midway through the book, for example, she writes, “So, after all, a na-
tive shrewdness in meeting new conditions has not died in all these years of en-
forced dormancy. I think that’s encouraging”—as though to give her people

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hope and certainly to acknowledge their fortitude as “white civilization had hit
Teton-Dakota life with cruel impact and thrown it into wild confusion.” 53 Im-
mediately following such moments in the text, Deloria strategically placates
the Christian readership with gratitude for the lonely void that Christian mis-
sions then filled. Also tactical is Deloria’s (approximately 100-page) demon-
stration of her people’s Christian ethic as a context illustrating why, how, and
to what extraordinary degree the Dakota embraced notions of Christian giving
around the world. In fact, Indian culture appears more “Christian” than a
Western economy that neither understands nor rewards the prioritizing of
kinship obligations over formal education.
Other instructive insights abound in part 4, “The Present Crisis.” Writing
when intercultural awareness was deemed central to the war effort, Deloria in
the last section does proffer a portrait of Indian life in wartime, suggesting the
service of Indians in the military. In chapter 14, “Indian Life in Wartime,” De-
loria discusses the Dakotas’ cumbersome adjustment to urban life, the efforts
and hardships of those left behind and those relocated to the war industry hubs:
They have something to bestir themselves about at last—what a pity it had to
be a war! And it has called forth all those dormant qualities that had been
thought killed long ago—initiative, industry, alertness. And they had gener-
ally retained their infinite patience, sympathy, gentleness, religious devotion,
tolerance, showing an amazing lack of bitterness—amazing, because they
have had plenty to be bitter about. They are not bitter, not because they are
childish and don’t know enough to be, but because they are wise. They know
that bitterness endangers dignity—another inalienable trait—and solves
nothing.54
What reader, then or now, does not or would not want to be like this wisdom-
bound and preserving, dignified Dakota when she or he grows up?
Conversely, Deloria expresses the detrimental stereotype of the warrior and
the misunderstanding of Indian names that register entire histories:
If friends of the Indian people had investigated and understood these “names,”
it would have been found that they are not “names” at all as we know them.
They are oral records, invented by people who did not write, for the purpose
of keeping fresh in the tribal memory great deeds and striking experiences out
of their history. They do not refer to persons bearing these names today. . . .
The deed of an ancestor was memorialized in a phrase applied to a descen-
dant of his.55
Deloria also delineates the various reasons Indians could not flourish in white
economic ways of thinking and being: “Nobody knows and appreciates the fact
any more than Indians themselves that there were splendid disciplines in the

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old culture to sustain and strengthen its people.” 56 Indeed, nobody knew or
appreciated more than Ella Cara Deloria—hence her own splendid discipline,
in every sense of that word and reflected in her admirably meticulous method.
Deloria describes her approach to Dakota Texts, for example: she wrote the
narrative “in the original, directly from storytellers who related them to [her].
Each tale is accompanied by a free translation which [she] tried to keep as
simple and close to the Dakota style as possible; and by notes on the grammar
and customs. In addition, a literal translation was provided.” 57
Deloria, like Zora Neale Hurston, seems to have been aware, as Katja May
would argue several decades later and as bears repeating as a frame to this essay,
that the ideology of racism as an American theme “ ‘empowers’ white people’s
historical actions . . . as if it did not matter what people of color ever thought or
did” (Deloria letter of 7 May). At every juncture, Ella Deloria tries to disabuse
readers of such a distorted, egocentric, ethnocentric view. Together, Hurston
and Deloria evoked a dynamic whereby women of color reasserted “their tra-
ditional role as ‘voice of the people,’ albeit through a much different medium
than had historically prevailed.” 58 Their lives and work abundantly demon-
strate that what people of color think and do does matter; what is more, it al-
ways has.

notes
I wish to thank Dr. LaVonne Brown Ruoff for introducing me to Ella Cara Deloria’s
work during a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar in 1994;
Dr. Vine Deloria Jr. for his permission to quote from his aunt’s letters; and the American
Philosophical Society Library, in particular Assistant Manuscripts Librarian Dr. Alison
Lewis, for its gracious assistance and permission. I also wish to thank the Estate of Zora
Neale Hurston. Victoria Sanders and Associates, the literary agent for Zora Neale Hur-
ston’s estate, granted me permission to cite Hurston’s extant correspondence. The es-
tate project,Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letter, edited by Dr. Carla Kaplan, will be pub-
lished in fall 2001 by Doubleday Books. I appreciate their generosity.
1. Lorraine E. Roses and Ruth E. Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Liter-
ary Biographies of 100 Black Women Writers 1900 –1945 (Cambridge ma: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1990), 181.
2. Ruth Benedict, Race: Science and Politics (New York: Viking Press, 1940); Ashley
Montague, Race: Man’s Most Dangerous Myth (Walnut Creek: Alta Mira Press, 1942).
3. Franz Boas, Race and Democratic Society (New York: J. J. Augustin, 1945).
4. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1877: 776.
5. Franz Boas, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race” (Salem ma: Salem Press,
1894), 227.
6. Boas, “Human Faculty as Determined by Race,” 247.

200 Hoefel: Deloria, Hurston, and Boas Contend with Race and Ethnicity
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7. Franz Boas, “Anthropology” (1907), 273.

8. Cited in Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1996), 89.
9. Aldona Jonaitis, ed., A Wealth of Thought: Franz Boas on Native American Art
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 9 –10.
10. Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and
the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge ma: Harvard University Press, 1998), 240.
11. Franz Boas, Primitive Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1955 reprint), 356.
12. Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought.
13. Jeanette Armstrong, “Till the Bars Break.” (San Francisco: Irresistible/Maya/
Revolutionary, 1995), 328.
14. Jonaitis, A Wealth of Thought, 329.
15. Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive (New York: New York University
Press, 1996), 148 – 49.
16. Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the
Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Katja May.
17. Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Reading Black, Reading Feminist (New York: Penguin
Books usa Inc., 1990), 9.
18. Gates, Reading Black, Reading Feminist, 88.
19. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York:
HarperCollins Publishers, 1991).
20. Françoise Lionnet, “Autoethnography: The An-Archic Style of Dust Tracks on a
Road.” In Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Pen-
guin Books usa Inc., 1990), 383.
21. Robert Hemenway, in Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston, (New York: Quality
Paperback Books, 1990), 3.
22. Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, 174.
23. See Roses and Randolph, Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 183; Henry Louis
Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 182 – 83. See also Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Claim-
ing the Heritage: African-American Women Novelists and History (London: University
Press of Mississippi, 1991), 53.
24. Hemenway, in Mules and Men, 80.
25. Kubitschek, Claiming the Heritage, 63.
26. See Zora Neale Hurston’s 1934 essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” in
Negro, ed. Nancy Cunard (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 39 – 62.
27. Nancy Cunard, ed., Negro (New York: Negro University Press, 1969), 43.
28. Gates, The Signifying Monkey, 183.
29. Hurston, Mules and Men, 4.
30. Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (Madi-
son: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987).

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31. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company,

1939).
32. Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (New
York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991), 64.
33. Paula Gunn Allen (1983), 140.
34. Allen, xi.
35. Allen, xii.
36. Prater (1995), 41.
37. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 56.
38. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans, 271.
39. Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color, 9.
40. Jacobsen, Whiteness of a Different Color, 10 –11.
41. Franz Boas, “The History of Anthropology” (1904), 33.
42. University of South Dakota Bulletin 11, Series lxv.
43. Ella Cara Deloria, Speaking of Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998), ixx.
44. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 15.
45. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 17.
46. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 31.
47. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 12.
48. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 62.
49. See Roseanne Hoefle, Strange Bedfellows: Anthropology and Literature, ed. Rose
De Angeles (Gordon and Breach Publishers, forthcoming).
50. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 75.
51. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 76.
52. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 77.
53. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 98.
54. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 138.
55. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 153 –54.
56. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 149.
57. Ella Cara Deloria, Dakota Texts, (Freeman sd: University of South Dakota Press,
1992), ix.
58. James and Halsey, 313.

202 Hoefel: Deloria, Hurston, and Boas Contend with Race and Ethnicity