Beautiful Day’s Waterlily

November 20, 2010 at 9:58 pm (culture, education, entertainment, environment, ethics, fiction, history, Indigenous People, Lakota, life, literary fiction, Native Americans, random, religion, Uncategorized, Writing)
Tags: Beautiful Day, books, culture, Deloria, education, Ella Cara Deloria, ethics, family, grief, history, Indigenous, Issues, Lakota, Native American Heritage Month, Native Americans, people, Sioux, Voices from the Gaps, Waterlily, women, Writing

Clicking on Beautiful Day’s image will take you to Voices from the Gaps and more information about Ella Cara Deloria and others.

 It’s Native American Heritage Month and today’s highlight is the incredible Ella Cara Deloria’s work Waterlily which is a fictional presentation of years of her field research regading women in Lakota, Dakota and Nakota culture pre-white contact. In an effort to make her information accessible to the general reading white public, Ella ‘packaged’ her first hand research of tradional Sioux culture in a novel. Deloria wanted to enhance understanding of Sioux culture, values and history for white audiences while perserving a record of this cultural information. Waterlily is the only such work of its kind–it’s about Sioux women, written by an educated  Sioux woman based on the sharing of direct knowledge by women who lived the traditional ways. “It was a way of life that worked.” Deloria, Speaking of Indians.  If you’re interested in taking a journey through a different way of living during a very different time, Ella offers such an adventure.