Dakota -- Fiction, Dakota, Indigenous authors, Fiction 

"Written nearly a half century ago but published now for the first time, Waterlily is a novel of the Dakotas, or Sioux. Its author, Ella Cara Deloria, herself a Sioux and an accomplished ethnologists, sought to record and preserve traditional Sioux ways through this imaginative re-creation of life in the camp circle. It is of special value because it is told from a woman's perspective, one that is much less well known than the warrior's or holy man's. More fully and compellingly than any ethnological report, and with equal authority, it reveals the intricate system of relatedness, obligation, and respect that governed the world of all Dakotas as it takes the protagonist, Waterlily, through the everyday and the extraordinary events of a Sioux woman's experience.

The time is before the advent of white settlement of the western plains; the place, beyond the Missouri in the northwestern reaches of the Sioux country. The story is charged with universal human interest, set firmly in the matrix of Sioux cultural practices and understandings. The twists and turns of the plot, as the readers are guided into the mental as well as the historical world of the nineteenth-century Sioux, are as fascinating as the true-life autobiographies that Deloria recorded from living people.

Whether read as a valuable addition to women's literature, as a unique ethnographic contribution in the Boasian tradition, or simply as an absorbing tale, Waterlily superbly fulfills Deloria's aim of explaining the old Sioux ways to a wide audience."--Book jacket. 

xii, 244 pages ; 23 cm.