Piety, Pageantry and Politics on the Northern Great Plains: An American Indian Woman Restages Her People's Conquest During the Era of Assimilation (1879-1934) (Travel Narrative‪)‬

Abstract A study of the early career of Dakota Sioux scholar Ella Cara Deloria (1889-1971). Better known male figures in her family, forced to relinquish their traditional leadership roles, strategically extended these by converting to Christianity during the nineteenth century US federal policies of allotment of lands and assimilation. Deloria's first opportunities for professional leadership took place under the auspices of the YWCA and the Episcopalian diocese of South Dakota. This paper argues that, despite paternalistic surveillance, and by surreptitiously adapting contemporary American community historical pageantry to their own agenda, Ella Deloria and the Dakota actors she directed encoded resistance to the church's "official story" of their conversion and salvation.