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| Format: | Recurso educativo Open Access |
| Language: | en |
| Published: |
2003
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ841792 |
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Table of Contents:
- "Though It Broke My Heart to Cut Some Bits I Fancied": Ella Deloria's Original Design for "Waterlily" Gardner, Susan American Indian History Autobiographies American Indian Culture American Indian Literature American Indian Studies Literary Devices Literary Criticism Didacticism Rhetorical Invention The focus of this article is Ella Deloria's novel "Waterlily." The history of its composition fascinated and frustrated the author of this article from the moment she read it in 1992, en route to a summer cultural studies institute at Oglala Lakota College. Later, at a documentary workshop on American Indian autobiography at the D'Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian History at the Newberry Library, its convenor, Dr. Kathryn Shanley (Nakota), noted that the published "Waterlily" is truncated. Why, this author wondered? By whom? Was it Bowdlerized? Censored? Insensitively or incompetently edited? Was there still an original manuscript? The author's purpose in this article is to demonstrate who Deloria's sources were and what they contributed; stylistic hoops in English she had to jump through; and considerations that led Deloria and her editors to censor "Waterlily." In light of the textual history the author has reconstituted in this article, she sees "Waterlily" as much more than the story of a young woman's life before her culture's military conquest. Rather, the author has tried to contribute to a criticism Paula Gunn Allen defines as imperative for understanding the work of those "who are seen as borderline writers,... Indians and other "marginalized peoples": attending to the actual texts being created, their source, their source texts, the texts to which they stand in relation, and the otherness that they both embody and delineate." "Waterlily's" final form, while an accommodation, is not a surrender. Editing could obscure, but not erase, its oral communal origins, its "sub-text." Like every member of her distinguished family, Ella Deloria sought, under adverse circumstances to build the new upon the old, without fetishizing or fossilizing the latter. (Contains 72 notes.)