Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century

Anthropologists believed that the Indigenous peoples of North America had been stripped of their cultural identity through their contact with Euro-American colonizers. American culture at large had adopted a new perspective on them as well: Now that Indigenous communities had been “tamed,” eradicated, or subdued and no longer posed a threat to the Western way of life, they were romanticized, mythologized, and took on almost mythical proportions.

Ella Cara Deloria brought more realistic insights to studies of Indigenous groups. Born in Yankton, South Dakota, Deloria was raised on Standing Rock Reservation. Originally a research assistant at the Teacher’s College at Columbia, Deloria returned to New York to assist Boas with a specific project: evaluating a body of publications claiming to represent Indigenous culture, specifically the work of reservation doctor James R. Walker. Deloria split her time between studying in New York and researching in the field, i.e., on reservations, where she collected data and compared her findings to Walker’s.

She faced immediate pushback when she found that Walker was not only incorrect in many of his depictions of Indigenous people, but he had fabricated much of what he claimed to have observed. Instead of accepting her findings as valid, Boas challenged Deloria’s thoroughness of research.