34 pages • 1 hour read
Ella Cara DeloriaWaterlily
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1988A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Chapter 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Introduction Summary
In the Introduction, Susan Gardner gives an overview of the life of the author Ella Cara Deloria. She was an accomplished ethnographer who specialized in the Native American Sioux, composed of the Dakota, Lakota, and Nakota tribes. Deloria herself was of Native American heritage, and she came from “one of the best-known Native American Indian intellectual families” (vii).At the time she wrote Waterlily, Deloria also worked on Speaking of Indians and a still unpublished ethnography of the Lakotas (vi). Deloria gathered information for these manuscripts over the course of 10 years, from 1927 to 1937, and was funded by Columbia University’s Committee on Research in Native American Languages. It was difficult for Deloria to compose all three books because “the genres and audiences available to her were culturally inappropriate for what she was trying to accomplish” (vii).
Deloria was ill-paid and unrecognized for her scholarship during her lifetime, and most of her work is “unknown, unpublished, and unanalyzed” (viii). She has since gained recognition and is “revered by Sioux scholars” (ix)and academics. Though Deloria wrote Waterlily in 1947, it was not published until 1988, and it was half the length of the original. Since her death, a body of criticism and intellectual history by American Indians has come into being, and her work is now situated among this new material.
Chapter 1 Summary
Chapter 1 describes the process of a group, or camp circle, of Dakota Native Americans moving from one camp site to the next. A camp circle, also called atiyospaye, is composed of several families who all live together as a community. The group moves in a line, with the four magistrates taking the lead. Able-bodied men are on “scout duty” (4)and travel behind and ahead of the line.
Eighteen-year-old Blue Bird is pregnant, and she silently leaves the line to give birth down by a river. She names her daughter Waterlily because she resembles the flower. Blue Bird rejoins the line and her “social cousin” (6)notices her with the baby and takes care of her. The camp circle finds a new site, and Blue Bird stays in her cousin’s tipi. News of the birth reaches Blue Bird’s mother-in-law. This is an adoptive camp circle for Blue Bird, and her only blood relative is her grandmother, who is later called Killed-by-Tree in the novel due to the circumstances of her death.
Chapter 2 Summary
When Blue Bird is 14, she and her family leave their original camp circle, White Ghost, in order to replenish their supply of meat. She and Killed-by-Tree leave the others to harvest beans. Upon their return, the temporary camp site has been destroyed by “enemy war camp” (10).Blue Bird’s two brothers lie dead, and her parents are presumed captured or killed.
Blue Bird and Killed-by-Tree flee and find another camp circle, where they are taken in and “equipped to start a new life” (11). They join this new camp circle but are considered “humbler folk” (12)since they have no male relatives to give them status.
Blue Bird elopes with Star Elk, and her grandmother disapproves due to his bad reputation. Star Elk brings Blue Bird home to his family, and the marriage is then considered valid. Blue Bird becomes pregnant with her first child.
Blue Bird, now 18, has been in this new circle for four years but is unhappy because she is separated from her “own people” (8)in White Ghost. She longs to go back to her family and wonders whether her parents still might be alive.
Chapter 3 Summary
Star Elk grows “more and more ill-tempered each day of his married life” (15)because he is jealous over his wife. He accuses her of encouraging other men and suggests the child is not his own. He “pouts” (15)after Waterlily is born and delays seeing her.
Star Elk decides to “throw [Blue Bird] away publicly” (15). He grabs a stick during a victory dance and announces that anyone may take Blue Bird since he is done with the marriage. He leaves camp shortly after, as this is a dishonorable action for a man to perform.
Waterlily becomes ill, and Blue Bird thinks she is dying. She makes an altar of a rock and prays for Waterlily to live. She hears “Hao” (18), meaning approval or consent. Waterlily gets better, and Blue Bird is happy. Blue Bird receives word from White Ghost, and they come for her and Killed-by-Tree.
Chapter 4 Summary
Blue Bird and Grandmother are welcomed back into White Ghost. They are allied with a larger family, now headed by Black Eagle, Blue Bird’s cousin.
One day, Blue Bird leaves Waterlily in a makeshift playpen, but she escapes and starts chewing on charcoal. A small boy named Little Chief distracts her and gets her to spit out the charcoal, and the two become friends. Blue Bird makes Little Chief moccasins, and his grandmother, Gloku, reciprocates by giving Waterlily a white mare. Gloku mentions her son, Rainbow, who is a “rover” (26), meaning he moves about from place to place.
Killed-by-Tree grows increasingly more feeble and is “struck down dead by a branch that gave way in the high wind” (28). She is laid out in a tipi, and the women in the camp circle come to wail over her. Her body is then covered in a buffalo hide and hoisted up onto a high platform along with some of her possessions. Rainbow attends the ceremony, and he approaches Blue Bird afterwards to propose marriage. She asks to go hunting with him, and this signals her assent to marry him.
Introduction-Chapter 4 Analysis
These chapters introduce the reader to the power dynamics and social customs of Dakotas kinship, which are reliant on a repressive paradigm. Silence and repression of women becomes a central theme of the novel. Enforced silence is apparent from the very first scene. When Blue Bird is about to give birth, she cannot speak of it directly with her mother-in-law: “The respect customary between two persons in their relationship made them hesitate to discuss freely the cause of their mutual anxiety” (4). Thus, they cannot name the issue, but instead must repress it. When Blue Bird gives birth, she cannot cry out. She remembers the advice: “If one is old enough to bear a child, one is old enough to endure in silence” (5). Here, maturity and respect are equated with silence and repression of emotion.
Women are naturally of lower social standing than men within tribes. When Blue Bird and Killed-by-Tree enter the new camp circle, they are automatically of lower status because they have no male relatives. Here, maleness is a marker of importance within the hierarchy. Furthermore, a man has the power to break off a marriage by announcing it in public, and women have no choice but to obey and be cast off. Effectively, they do not possess rights within the marriage.
Through these customs, Blue Birdemerges as a main character and exemplar of these paradigms within Dakota culture. She endures significant hardship. As a Dakota woman, she naturally has less sway than does a male. She is also disenfranchised—after her family is killed, she becomes separated from her camp circle and is brought into another one. Despite their welcome, Blue Bird is unhappy because she “yearns for her own people” (8). Her husband also treats her poorly and subsequently publicly divorces her. She has no recourse—his word is law, and she has to obey.
However, she begins to gain some happiness and some agency with the birth of her daughter, Waterlily. For the first time since her family’s death, she experiences true happiness. She feels a closeness that had been lacking. In her second marriage, she sees characteristics of Rainbow that were not present in her first husband. He is industrious and does not play games. She makes a more informed, mature choice of a new mate.
