Until the 1988 publication of her posthumous novel, Waterlily, Ella C. Deloria's reputation rested on her achievements in linguistics and ethnology. Few readers realized the literary talents that had produced the little-known collection of traditional stories titled Dakota Texts (1932), because most assumed that Deloria simply transcribed and translated tales that elderly Sioux people had agreed to tell her. These narrators, distrustful of non-Indian anthropologists, spoke freely to Deloria because she needed no interpreter and listened respectfully as a relative, without such inhibiting paraphernalia as a recorder or a notepad. Like generations of Indian storytellers before her, Deloria absorbed the spirit and feeling of the stories; but, unlike those earlier storytellers, she retold them in writing -- first in Lakota, then in English. Essentially, however, she transmitted the stories as they had always been passed down, renewing them in her own words rather than duplicating a prior performance. Her adaptation...