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intellectual families” (vii).At the time she wrote Waterlily, Deloria also worked on Speaking of Indians and a still unpublished ethnography of the Lakotas (vi).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Deloria was ill-paid and unrecognized for her scholarship during her lifetime, and most of her work is “unknown, unpublished, and unanalyzed” (viii).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.