[3] Deloria is an enrolled citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe,[4] and the son of Barbara and Vine Deloria Jr. His father was a scholar, writer, and activist for Native American rights who earned national recognition for his 1969 book, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.
[12] Deloria was the associate dean of undergraduate education in the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor's College of Literature Science and the Arts and was the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor.
[13] In 2018 he was made the first tenured professor of Native American history at Harvard University.
Indians in Unexpected Places received the John C. Ewers Prize for Ethnohistorical Writing in 2006 from the Western History Association.
[19] Deloria's third book, Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019), works through the ways in which the artwork produced by his great-aunt Mary Sully interacts with the larger art historical cannon of Modernism.
Deloria additionally produced, directed, and edited PBS program Eyanopapi: Heart of the Sioux.