A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson Lisa J. M. Poirier (bio) A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson University of Oklahoma Press, 2018 A WHIRLWIND PASSED THROUGH OUR COUNTRY is a thoroughly contextualized and annotated collection documenting a broad spectrum of Lakota perspectives on the Ghost Dance of 1890. It is not merely an updated treatment of the documents in the Eugene Beuchel Manuscript Collection at Marquette University. Rather, Andersson has meticulously assembled and retranslated all available printed sources that contain Lakota (and Lakota-adjacent) views regarding the Ghost Dance of 1890. Rani-Henrik Andersson has buttressed the Beuchel collection with documents from several other archival and newspaper sources, including, perhaps most impressively, his translations of accounts from Iapi Oaye, the Dakota-language Presbyterian missionary newspaper. With the publication of this book, the complexity and multiplicity of Lakota positions regarding the Ghost Dance Movement of 1890 has been made abundantly clear and widely accessible. Rani-Henrik Andersson's linguistic, cultural, and historical expertise is evident in his fresh translation, careful contextualization, and thorough annotation of dozens of Lakota accounts of the origin, transmission, performance, significance, and future of the Ghost Dance. Andersson has arranged the collection into four sections that represent and illustrate the spectrum of Lakota attitudes toward and relationships with the Ghost Dance. In the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, settlers and scholars categorized Lakota positions on the Ghost Dance as either "progressive" (Christian and opposed to the Ghost Dance) or "non-progressive" (traditionalist and supportive of the Ghost Dance). Andersson's quadripartite division of these texts takes an important step in disrupting this binary system of classification. The first section of the book is filled with accounts from enthusiastic Lakota practitioners of the Ghost Dance, described by Andersson as "true believers." The second part includes the views of some Lakota people who were initially practitioners but later ended their participation, as well as statements by sympathetic nonpractitioners (like Red Cloud and Sitting Bull), accounts from Lakota men involved in the arrest and murder of Sitting [End Page 190] Bull (which provide context for the volatility of the time), and finally, the perspectives of vocal opponents of the Ghost Dance (like American Horse and Young Man Afraid of His Horses). The third part of the collection contains documents conveying the thoughts of outsiders who were still close observers of the ritual, including, notably, not just George Sword and William T. Selwyn but also several settlers married to Lakota women and several men of mixed French-Canadian and Native (Lakota, Omaha, or Santee) heritage. These outsider accounts add a great deal to the richness of Part 3. The final part of the collection presents the perspectives of Lakota (and Santee) Christians with Euro-American educational backgrounds, including Charles Eastman and Luther Standing Bear, as well as the Christian perspectives published in Iapi Oaye. The book admirably succeeds in illustrating that there was no unified "Lakota perspective" on the Ghost Dance of 1890. Clearly, there was a multiplicity of perspectives. Andersson accomplishes his goal of complicating the old "progressive" versus "non-progressive" taxonomy. His collection reflects a series of well-taken choices; the decision to include all of the Short Bull material exemplifies Andersson's dedication to representing nuance, specificity, and change over time. In addition, Andersson's excellent introduction includes a detailed contextualization of the Ghost Dance of 1890, including environmental context of the sort that anchors Louis Warren's God's Red Son. The footnotes are filled with substantive annotations and observations. There is still some room for critique, however. For instance, as a scholar of religion, I would have liked to see some interrogation of the use of the terms "religion" and "new religious movement" to characterize this distinctive set of ritual innovations on the northern plains at the turn of the twentieth century. I also would have appreciated a more critical engagement with the meaning and the effects of using the terms "belief" and "practice" here, especially as these terms reflect and replicate a European Christian taxonomy. While I acknowledge that...