Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century. By Gregory E. Smoak. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. xii, 289 pp. Cloth, $44.95, ISBN 978-0-24658-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25627-9.)

Abstract

The story of the Ghost Dance of 1890 is usually related along familiar lines: A Paiute prophet's millenarian teachings roar out of the Great Basin and tear across the Great Plains like a wildfire, igniting the hopes of Indians who yearn for the whites' disappearance, restoration of vanished buffalo herds, and reunion with the shades of departed friends and relations. But a series of catastrophes—including the murder of the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and the slaughter at Wounded Knee—smother the Ghost Dance's soaring promise of cultural rebirth and blunt the seductive appeal of placing faith in the redemptive powers of supernatural forces. In the end, the enthusiasm of the Ghost Dancers dies, and they sink back, defeated, dejected, and demoralized. Perceived thusly, the Ghost Dance is a grandly sweeping metaphor for the destruction of huge blocks of American Indian culture, one that dovetailed nicely with late nineteenth-century perceptions of the vanishing American. Yet that panoramic view ignores important details, discrete components, and elusive dynamics that allow for something more nuanced than that trope, as Gregory E. Smoak, an assistant professor at Colorado State University, makes clear in this provocative volume.