Medicine Bundle: Indian Sacred Performance and American Literature, 1824-1932. By Joshua David Bellin. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 264 pp. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4034-4.)

Abstract

Medicine bundles often include herbs, claws, feathers, pipes, or carvings, but, as Joshua David Bellin points out, the medicine is not in the objects alone; it is also in the ceremonies and lore associated with them. He quotes ethnographers who learned of the “prescribed rules of behavior when in the presence of a bundle” and of how “the performance of and acquaintance with the secret rites differed somewhat between bundles” (p. 68). This intriguing book examines intercultural performers of the sacred in nineteenth-century America. Catherine Brown, a Cherokee convert to Christianity, performed her exemplary piety in an 1824 memoir published by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. George Catlin, an artist, ethnographer, and relentless self-promoter, painted images of the Mandan okipa, a dance that, as he was at pains to point out, was the most sacred and secret of all the tribe's mysteries. The Sioux autobiographer Luther Standing Bear danced the Ghost Dance that inspired the 1890 Wounded Knee rebellion and then later repeated, or travestied, the dance in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West show.