New Angles of Vision on the Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement of 1811-1812

Abstract

The Cherokee ghost dance movement of 1811-1812 got its name from James Mooney in 1891 but has been known to historians since the first account was published by Thomas L. McKenney in 1838. Recently a number of important works have generated new insights into ghost dance religions, cargo cults, millenarian movements, and nativist revivals. They suggest the need to re-examine the Cherokee phenomenon. I have tried to assemble here all the primary accounts and to re-assess them in the light of these recent studies, particularly those by A. F. C. Wallace, Peter Worsley and Kenelm Burridge. Although the evidence is still fragmentary, it casts serious doubts on the claim that there was a direct link between the Cherokee movement and the ghost dance religion among the Creek. Not only did the Cherokee movement precede that among the Creek, but it remained passivist in tone where the Creek movement was militantly activist. Re-examination of the evidence also questions McKenney's account of a single prophet who inaugurated and directed the movement. By following McKenney and conflating a variety of prophets, prophecies and events, historians and ethnographers have given the ghost dance a coherence and consistency it did not have. Furthermore, previous accounts have, in my opinion, dismissed the movement rather too easily on the basis of its more extreme manifestations and mistakenly attributed its demise to the failure of some of the more extravagant predictions to materialize. Far from being a trivial incident, the Cherokee ghost dances marked a critical turning point in Cherokee history. The standard versions of the Cherokee ghost dance movement derive essentially from the account given to McKenney by the Cherokee chief, The Ridge, in the 1830s, and the account given to Mooney by the Cherokee, James Wafford, in 1891.1 They can be summarized as follows: In