Ghost Dance Religion Research Articles

All Guns Fired at One Time": Native Voices of Wounded Knee, 1890 ed. by Jerome A. Greene (review)

Reviewed by: All Guns Fired at One Time": Native Voices of Wounded Knee, 1890 ed. by Jerome A. Greene Rani-Henrik Andersson "All Guns Fired at One Time": Native Voices of Wounded Knee, 1890. Compiled and edited by Jerome A. Greene. Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2020. 360 pp. Illustrations, map, appendix, index. $34.95 cloth. The Ghost Dance and the ensuing Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 continues to interest scholars and the general public alike. In fact, only recently were the Oglala Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux able to convert a considerable portion of the massacre site back to tribal ownership, a major development in the efforts to protect this sacred site. The past decade or so has seen a plethora of new studies of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee tragedy, including my own Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (University of Nebraska Press, 2008) and A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance as well as Louis Warren's God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017) and Justin Gage's We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2019). Jerome Greene published an extensive study of the massacre entitled American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014) only a few years ago. His new book, "All Guns Fired at One Time": Native Voices of Wounded Knee, 1890, continues from where his previous work ended by publishing Lakota accounts of the Wounded Knee massacre in full. As I started reading the book, I immediately thought that this may be based on the materials he collected for his previous work. Indeed, that was the case, as he also indicated in the introduction. There's nothing wrong with that; on the contrary, publishing these materials that could not fully be utilized in his previous work is a genuine contribution to the field. Greene demonstrates his deep knowledge of the sources that he has mined from often random archives and collections. In A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country, I published more than one hundred Lakota accounts of the Ghost Dance, and some of them included accounts of the Wounded Knee massacre. However, I decided to leave accounts discussing only the massacre out of my work. Greene's work thus nicely compliments my work, and together these collections provide other scholars and the general public a comprehensive body of materials conveying Lakota perspectives of this tragic period. "All Guns Fired at One Time" includes several accounts such as Black Elk's or Dewey Beard's that have been published in other collections, for example, James H. McGregor's The Wounded Knee Massacre from the Viewpoint of the Sioux (Wirth Brothers, 1940) or Raymond J. DeMallie's The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (University of Nebraska Press, 1985) and in other more recent works. Still, many of the documents presented here have never been published in full, and some have never been used before. Thus, it is a great accomplishment to have all these Lakota accounts in one collection. However, the general reader might find this book somewhat repetitive and even difficult to read. The documents have been published without much context. To make this book easier to read, the text could have been divided into chapters, for example, by the date when the interview was taken down: immediately after the massacre, later in Washington, or even later by anthropologists, and so on. Even though I am familiar with many of these documents, events, and people delivering them, it would [End Page 106] have been helpful to have more context, maybe a few footnotes explaining key events and key people. I'm left to wonder what a reader who is not familiar with this topic will get out of this book. It serves especially fellow scholars interested in the Ghost Dance or Wounded Knee and, importantly, Lakota communities that still struggle with this difficult past. The main contribution of "All Guns Fired at One Time" is that it introduces these firsthand Lakota accounts to a new...

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

Theorizing the Demise of Greek and Roman Religions

Abstract Analyzing the demise of religions is rendered considerably more difficult when lack of sufficient evidence causes gaps in historical understanding of the progressions of religions from being clearly alive to apparently no longer existing – an acute problem with regard to most Greek and Roman religions. Drawing on the Ghost Dance religion as a parallel case and presenting by way of example considerations regarding emperor Julian’s attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem temple, this article explores the common challenges of dearth of evidence, the need to argue from silence, and a ‘religion’ as category prone to (at least) the complication of transmutation.

Louis S. Warren. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America.

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 is one of the best-known events in American history. It is an internationally recognized symbol of the violence of settler colonialism and of indigenous resistance to oppression. The massacre has long been a staple in textbooks and in classroom lectures as the last gasp of Native American military resistance to the United States. Historians and anthropologists have spilled more ink on the massacre than on nearly any other event in the history of the North American West. Although each of the works on the massacre includes a discussion of the Ghost Dance, the indigenous religion that precipitated the massacre, rarely has that movement in and of itself been taken as an object of scholarly inquiry. Louis S. Warren’s new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, demonstrates that the Ghost Dance readily rewards close scrutiny, and that when properly understood, it has implications that illuminate not only western but also American and global histories. Warren has previously shown how to take a well-worn western subject—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—and transform it into a lens through which to understand a broader American story. Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005) won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History and the Western History Association’s Caughey Prize for the Best Book in Western History.

Collaborative and Non-Collaborative Exhibits: James Mooney and Displaying Kiowa Culture

Collaborative and Non-Collaborative ExhibitsJames Mooney and Displaying Kiowa Culture Nancy J. Parezo (bio) American anthropology was grounded in museums. This fact makes museums productive sites for examining disciplinary history and its changing practices, including collaborative endeavors with indigenous people. With world’s fairs, museums provided venues in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries where foundational anthropologists invited visitors to think about native peoples as the primitive before of humanity’s collective past compared to their own enlightened civilization and future. Museologists generally used this evolutionary dichotomy without consulting the peoples being depicted because individual cultures did not particularly matter in this framework. A racialized sociocultural classification combined with a developmental-cultural-technological typology that supposedly explained regimented evolutionary processes was critical. Collaborations were irrelevant, for indigenous perspectives would muddy the simplicity of the theoretical narrative. Some anthropologists thought individual cultures and what indigenous peoples had to say mattered, however. They used exhibition venues to challenge the evolutionary model by displaying the stories (not the universalized abstract narrative) of North American peoples, thereby conveying a differentiated understanding of particular cultures or tribes, social groups that today are called Native or First Nations. This shift would eventually replace the homogeneous representation of “the primitive before” with ethnographic displays of distinctive indigenous people as unique parts of humanity’s present, not simply as survivals of humankind’s past. Moving toward more culturally specific [End Page 72] Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Model of exhibit types in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century ethnology approaches, curators eliminated the superficial functional analogies at the core of developmental stages and substituted a depiction of regional difference based on variables such as environment, natural resources, climate, language, and cultural adaptation or choice (culture areas). Emphasis on regional distinctiveness added place as an explanation for variation. But displays were still comparative, based on categorization strategies the curator conceptualized, providing little information based on indigenous perspectives. Soon an interest in variation within the culture area and in cultural particularism for its own sake led to ethnographic exhibits based on a melding of indigenous knowledge with anthropological theories and description conventions. This [End Page 73] approach could be a historical, depicting the cultural present, the actual present, or a particular time. Ethnohistory and inclusion of indigenous memory culture added the dimension of time. Table 1 reflects my model of exhibit types during this period. While comparative displays could be undertaken without indigenous approval, negotiation, or involvement (except for ensuring that an object came from or was used by a specific culture), the quest for scientific accuracy and truthfulness meant that ethnographic approaches required collaboration with the source community during the exhibition preparation process and ideally through all stages of implementation. This did not often happen. When contextualizing history was added to the variables displayed, collaboration with the source community became essential but was rarely talked about in exhibition labels. There was no way for visitors to recognize collaborative efforts (Krmpotich and Anderson 2005). One individual who utilized community collaboration, consultation with the proper keepers of pertinent knowledge, and followed culturally appropriate information-seeking protocols was James Mooney (1861–1921), an ethnologist with the Bureau of American Ethnology from 1885 to 1921.1 During his career Mooney used a mixed methodology in extensive multi-year fieldwork settings to produce ethnographies, specialized topical reports on a wide range of subjects, and documentary and indigenous histories. He studied the historical events and developments that had affected colonized societies, both for those forced onto reservations (Kiowa) and those who refused deportation (Eastern Cherokee). During his productive career Mooney pioneered many methodologies that are considered essential for ethical ethno-graphic and ethnohistorical research today (see Moses 1984). In addition, a desire for justice in colonial situations undergirded his political activism (fights for religious freedom and federal recognition). A proponent of an engaged anthropology that helped communities and individuals, Mooney tried to explain Indian worldviews and behaviors to Congress, Indian Service personnel, and the American people. His most famous works were the Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), Myths of the Cherokee (1900), and Calendar History of the Kiowa (1898), “an autobiographic history of an...

“Contagious Emotions” and the Ghost Dance Religion: Mooney’s Science, Black Elk’s Fever

This essay explores the nature and consequences of James Mooney’s literal pathologization of Native American religious belief in The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 . I first situate Mooney’s fusion of Dance and disease within late nineteenth-century discourses of positivist science and closed subjectivity. I then briefly consider Nicholas Black Elk’s famous narrative of his own Great Vision, which offers an alternative, non-pathological perspective on Native religion and the idea that openness, connectedness, and vulnerability are constitutive of life. However, unlike many popular representations of American Indian spirituality, this vision authorizes neither a self-serving mysticism nor an easy holism; as in much recent philosophical and scientific work on extended networks of being, it instead pictures an uncertain, often fearful process in which susceptibility to the “outside” is both the condition of our existence and the becoming of our end.

Getting into the Game: Anthropological Perspectives on Sport: Introduction

Keywords: sports, games, play, body, performance, aestheticsConceptual walls that once cloistered scholars from even contemplating that games and sports might be legitimate and significant matters for intellectual inquiry have in recent years been intrepidly scaled. Political scientists, sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, historians, geographers, economists and philosophers have mounted inquiries into sundry aspects of sport participation and spectatorship, past and present. Anthropologists too have been tempted to rethink their disciplinary habit of steering clear of the study of games and sports and to speculate concerning the intellectual challenges that may be embraced within previously forbidden fields of play. Ethnographers who venture into arenas of sport may risk incurring larger or smaller measures of professional indifference or prejudice, but they also tend to return with vivid accounts and intriguing theoretical insights.Sources of the lingering anthropological reluctance to afford games and sports serious and sustained attention have been probed in various writings (e.g., Archetti, 1998; Bourdieu, 1990; Dyck, 2000b) and are subjected to further critical analysis by King in this issue. What also needs to be noted here is the ethnographic breadth and analytical depth of a nascent and pulsing anthropological literature on sport. In fact, ethnographic fieldworkers have been intermittently reporting the popularity of games and sports of many types since the founding of the discipline in the 19th century. James Mooney published an article on the Cherokee ball game (1890) in the same year that he conducted research into the Ghost Dance religion. Shortly after this came Culin's (1907) comprehensive study of the morphology and religious significance of the games of North American Indians. Additional accounts of the traditional games and athletic contests of the Americas have been issued in the last two decades (Nabokov, 1987; Oxendine, 1988; Scarborough and Wilcox, 1991; Veenum, 1994). At various times eminent anthropologists have matter of factly identified sport practices as salient features of their investigations (i.e., Appadurai, 1995; Firth 1931; Fox 1961; Geertz 1972; Gluckman and Guckman, 1977; MacAloon, 1981). Paradoxically, although several generations of undergraduate anthropology students were introduced to the filmed intricacies of Trobriand cricket while their teachers puzzled over the implications of the Balinese cock fight, the notion that games and sports might comprise appropriate objects of systematic and comparative anthropological investigation tended to be smothered by a preference for exoticism.Since the 1980s, however, a set of finely crafted anthropological monographs that explicitly target the study of specific sports in particular settings has appeared. It includes works on masculinity, ideology and wrestling in India (Alter, 1992), sports in the moral order of the Peoples' Republic of China (Brownell, 1995), baseball on the border between Mexico and Texas (Klein, 1997) and of football (i.e., soccer) cultures worldwide (Archetti, 1999; Armstrong and Giulianotti, 1997; Armstrong, 1998). These and other ethnographies have been supplemented by a revised introductory text (Blanchard, 1995) and edited volumes that examine a broad range of fieldwork settings and theoretical concerns pertinent to the anthropology of sport (Dyck, 2000a; MacClancy, 1996; Sands, 1999). In conjunction with these developments a distinctively anthropological literature on children's involvement in sport has materialized (Anderson, 2001, 2003; Beyer Broch, 2003; Dyck, 1995, 2000c, 2000d, 2003; Lithman, 2000; Weiss, 2000). The anthropology of sport now boasts a small but rapidly growing literature that suffices to demonstrate the potential of both what the study of sport has to offer to anthropology and what, in turn, anthropology can reveal about sport as a facet of social life.What await anthropologists who choose to look into the sporting pastimes so enthusiastically partaken of by people within our fieldwork locales are familiar components of ethnographic inquiry. …

The Dream of the Millennium

The Dream of the Millennium

Dancing ghosts: Native American and Christian syncretism in Mary Austin's work

How did an Illinois Methodist homesteader in West come to create one of most significant cosmological syntheses in American literature? In this study, Hoyer draws on his own knowledge of biblical religion and Native American cultures to explore Austin's creation of mythology of American continent she so valued. Austin lived in and wrote about the land of little rain, semiarid and arid parts of California and Nevada that were home to Northern Paiute, Shoshone, Interior Chumash, and Yokut peoples. Hoyer makes new and provocative connections between Austin and spiritual figures like Wovoka, prophet of Ghost Dance religion, and writers like Zitkala-sa and Mourning Dove, and he provides a particularly fine reading of Cogowea.

Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context

The Ghost Dance, which led to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, was a widespread Native American religious movement. Judith Vander's path-breaking Ghost Dance Religion demonstrates that it was not a single religion, but had two branches - the Great Basin branch, a nature religion typified by Shoshone Ghost Dance songs (Naraya), and the Plains branch documented by famed anthropologist James Mooney in 1896. Based on extensive fieldwork with two Shoshone women in Wyoming, Vander's work presents 130 Naraya songs, the largest collection of new Ghost Dance material since Mooney's publication. She thoroughly analyzes the poetic texts, rich imagery, and musical style, demonstrating their high artistic achievement. Connecting the Shoshone Ghost Dance to the ancient religious traditions of the Great Basin, Vander provides the cultural background for understanding the intent of the religion and its songs.

Ethnography, Reform, and the Problem of the Real: James Mooney's Ghost-Dance Religion

The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The father says so, the father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming. The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The Crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so. -Sioux Ghost Dance song as transcribed and translated by James Mooney in The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896).

Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context

Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context

Corbett Mack: The Life of a Northern Paiute

This is the compelling yet disturbing story of Corbett Mack (1892-1974), an opiate addict who was a member of the Nuumuu (Numa), or Northern Paiute. The Northern Paiute are best known as the people who produced Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet whose revitalistic teachings swept the Indian world in the 1890s. Mack is from the generation following the collapse of the Ghost Dance religion, a generation of Nomogweta or 'half-breeds' (also called 'stolen children') - Paiute of mixed ancestry who were raised in an increasingly bicultural world and who fell into virtual peonage to white (often Italian) potato farmers.Around the turn of the century, the use of opium became widespread among the Paiute, adopted from equally victimized Chinese laborers with whom they worked closely in the fields. The story of Corbett Mack is an uncompromising account of a harsh and sometimes traumatic life that was typical of an entire generation of Paiute. It was a life born out of the turmoil and humiliation of an Indian boarding school, troubled by opiate addiction, bound to constant labor in the fields, yet nonetheless made meaningful through the perseverance of Paiute cultural traditions. Michael Hittman is chairman of the Anthropology and Sociology Department and a professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn. He is the author of Wovoka and the Ghost Dance: Sourcebook and A Numa History: The Yerington Paiute Tribe.

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature

Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature Editor: Thomas Austenfeld, Drury College Assistant Bibliographers: Robert Brophy, California State University; Kate Boyes, Jane Reilly, and Tom Lyon, Utah State University; Michael Hobbs and Giuli Coniglio, Northwest Missouri State University; Joel Martineau, University of British Columbia; Linda Ross, Sheridan College; Joe Wydeven, Bellevue College; Michael Kowalewski, Carleton College; Don Barclay, University of Houston. PLEASE NOTE: Authors of books and articles are encouraged to notify Thomas Austenfeld (Drury College; 900 N. Benton Avenue; Springfield, MO 65802) of items for inclusion in the 1997 bibliography. Abbey, Edward. Cahalan, James M. “Edward Abbey, Appalachian Easterner.” Western American Literature 31.3 (1996): 233-53. Knott, John R. “Edward Abbey and the Romance of Wilderness.” Western American Literature 30.4 (1996): 331-51. Metting, Fred. “Edward Abbey’s Unique Road.” South Dakota Review 34.1 (1996): 85-102. Payne, Daniel G. “Monkey Wrenching, Environmental Extremism, and the Problematical Edward Abbey.” Southwestern American Literature 21.1 (1995): 195-208. Wild, Peter. “Sentimentalism in the American Southwest: John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin, and Edward Abbey.” Kowalewski, Michael (ed.). Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 127-43. Alexie, Sherman. Gillan, Jennifer. “Reservation Home Movies: Sherman Alexie’s Poetry.” American Literature 68.1 (1996): 91-110. 322 Western American Literature Allen, Paula Gunn. Ferrell, Tracy J. Prince. “Transformation, Myth, and Ritual in Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the Light.” North Dakota Quarterly 63.1 (1996): 77-88. Asian-American / Asian-Canadian. Beauregard, Guy. “Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and the Politics of Writing Diaspora.” West Coast Line 29.3 (1995-96): 47-62. Berson, Misha. “Fighting the Religion of the Present: Western Motifs in the First Wave of Asian American Plays.” Kowalewski, Michael (ed.). Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 251-72. Chao, Lien. “Anthologizing the Collective: The Epic Struggles to Establish Chinese Canadian Literatures in English.” Essays on Canadian Writing 57 (1995): 145-70. Georgelos, Peter. “Deterritorialization in Evelyn Lau’s Runaway.” Open Letter 9.4 (1995): 15-31. Hesford, Walter. “Thousand Pieces of Gold'. Competing Fictions in the Representation of Chinese-American Experience.” Western American Literature 31.1 (1996): 49-62. Kanefsky, Rachelle. “Debunking a Postmodern Conception of History: A Defence of Humanist Values in the Novels of Joy Kogawa.” Canadian Literature 148 (1996): 11-36. Morgan, Nina Y. “The Chinatown Aesthetic and the Architecture of Racial Identity.” San Francisco in Fiction: Essays in a Regional Literature. Ed. David Fine and Paul Skenazy. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995, 217-40. Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto. “Ethnicity and Ethnography: The Artist’s Fiction as Cultural Artifact in the Works of Maxine Hong Kingston.” Literature and Life: Fact and Fiction 58.1 (1995): 17-24. Atwood, Margaret. Atwood, Margaret. Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Cooper, Pamela. “Sexual Surveillance and Medical Authority in Two Versions of The Handmaid’ s Tale.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.4 (1995): 49-66. Annual Bibliography 323 Austin, Mary. Hoyer, Mark T. ‘“To Bring the World Into Divine Focus’: Syncretic Prophecy in The Land of Little Rain.” Western American Literature 31.1 (1996): 3-31. ---------. “Prophecy in a New West: Mary Austin and the Ghost Dance Religion.” Western American Literature 30.3 (1995): 235-55. ---------. “Weaving the Story: Northern Paiute Myth and Mary Austin’s The Basket Woman.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19.1 (1995): 133-51. O’Grady, John P. “The Death and Lives of Mary Austin.” Southwestern American Literature 21.1 (1995): 175-86. Stout, Janis P. “Willa Cather and Mary Austin: Intersections and Influence.” Southwestern American Literature 21.2 (1996): 39-59. Wild, Peter. “Sentimentalism in the American Southwest: John C. Van Dyke, Mary Austin, and Edward Abbey.” Kowalewski, Michael (ed.). Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 127-43. Baca, Jimmy Santiago. Schubnell, Matthias. “The Inner Landscape of the Self in Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Martin.” Southwestern American Literature 21.1 (1995): 167-73. Bibliography. Austenfeld, Thomas. “Annual Bibliography of Studies in Western American Literature.” Western...

Prophecy in a New West: Mary Austin and the Ghost Dance Religion

M A R K T. H O Y E R University of California, Davis Prophecy in aNewWest:MaryAustin and the GhostDance Religion i On New Year’sDay 1889, “the sun died.”During this total eclipse, a Northern Paiute named Wovoka, known to the whites asJack Wilson, fell into a trance in the Pine Nut Mountains ofwestern Nevadawhere he had been cutting wood. He reported upon reviving that he died and went to heaven, where he talked to God and saw “all the dead people,” Indian and white alike, all of whom were dancing and appeared to be young, well-nourished, and happy. God declared thatJack Wilson was to be, in effect, co-president with Benjamin Harrison, Wilson’sjurisdiction being the West and Harrison’s the East. To secure Wilson’s authority, God granted him power over the elements, specifically in the form of five songs for controlling the weather. He then instructed Wilson to command the Indians to cease all lying, stealing, and fighting, and to work peaceably with whites. He taught Wovoka a dance, a variation of the Paiute’s traditional Round Dance, which the Indians were to per­ form at regular intervals. It later became known to whites as the Ghost Dance, in reference to the dead that were to be reunited with the living. Believers in Wovoka’s “Great Revelation” were to be saved from an impending natural cataclysm that would cleanse the earth, their reward being rejuvenated youth in the next life, in a world of peace and plenty (Hittman 63-64).1 Within months, word ofWovoka’s revelation had spread to Indian tribes throughout the West, many of whom thought him to be “the Indian Messiah.”Although Wovoka’s message enjoined the Indians to get along with whites, the revelation changed in several ways as it traveled, due in part to the vagaries of translating between different 236 WesternAmerican Literature languages; in part to the fact that Wovoka could not write, and so never “recorded” the prophecy in a fixed form; and in part to the divergent needs of the various peoples to whom the prophecy spread. Thus both what the prophecy meant and how particular tribes reacted to it varied according to specific cultural contexts. Some Indian leaders received the message as foretelling the destruction of whites only, the land returning to its rightful inhabitants—a version of a prophecy that has a long history in Native American cultures (see, e.g., Trafzer). Although some believed that the Indians could help bring about the millennium by actively resisting or fighting the whites, what happened at Wounded Knee in December 1890 shows the extent to which white anxiety eclipsed the desire—or willingness—to accurately assess the threat posed by this militant minority. As Ghost Dance scholar L. G. Moses puts the situation, “Dancing, peaceful Indians awaiting their divine redemp­ tion did not sell newspapers, so journalists surfeited the country with stories about Indians dancing themselves into frenzies as they awaited reinforcements from the risen dead” (qtd. in Hittman 276). Acting under the orders of a government made uneasy by the supposition that a Ghost Dance ceremony wasa War Dance, the U. S. Cavalry opened fire on a band ofLakotawhich included women aswell as men, children and elders as well as warriors. The Indian dead numbered around two hundred fifty; some were found up to three miles away from the dance grounds. The Ghost Dance religion and Wovoka’s vision are thought by most to have died on thatwinter day in 1890, and, with the “final”defeat of Indian resistance to white military authority, any remaining hopes by Native Americans to retain their “traditional”way(s) of life along with it. This reading of the events at Wounded Knee has also been shared by most scholars, Indian and white alike. Most anthropologists, following Mooney, who worked east-to-west in gathering information and forming his conclusions about the Ghost Dance, focus on its manifestation among the Lakota and other Plains Indians, and thus foreground these tragic “final” events. Drawing cause-and-effect inferences between Wovoka’s doctrines and Wounded Knee, they assume directly, or indi­ rectly imply, or else state outright that Wovoka’s doctrine...

"Everything of Interest in the Late Pine Ridge War Are Held by Us for Sale": Popular Culture and Wounded Knee

So BLACK ELK DESCRIBED THE ERUPTION of violence at the Pine Ridge Reservation on the morning of 29 December 1890. Called in to suppress the messianic Ghost Dance religion and prevent an outbreak, U. S. Army troops, after two months of tense inactivity, killed over two hundred Lakotas in a ninety-minute burst of violence. Long a marker of the end of the Indian wars and the close of the frontier era, the massacre at Wounded Knee holds a prominent position within western history and popular consciousness.2 At the same moment that Wounded Knee entered history, it also entered the realm of popular culture. Photographers George Trager, newspaper reporter William Fitch Kelley, and dime novelist Francis Dougherty soon produced images and

Review: The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 by James Mooney

Review: <i>The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890</i> by James Mooney

The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890

Responding to the rapid spread of the Ghost Dance among tribes of the western United States in the early 1890s, James Mooney set out to describe and understand the phenomenon. He visited Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, at his home in Nevada and traced the progress of the Ghost Dance from place to place, describing the ritual and recording the distinctive song lyrics of seven separate tribes. His classic work (first published in 1896 and here reprinted in its entirety for the first time) includes succinct cultural and historical introductions to each of those tribal groups and depicts the Ghost Dance among the Sioux, the fears it raised of an Indian outbreak, and the military occupation of the Sioux reservations culminating in the tragedy at Wounded Knee. Seeking to demonstrate that the Ghost Dance was a legitimate religious movement, Mooney prefaced his study with a historical survey of comparable millenarian movements among other American Indian groups. In addition to his work on the Ghost Dance, James Mooney is best remembered for his extraordinarily detailed studies of the Cherokee Indians of the Southeast and the Kiowa and other tribes of the southern plains, and for his advocacy of American Indian religious freedom. Raymond J. DeMallie, director of the American Indian Studies Research Institute and a professor of anthropology at Indiana University, has edited James R. Walker's Lakota Society (1982) andThe Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984), both published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Investigators and informants, collaboration, and drinking at the well of native understanding

Vander, Judith. Ghost Dance Songs and Religion of a Wind River Shoshone Woman. Los Angeles: University of California Department of Music, 1986. iii + 76 pp. including photographs, appendix, references, and song transcriptions. No price. El Guindi, Fawda, and Abel Hernandez Jimenez. The Myth of Ritual: A Native's Ethnography of Zapotec Life‐Crisis Rituals. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. xvii + 147 pp. including foreword by Henry A. Selby, photographs, maps, diagrams, chart of Zapotec vowels and consonants, endnotes, index, and references. $22.95 cloth. Evers, Larry, and Felipe S. Molina. Yaqui Deer Songs Maso Bwikam. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1987. viii + 239 pp. including photographs, maps, key to Yaqui orthography, notes, index, and references. $32.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

A Grey and Fervent Shamanism

This essay treats three instances of shamanic sung poetry : from the contemporary Pima-Papago, the early 20th century Shoshone, and the 16th century Aztecs. The object is to understand them as poetry and shamanism. The first example, being familiar to the author, is the easiest to interpret : dreamt poems concerned with ghosts and the end of the world. The second, from the famed Ghost dance religion, is found to be simpler as poetry but more thrilling as shamanism. The third, called the Cantares mexicanos, is the most complex poetically and has been controversially interpreted as analogous to Ghost songs. That controversy is reviewed.