The Ghost Dancers

Adrian C. Louis’s previously unpublished early novel has given us “the unsayable said” of the Native American reservation. A realistic look at reservation life, The Ghost Dancers explores—very candidly—many issues, including tribal differences, “urban Indians” versus “rez Indians,” relationships among Blacks, Whites, and Indians, police tactics on and off the rez, pipe ceremonies and sweat-lodge ceremonies, alcoholism and violence on the rez, visitations of the supernatural, poetry and popular music, the Sixties and the Vietnam War, the aims and responsibilities of journalism, and, most prominently, interracial sexual relationships. Readers familiar with Louis’s life and other works will note interesting connections between the protagonist, Bean, and Louis himself, as well as a connection between The Ghost Dancers and other Louis writings—especially his sensational novel Skins. It’s 1988, and Lyman “Bean” Wilson, a Nevada Indian and middle-aged professor of journalism at Lakota University in South Dakota, is reassessing his life. Although Bean is the great-grandson of Wovoka, the Paiute leader who initiated the Ghost Dance religion, he is not a full-blood Indian and he endures the scorn of the Pine Ridge Sioux, whose definition of Indian identity is much narrower. A man with many flaws, Bean wrestles with his own worst urges, his usually ineffectual efforts to help his family, and his determination to establish his identity as an Indian. The result is a string of family reconnections, sexual adventures, crises at work, pipe and sweat-lodge ceremonies, and—through his membership in the secret Ghost Dancers Society—political activism, culminating in a successful plot to blow the nose off George Washington’s face on Mount Rushmore. Quintessentially Louis, this raw, angry, at times comical, at times heartbreaking novel provides an unflinching look at reservation life and serves as an unyielding tribute to a generation without many choices.

" This is a compellingly nuanced and sophisticated study of Indian peoples as negotiators and shapers of the modern world."—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815

Classic of American anthropology explores messianic cult behind Indian resistance, from Pontiac to the 1890s. Extremely detailed and thorough. Originally published in 1896 by the Bureau of American Ethnology. 38 plates, 49 other illustrations.

The religious fervor known as the Ghost Dance movement was precipitated by the prophecies and teachings of a northern Paiute Indian named Wovoka (Jack Wilson). During a solar eclipse on New Year’s Day, 1889, Wovoka experienced a revelation that promised harmony, rebirth, and freedom for Native Americans through the repeated performance of the traditional Ghost Dance. In 1890 his message spread rapidly among tribes, developing an intensity that alarmed the federal government and ended in tragedy at Wounded Knee. While the Ghost Dance phenomenon is well known, never before has its founder received such full and authoritative treatment. Indispensable for understanding the prophet behind the messianic movement, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance addresses for the first time basic questions about his message and This expanded edition includes a new chapter and appendices covering sources on Wovoka discovered since the first edition, as well as a supplemental bibliography.

Thousands of years ago, the root of the Ghost Dance ritual radiated out from the Mountains of the Clouds where the ancient Toltec god, the Plumed Serpent, Quetzalcoatl, first danced with the Lord of the Dead, Mictlantecuhtli to create the civilizations of the Americas. As a gift to his children, the Plumed Serpent gave the people the Prince of Plants: Desheto. The Mazatecan Indians of Oaxaca still believe that plant knowledge can be communicated through Desheto's pre-Colombian mushroom ritual. Each year when the rains came the Prince of Plants would continue to share this hidden history of the Americas with his scribe Ani. To deepen Ani's knowledge, the Prince of Plants sent his scribe on a journey through the most remote tribes of the Americas to find the last remnants of the ancient Ghost Dance ritual.

Growing up in South Dakota, Josh Garrett-Davis knew he would leave. But as a young adult, he kept going back -- in dreams and reality and by way of books. With this beautifully written narrative about a seemingly empty but actually rich and complex place, he has reclaimed his childhood, his unusual family, and the Great Plains. Among the subjects and people that bring his Midwestern Plains to life are the destruction and resurgence of the American bison; Native American "Ghost Dancers," who attempted to ward off destruction by supernatural means; the political allegory to be found in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz; and current attempts by ecologists to "rewild" the Plains, complete with cheetahs. Garrett-Davis infuses the narrative with stories of his family as well -- including his great-great-grandparents' twenty-year sojourn in Nebraska as homesteaders and his progressive Methodist cousin Ruth, a missionary in China ousted by Mao's revolution. Ghost Dances is a fluid combination of memoir and history and reportage that reminds us our roots matter.

A broad range of perspectives from Natives and non-Natives makes this book the most complete account and analysis of the Lakota ghost dance ever published. A revitalization movement that swept across Native communities of the West in the late 1880s, the ghost dance took firm hold among the Lakotas, perplexed and alarmed government agents, sparked the intervention of the U.S. Army, and culminated in the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in December 1890. Although the Lakota ghost dance has been the subject of much previous historical study, the views of Lakota participants have not been fully explored, in part because they have been available only in the Lakota language. Moreover, emphasis has been placed on the event as a shared historical incident rather than as a dynamic meeting ground of multiple groups with differing perspectives. In The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, Rani-Henrik Andersson uses for the first time some accounts translated from Lakota. This book presents these Indian accounts together with the views and observations of Indian agents, the U.S. Army, missionaries, the mainstream press, and Congress. This comprehensive, complex, and compelling study not only collects these diverse viewpoints but also explores and analyzes the political, cultural, and economic linkages among them.

The definitive account of the Ghost Dance religion, which led to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 Winner of the Bancroft Prize in American History In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the US Army killed over two hundred Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. In God's Red Son, historian Louis Warren offers a startling new view of the religion known as the Ghost Dance, from its origins in the visions of a Northern Paiute named Wovoka to the tragedy in South Dakota. To this day, the Ghost Dance remains widely mischaracterized as a primitive and failed effort by Indian militants to resist American conquest and return to traditional ways. In fact, followers of the Ghost Dance sought to thrive in modern America by working for wages, farming the land, and educating their children, tenets that helped the religion endure for decades after Wounded Knee. God's Red Son powerfully reveals how Ghost Dance teachings helped Indians retain their identity and reshape the modern world.

In this fascinating ethnohistorical case study of North American Indians, the Ghost Dance religion is the backbone for Kehoes exploration of significant aspects of American Indian life and her quest to learn why some theories become popular. In Part 1, she combines knowledge gained from her firsthand experiences living among and speaking with Indian elders with a careful analysis of historical accounts, providing a succinct yet insightful look at people, events, and institutions from the 1800s to the present. She clarifies unique and complex relationships among Indian peoples and dispels many of the false pretenses promoted by United States agencies over two centuries. In Part 2, Kehoe surveys some of the theories used to analyze the events described in Part 1, allowing readers to see how theories develop, to think critically about various perspectives, and to draw their own conclusions. Kehoes gripping presentation and analysis pave the way for just and constructive Indian-White relations.

Every great city is a restless work in progress, but nowhere is the urban impulse more in flux than in Berlin, that sprawling metropolis located on the fault line of history. A short-lived fever-dream of modernity in the Roaring Twenties, redubbed Germania and primped up into the megalomaniac fantasy of a Thousand-Year Reichstadt in the Thirties, reduced in 1945 to a divided rubble heap, subsequently revived in a schizoid state of post-World War II duality, and reunited in 1989 when the wall came tumbling down — Berlin has since been reborn yet again as the hipster hub of the 21st century. This book is a hopscotch tour in time and space. Part memoir, part travelogue, Ghost Dance in Berlin is an unlikely declaration of love, as much to a place as to a state of mind, by the American-born son of German-speaking Jewish refugees. Peter Wortsman imagines the parallel celebratory haunting of two sets of ghosts, those of the exiled erstwhile owners, a Jewish banker and his family, and those of the Führer’s Minister of Finance and his entourage, who took over title, while in another villa across the lake another gaggle of ghosts is busy planning the Final Solution.