2130_American Lit Module 1_"The Ghost Dance" "Wounded Knee"
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Learn more about this time period. Source: Norton Anthology of American Literature, Short Volumne
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2130_American Lit Module 1_"The Ghost Dance" "Wounded Knee"
- 1. The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
- 2. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Ghost Dance
- 3. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Ghost Dance
- 4. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company The Ghost Dance
- 5. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company While all goes well with the tribe the religious feeling finds sufficient expression in the ordinary ritual forms of tribal usage, but when misfortune or destruction threaten the nation or the race, the larger emergency brings out the prophet, who strives to avert the disaster by molding his people to a common purpose through insistence upon the sacred character of his message. —James Mooney (1896) The Ghost Dance
- 6. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Wounded Knee Massacre
- 7. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Wounded Knee Massacre
- 8. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company • Ghost Dance Songs • Black Elk Speaks by Black Elk and John G. Neihardt • From the Deep Woods to Civilization by Charles Alexander Eastman • Statement of Valentine T. McGillycuddy Texts in the Cluster
- 9. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company Se’iicooo hei’towuuneinoo—Eiyohei’eiyei Flat Pipe is telling me. Eiyohei’eiyei Heisonoonin—Yohei’eiyei Our Father. Yohei’eiyei Hootniizoowuce’woohonoteino’—Eiyohei’eiyei We shall surely be put together again. Eiyohei’eiyei! Ghost Dance Songs
- 10. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “My father died in the first part of the winter from the bad sickness that many people had. This made me very sad. Everything good seemed to be going away.” “I was surprised, and could hardly believe what I saw; because so much of my vision seemed to be in it” Black Elk
- 11. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “The ‘Messiah craze’ in itself was scarcely a source of danger, and one might almost as well call upon the army to suppress Billy Sunday [an evangelical Christian minister] and his hysterical followers.” “All of this was a severe ordeal for one who had so lately put all his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man.” Charles Alexander Eastman
- 12. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 8th Edition | Copyright © 2012 W.W. Norton & Company “As for the ghost dance, too much attention has been paid to it. It was only the symptom or surface indication of deep-rooted, long-existing difficulty.” Valentine T. McGillycuddy
- 13. Visit the StudySpace at: http://wwnorton.com/studyspace For more learning resources, please visit the StudySpace site for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for The Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee
Notes de l'éditeur
- The development of the Ghost Dance religion and the subsequent massacre at Wounded Knee—both of which took place in 1890—are watershed moments in Native American history. The Ghost Dance has come to represent many things about this pivotal moment in Native American history: an emerging pan-tribalism that united formal rivals in collective opposition to Euro-American oppression; the creative synergy of Christian and Native religious traditions (Wovoka, the prophet of the Ghost Dance, is called the “Messiah,” but the rituals he performs emerge from tribal customs); a desperate attempt to halt the continuing advance of settlers to the West; and, with the culmination of the massacre at Wounded Knee, a feeling that the tide of history had irrevocably turned against the Native Americans. Pictured on this slide is an illustration by James P. Boyd called “Sioux Ghost Dance” published in Philadelphia in 1891. Wikimedia Commons
- The Ghost Dance religion began with Wovoka, a Paiute spiritual leader who also went by the English name of Jack Wilson. Wovoka had a vision on the first of January 1889 during a total solar eclipse. In his vision, he “saw the dead—Paiutes, other Indians, and whites as well—and received instruction in how Indians must live in order to be reunited with the dead in a world where the old ways would be restored. Indians were to be honest, work hard, and adopt a generally accommodating relation to the whites. They were also to perform a series of dances for five nights . . . And to sing songs that would be revealed to those who fell into trances” (NAAL). Theses dances, which came to be known as the Ghost Dance, struck a chord with other Native tribes such as the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and the Lakota (Sioux). Wikimedia Commons
- Pictured here is a photograph taken by a U.S. Army soldier in August 1890 of Big Foot's band of Menneconjou Sioux in costume at a dance, Cheyenne River, South Dakota. The Menneconjou Sioux were one of many tribal groups who participated in the Ghost Dance. Wikimedia Commons
- James Mooney was a white American ethnographer who lived among a variety of Native American tribes during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. His explanation of the popularity of the Ghost Dance, which appears on this slide, points to the particular crisis that tribes across the West were experiencing at the end of the nineteenth century: Native populations had been decimated by disease; Indian reservations were shrinking in size; one treaty after another was broken (or ignored) by the U.S. government; and Buffalo herds had all but died out. The realization was setting in that a precontact Native lifestyle would not return without drastic measures. The Ghost Dance came at this pivotal moment. Different tribes understood the Ghost Dance to mean different things. For some, it was a spiritual practice designed to bring inner peace; for others, it was a pre-apocalyptic measure designed either to resurrect the ghosts of dead warriors or to summon some natural catastrophe that would destroy the whites and return North America to its precontact state.
- Needless to say, when the apocalyptic versions of the Ghost Dance came to the attention of the U.S. Army, fears of a Native American uprising led to what has come to be known as the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek. Tensions between the U.S. government and the Lakota Sioux living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota were already high—the government had recently broken a treaty by splitting up the Sioux Reservation into five smaller reservations to accommodate white homesteaders—and when it was reported that the Lakota had interpreted the Ghost Dance as having the power to return North America to a precontact state, the Army took action. Pictured in this slide is Buffalo Bill, Capt. Baldwin, Gen. Nelson A. Miles, Capt. Moss, and others, on horseback, on the battlefield of Wounded Knee, ca. 1890. Wikimedia Commons
- In the massacre that took place when U.S. soldiers were sent to South Dakota to prevent the Lakota from practicing the Ghost Dance, over 150 Lakota were killed (many of whom were women and children). Twenty-five U.S. soldiers were also killed. Pictured here is the burial of the dead in a mass grave after the massacre of Wounded Knee. Wikimedia Commons
- One of the things that makes this cluster of texts such a fascinating set of documents is the way in which a variety of different observers struggle to make sense of the meaning of the Ghost Dance and the resulting massacre at Wounded Knee. The texts in this cluster come from a variety of perspectives, and students would greatly benefit from attempting to identify the concerns and motivations of these different commentators. Specifically, we have the text of Algonquin Ghost Dance songs themselves (transcribed by a white anthropologist), the reflections of the Lakota holy man Black Elk (as told to a white author), the observations of Charles Alexander Eastman (the son of a Sioux father and a white mother and a convert to Christianity), and the official report of a white Native American agent named Valentine McGillycuddy.
- Do the Algonquin Spirit songs read like poetry? How can the techniques we have developed for reading poetry in the Western world aid us in understanding these songs? How can they hinder us? Think in particular about the relationship between the Algonquin words that can be translated into English and the words that remain untranslatable as sounds: What is the effect of reading/listening to a song that includes sounds that have referential meaning to things in the world and sounds that exist solely as sounds? Does that diminish their value as poetry? Does that increase their value in a ritualistic context?
- Black Elk’s narrative puts the Ghost Dance, which was a widespread cultural phenomenon, within the context of his own personal life, as when he says, “My father died in the first part of the winter from the bad sickness that many people had. This made me very sad. Everything good seemed to be going away.” How does his comment that “Everything good seemed to be going away” resonate as both a personal reflection on his own life and as an analysis of large-scale cultural transformation? Ultimately, does Black Elk’s narrative feel more like a personal account or an attempt to speak for an entire culture? Or does it succeed in providing a balance of the two? One passage to look at in particular for analyzing Black Elk’s tendency to speak both as an individual and as the voice of a much larger community begins at the moment where Black Elk is shocked to see the details of his personal vision duplicated in the events of the Ghost Dance (“I was surprised, and could hardly believe what I saw; because so much of my vision seemed to be in it”).
- Eastman writes, “The ‘Messiah craze’ in itself was scarcely a source of danger, and one might almost as well call upon the army to suppress Billy Sunday [an evangelical Christian minister] and his hysterical followers.” Eastman raises a good point: Why didn’t Euro-Americans understand the Ghost Dance within the context of religious freedom? Did the U.S. government actually believe that the Ghost Dancers had the power to bring dead warriors back to life? What was the source of this fear? Why would a religious activity be viewed as an “uprising”? Eastman, who was a convert to Christianity, describes the massacre at Wounded Knee as a crisis of faith. He writes, “All of this was a severe ordeal for one who had so lately put all his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man.” What do we make of this comment from Eastman? Is this crisis of faith sincere, or is he using Christianity rhetorically to comment on Euro-American treatment of Native peoples (as William Apess did in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man”)?
- McGillycuddy’s brief text is something of an enigma. Is he sympathetic to the victims of Wounded Knee or not? When he writes, “As for the ghost dance, too much attention has been paid to it. It was only the symptom or surface indication of deep-rooted, long-existing difficulty,” is he discounting the significance of the Ghost Dance to Native American history, or is he trying to provide a broader context for understanding the massacre than other (perhaps more sensationalistic) accounts were providing?