Age 9, Eleanor Wilson sneaks out of her parents' marble mansion and among the grave houses in an Indian cemetery plays with the faceless doll she made from wood and corn silk. Twilight shadows gather around her. She runs home.Her mother is waiting."An Indian without a face. It's hideous." Constance Wilson takes the doll and burns it.That night in her bedroom, Eleanor watches the doll, shriveled by fire, materialize out of the darkness."Cry for your mother," it tells her. Eleanor is chosen.Nine years later, 1958, lonely, insecure, controlled by the rigid rules of her parents, she enters the realm of spirits and when discovering the secret about herself learns how she can save a dying world.
"This is a remarkable coming-of-age story and spiritual journey with as much between the lines as in them. Sometimes wry, always thoughtful, the characters seem to live and breathe, and you won't soon forget them."—Senator Byron Dorgan The Last Ghost Dancer is more than a coming-of-age fable, more than the wry memoirs of a spiritual search. It is the story of a remarkable summer in a remarkable west river town. It is a commentary on the depth and breadth of friendships forged, of lovers lost, and the realization that it is the journey that is of importance, and not so much the destination. Looking back, as old men do, it's hard to imagine it really happened. But it did. One wise teacher, one perfect girl, one harrowing summer, can set the course of a lifetime. Meet Bones, the wry, funny, ever-observant, thoughtful and hapless narrator, a grease monkey at the only gas station in Pale Butte, whose most recent claim to fame is dropping an Edsel off the hoist. Now, some sixty years later, Bones, a dreamer of apocalyptic dreams, reflects on miracles small and large and his spiritual discovery that marked the summer of 1977.
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.
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.
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.
"In Hostiles? Sam A. Maddra relates an ironic tale of Indian accommodation - and preservation of what the Lakota continued to believe was a principled, restorative religion. Their alleged crime was their participation in the Ghost Dance. To the U.S. Army, their religion was a rebellion to be suppressed. To the Indians, is offered hope in a time of great transition. To Cody, it became a means to attract British audiences. With these "hostile indians," the showman could offer dramatic reenactments of the army's conquest, starring none other than the very "hostiles" who had staged what British audiences knew from their newspapers to have been an uprising.".
On the eve of his 40th birthday, Patrick Gallager, a New York documentary film producer, retreats to the mountainous river regions of Central Vermont to get away from his faltered past life to fish. In the shallows of the river, Gallagher's line catches on a submerged body.
"Although author Carole Maso follows the contours of fiction, style is everything in Ghost Dance, a strangely lovely and perplexing book . . . she has a fine ear and her literary gift is impressive." —San Francisco Chronicle Originally published in 1986, Ghost Dance is the first in a line of relentlessly experimental and highly esteemed works by Carole Maso. Vanessa Turin's family has been broken up by an event so devastating she cannot bear to face it straight on. Her mother, the brilliant and beautiful poet Christine Wing, seems simply to have disappeared, and her gentle, silent father also vanishes. In Ghost Dance, the reader experiences firsthand the dimensions of Vanessa's longing, the capabilities of her imagination, the persistence of her memory, and the ferocity of her love as she struggles to retrieve her family, to reclaim her country, and to come to terms with overwhelming sorrow.
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.
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.
