Ghost Dances and Identity

Ghost Dances and Identity PDF Author: Gregory Smoak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520941721
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This innovative cultural history examines wide-ranging issues of religion, politics, and identity through an analysis of the American Indian Ghost Dance movement and its significance for two little-studied tribes: the Shoshones and Bannocks. The Ghost Dance has become a metaphor for the death of American Indian culture, but as Gregory Smoak argues, it was not the desperate fantasy of a dying people but a powerful expression of a racialized "Indianness." While the Ghost Dance did appeal to supernatural forces to restore power to native peoples, on another level it became a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities that crossed ethnic, tribal, and historical boundaries. Looking closely at the Ghost Dances of 1870 and 1890, Smoak constructs a far-reaching, new argument about the formation of ethnic and racial identity among American Indians. He examines the origins of Shoshone and Bannock ethnicity, follows these peoples through a period of declining autonomy vis-a-vis the United States government, and finally puts their experience and the Ghost Dances within the larger context of identity formation and emerging nationalism which marked United States history in the nineteenth century.

Ghost Dances and Identity

Ghost Dances and Identity PDF Author: Gregory Smoak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520941721
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book Here

Book Description
This innovative cultural history examines wide-ranging issues of religion, politics, and identity through an analysis of the American Indian Ghost Dance movement and its significance for two little-studied tribes: the Shoshones and Bannocks. The Ghost Dance has become a metaphor for the death of American Indian culture, but as Gregory Smoak argues, it was not the desperate fantasy of a dying people but a powerful expression of a racialized "Indianness." While the Ghost Dance did appeal to supernatural forces to restore power to native peoples, on another level it became a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities that crossed ethnic, tribal, and historical boundaries. Looking closely at the Ghost Dances of 1870 and 1890, Smoak constructs a far-reaching, new argument about the formation of ethnic and racial identity among American Indians. He examines the origins of Shoshone and Bannock ethnicity, follows these peoples through a period of declining autonomy vis-a-vis the United States government, and finally puts their experience and the Ghost Dances within the larger context of identity formation and emerging nationalism which marked United States history in the nineteenth century.

Ghost Dances and Identity

Ghost Dances and Identity PDF Author: Gregory E. Smoak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520256271
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
" 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

Ghost Dances and Identity

Ghost Dances and Identity PDF Author: Gregory E. Smoak
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520246586
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
" 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

Ghost Dances and Identity

Ghost Dances and Identity PDF Author: Gregory Ellis Smoak
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Bannock Indians
Languages : en
Pages : 856

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Book Description
"This dissertation explores the emergence of ethnic and racial identity within the context of the Ghost Dance movements of the late nineteenth century among the Shoshone and Bannock speaking peoples of the northern Great Basin. Most historical interpretations have presented the Ghost Dances as short-lived and desperate religious fantasies. To the contrary, there is ample evidence that these beliefs had a long (well over three decades) and varied history west of the Rockies. Especially intriguing is the role of the Bannock people as missionaries and interpreters of the religion. Although they shared the Fort Hall Reservation and most aspects of their culture with Shoshones, the Bannocks were more consistently linked with the religion. This raises the question of what it meant to be a "Shoshone" or a "Bannock." I argue that social and economic differences were at the heart of these ethnic identities, and that they in large part explain each peoples' reaction to the Ghost Dances. In turn, these religions represented the emergence of an American Indian racial identity. Thus, the Ghost Dances were not simply the dreams of an oppressed and dying culture, but important elements in the development of ethnic and racial identity among some American Indian peoples"--Leaf [iv].

The Pawnee Ghost Dance and Hand Game

The Pawnee Ghost Dance and Hand Game PDF Author: Alexander Lesser
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Hostiles?

Hostiles? PDF Author: Sam Maddra
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 9780806137438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
"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.".

The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game

The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game PDF Author: Alexander Lesser
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 9780803279650
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
The Ghost Dance religion that swept through the Plains Indian tribes in the early 1890s was embraced wholeheartedly by the Pawnees. It was a message of hope to a people devastated by the attacks of enemy tribes, the encroachment of white settlers, and the outbreak of epidemics. For the Pawnees, who were looking to the U.S. government and trying unsuccessfully to farm their land, the Ghost Dance movement promised salvation: a restoration of the Indian dead, the buffalo, and the old times. Alexander Lesser shows how the Ghost Dance brought about a partial revival of traditional Pawnee culture and its dances and songs. The ancient guessing hand game, remembered best by a tribe starved for the joy of play, became an important part of the Ghost Dance ritual. What had been a gambling game, a representation of warfare played by men, was transformed into a sacred game played by both sexes as an expression of faith or ?good fortune.? Lesser surveys the history of the Pawnee Indians and their relations with the federal government and describes in detail the Ghost Dance hand games that ?were the chief intellectual product of Pawnee culture? from the onset of the messianic movement to the original publication of this book in 1933. Citing such authorities as James Mooney and Stewart Culin, Lesser produced an enduring classic, now introduced by Alice Beck Kehoe, a professor of anthropology at Marquette University and the author of The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization.

We Have a Religion

We Have a Religion PDF Author: Tisa Joy Wenger
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807832626
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to twenty-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has often act

The Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance PDF Author: Alice Beck Kehoe
Publisher: Waveland Press
ISBN: 1478609249
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
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.

The Cherokee Ghost Dance

The Cherokee Ghost Dance PDF Author: William Gerald McLoughlin
Publisher: Mercer University Press
ISBN: 9780865541283
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 554

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Book Description
"In these essays a distinguished historian analyzes how the Indian nations of the Southeast grappled with nationalism, slavery, and missionaries. Against the background of this "combined onslaught on their cultural identity," McLoughlin describes what the Indians did "to preserve what they considered most important." The fate of Native Americans was inextricably bound up with the most vital questions of national life"--Publisher's description.