Book of the Month:

Gregory E. Smoak, Ghost Dances and Identity
Review by Quincy D. Newell

Happy New Year!  Do you teach about the Ghost Dance? For many of us who teach about American religion, the Ghost Dance gets a day – and that day focuses on the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, when federal troops clashed with Lakota Sioux Indians, killing scores of men, women, and children. Wounded Knee is a way to weave Indians into the ongoing story of American religion, a way to remind ourselves and our students that Indians did not disappear after rescuing the Pilgrims from starvation, or after the Trail of Tears. Wounded Knee highlights interaction between Native Americans and Anglo-Americans in the West, and it does so in an overtly religious context. It’s tailor-made for American religion classes, especially for those of us that want to focus on the West. Except that it’s so tragic. And except that we so often end up dropping the story into our classes without enough context, so that although we want to present a more complicated story, we end up with something along the lines of “misguided, possibly even malicious, federal troops, controlled by a government back east that really just wants the Indians’ land, massacre well-meaning Native Americans tragically following religious commandments, exercising their religious freedom as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and believing themselves to be invincible because of the idealistic promises made by their authentic, timeless spiritual tradition.” That is, I hope, an exaggeration, but I fear it is sometimes an all-too-accurate summation of what my students leave my classroom thinking.

Raymond DeMallie’s excellent “The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account” (Pacific Historical Review 51, no. 4 [1982]: 385-405) is a great first step toward countering this impression. DeMallie examines the Ghost Dance within a Lakota Sioux context, showing that many of the ways scholars have understood the Ghost Dance fail to take into account “the symbolic content of Indian cultures”(388) – specifically, in this case, of Lakota Sioux culture. It’s a wonderful article, and I won’t try to summarize it here – instead, if you haven’t read it, you should read it. (It’s available on JSTOR, which I’m guessing most of you, dear readers, have access to in one way or another.)

In some ways, Gregory E. Smoak's Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2006) picks up where DeMallie left off, placing the Ghost Dance in the broader context of the history and culture of Shoshone and Bannock, or Newe, Indians. The Ghost Dance, and prophetic religion more broadly, Smoak writes, were crucial to the lives of Newe peoples throughout the nineteenth century as they dealt with Euro-American expansion and encroachment. The Ghost Dance was part of these peoples’ “long-standing religious response to colonization,” and it built upon elements of Newe culture that preceded it. The Ghost Dance among the Newe was also tied up with the process of ethnogenesis – the emergence of ethnic and racial identities. Ultimately, Smoak argues, “The Ghost Dances were functional, not delusional. On one level they represented a culturally consistent appeal to a supernatural power aimed at restoring the flow of that power toward native people. But on another they were a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities. Moreover, the parallels between the Ghost Dances and the prophetic religion of Euro-Americans allowed native peoples to engage the dominant society in a conversation concerning American identities in an age of radical change” (3).

The concept of ethnogenesis is one of Smoak’s keys for explaining the functionality and persistence of the Ghost Dance. In the first part of the book, Smoak illuminates the gradual, confusing emergence of Shoshone and Bannock peoples from the groups that had previously known themselves as the Newe, placing the Ghost Dance within the larger context of Newe interaction with Euro-American colonialism. He then shows the integral role that religion – particularly dynamic shamanistic religious practices – played in Newe cultures, and traces the prophetic tradition among American Indians, especially in the West.

In the second part of the book, Smoak turns to the more directly political aspects of Newe interaction with the United States federal government: treaties, reservations, and the like. Although these details may seem dry to some who are more interested in rituals, stories, and dances, they are crucial for understanding the social and political context of the Ghost Dance. Briefly, treaty-making reified distinctions between groups of Newe, making them more important than they probably were to the people they identified. Simultaneously, the government started trying to lump Shoshone and Bannock peoples into one group for the purposes of reservation-making, erasing the distinctions it magnified during the treaty-making process. Smoak shows that in this context, “the waves of religious excitement that began with the first Ghost Dance prophecies of 1869 were … part of an ongoing process of identity formation that would last for the rest of the century” (113-14). The Ghost Dance, in other words, became a way for Shoshones and Bannocks to negotiate both what it meant to be Shoshone or Bannock, as well as what it meant to be “American Indian.” Smoak traces the spread of the Ghost Dance, showing that it was an ongoing and widespread movement rather than an episodic phenomenon, and uses the theory of relative deprivation to explain why Bannocks were more enthusiastic practitioners of the Ghost Dance than the Shoshones. This interpretation also allows Smoak to show that the Ghost Dance meant different things to different people: to Bannocks, it was “militant resistance”; to the Shoshones, it was “measured accommodation.” Either way, Smoak writes, “Newe people…looked to prophetic religion to make their choice understandable and proclaim their identity as Indians” (118).

As the century wore on, the Ghost Dance also became a way of expressing solidarity with other American Indian peoples. Even as it incorporated Christian doctrines, Smoak argues, “the Ghost Dance taught Indian peoples that they were a distinct group with a distinct origin and way of life and a destiny separate from white America” (154). The Ghost Dance continued to hold different meanings for different peoples, even as it provided a way to unite them as one people.

Brett Hendrickson argued not long ago that one of the things that makes the West different is that there are larger numbers of Native Americans. “In broad brushstrokes,” Hendrickson wrote, “it is fair to say that the study of living Native American religions and worldviews has been vital in the American West as has been the development of Native American religious rights.” Smoak’s story of the Ghost Dance among Newe peoples supports this claim. Although the Ghost Dance did make some inroads in the East, it is largely a western phenomenon. The Ghost Dance itself was multi-layered and malleable, taking on different meanings for different American Indian cultures. Ghost Dances and Identity is well worth reading, whether you’re looking for a complex, subtle argument or just something to make the one day you teach the Ghost Dance a little more satisfying.

Editors’ note: Have you read this book? What do you think about it? Join the conversation and leave your thoughts in the comments! If you have a suggestion for a future book of the month, or if you would like to review a book for the book of the month series, please contact us. Next month, Brandi Denison reviews Matthew Avery Sutton’s Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America (Harvard University Press, 2007).