The Ghost Dance Religion And The Sioux Outbreak Of 1890 Abridged With An Introduction By Anthony F C Wallace With Illustrations

The 1870 Ghost Dance was a significant but too often disregarded transformative historical movement with particular impact on the Native peoples of northern California. The spiritual energies of this ?great wave,? as Peter Nabokov has called it, have passed down to the present day among Native Californians, some of whose contemporary individual and communal lives can be understood only in light of the dance and the complex religious developments inspired by it. Cora Du Bois's historical study, The 1870 Ghost Dance, has remained an essential contribution to the ethnographic record of Native Californian cultures for seven decades yet is only now readily available for the first time. Du Bois produced this pioneering work in the field of ethnohistory while still under the tutelage of anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber. Her monograph informs our understanding of Kroeber's larger, grand and crucial salvage-ethnographic project in California, its approach and style, and also its limitations. The 1870 Ghost Dance adds rich detail to our understanding of anthropology in California before World War II

Responding to the rapid spread of the Ghost Dance among tribes of the western United States in the early 1890s, James Mooney set out to describe and understand the phenomenon. He visited Wovoka, the Ghost Dance prophet, at his home in Nevada and traced the progress of the Ghost Dance from place to place, describing the ritual and recording the distinctive song lyrics of seven separate tribes. His classic work (first published in 1896 and here reprinted in its entirety for the first time) includes succinct cultural and historical introductions to each of those tribal groups and depicts the Ghost Dance among the Sioux, the fears it raised of an Indian outbreak, and the military occupation of the Sioux reservations culminating in the tragedy at Wounded Knee. Seeking to demonstrate that the Ghost Dance was a legitimate religious movement, Mooney prefaced his study with a historical survey of comparable millenarian movements among other American Indian groups. In addition to his work on the Ghost Dance, James Mooney is best remembered for his extraordinarily detailed studies of the Cherokee Indians of the Southeast and the Kiowa and other tribes of the southern plains, and for his advocacy of American Indian religious freedom.

In this religious history of the spiritual life of the great Lakota leader Black Elk, Clyde Holler reconstructs the development of the Lakota Sun Dance—the central religious ritual of the Lakota tradition, which is essential to understanding Black Elk's thought. This comprehensive study of the dance, which was banned by the U.S. government in 1883, shows how Black Elk adapted the dance to the conditions and circumstances of reservation life and reinterpreted it in terms commensurate with Christianity. A creative thinker, rather than a passive informant on his people's past, Black Elk was both a sincere traditionalist and a sincere Christian, seeing the two religious traditions as expressions of the sacred. Through a firsthand account of the dance associated with Frank Fools Crow at Three Mile Camp, near Kyle, South Dakota, the author demonstrates how the contemporary Sun Dance reflects Black Elk's vision. Holler's book is a penetrating model of philosophical engagement with native North American religion that is carried out in close dialogue with anthropology. Readers who were captivated by John G. Neihardt's gripping portrait of Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks may be surprised to learn that he was a vital and creative leader until his death in 1950, and not the broken, despairing old man made famous by Neihardt. As the greatest native American religious thinker of North America, much has been written about Black Elk, his life and influence; but of those works, Roller's is likely to stand out as the most capacious in breadth and analysis.

This book examines the relationship between economics, politics and religion through the case of Olivorio Mateo and the religious movement he inspired from 1908 in the Dominican Republic. The authors explore how and why the new religion was formed, and why it was so successful. Comparing this case with other peasant movements, they show ways in which folk religion serves as a response to particular problems which arise in peasant societies during times of stress.