Ghost Dance of the Sioux (1891)
The Ghost Dance was a last, desperate attempt by Native Americans to resist the White Man and preserve their own way of life. Performance of the dance was thought to unite the living with the spirits of the dead and enlist the latter in the fight for survival against those who came from far away with their strange customs and alien gods.
Essentially, it was a type of circle dance in which the men moved in unison with a soft, yet heavy-footed shuffle around a drum; a traditional form used by many tribes for millennia. But the ghost dance had new and deadly serious ceremonial significance and quickly spread at the end of the 19th century throughout much of the Western United States, with different peoples synthesizing aspects of the ritual dance with their own tribal beliefs.
Of course, as we know, the dance failed to work its magic and halt white expansion; mystery religion, it seems, is ineffective in the face of guns and railways. For all their sacred and heroic effort, the Indians were doomed and their day passed.
What intrigues me, however, is this: in the face of the threat posed to their traditional culture by the mass influx of foreign bodies, will the indigenous peoples of Europe soon be the ones enacting their own version of the ghost dance (and will it be any more effective)?
What intrigues me, however, is this: in the face of the threat posed to their traditional culture by the mass influx of foreign bodies, will the indigenous peoples of Europe soon be the ones enacting their own version of the ghost dance (and will it be any more effective)?
