Ghost Dance

[Tin Can]

Library of Congress images and song

https://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2017/11/james-mooney-recordings-ghost-dance-songs/

[Renato Tonelli]

Thank you for that.

[Drew Wiley]

So it was not a recording of an actual event, but by an ethnographer later. I spent a lot of time searching for where the Ghost Dance transpired in my own neighborhood in the 1870's, and tentatively located it, though I was never precisely certain. There were still many Indians living around there while I grew up, but seemingly no memories of the Ghost Dance event itself by them. All I had to go by concerning its location were the records of the ethnographers of that era. But there were plenty of memories among the immediate descendants of the white pioneering families who fled to atop a nearby summit while their barns and so forth were being burnt during raids incited by the Ghost Dance, so at least the specific timing was identifiable. It was remarkable in being a religious cult that spread so far and wide between native peoples who had traditionally been in deep conflict with one another.