Within this context, we take a look at the connection of aboriginal people to the land, to the natural world to ancient rituals and long established traditions.

     And we'll explore their reliance - much like the rest of us - on turning to powers greater than themselves in times of upheaval.
We begin with a look at the Ghost Dance, a phenomena that sprang forth when North American Indians were displaced from hunting grounds, dispossessed of lands and in some cases assimilated to accommodate encroaching white settlements in the latter half of the 1800s.

     During this time, much of the Native population had been wiped out by such White man's diseases as small pox and the buffalo had been hunted nearly to extinction.

     And so the Indians turned to the Ghost Dance for salvation.

     We'll examine the Ghost Dance as a somewhat-utopian spiritual belief system that helped the dispossessed Cherokee, Sioux, Paiute, Klamath and Plains Indians in the U.S., and Dakota Indians in Canada, cope with their sudden displacement, alienation and rapidly growing sense of despair.

     As we'll learn, the Ghost Dance comforted the oppressed Indians as performing the dance could, supposedly, bring about the return of lost people and game in abundance, with Indians displacing whites to regain their former relationship with the land.
     This spiritual dance promised the return of dead Indians and game in a new age of abundance, with the Indians being very much in control of their collective destiny.

     In examining the Ghost Dance, we'll also compare it to cargo cults, another manifestation of an oppressed people's spiritual need to find a utopian solution to an all-encompassing threat against the continued existence of their culture.

     The cargo cults of New Guinea and Melanesia also allowed practitioners to use religious principles to help their followers cope with a crisis that has thwarted their efforts to have a more satisfying culture.

     Cargo cults offer a revivalistic appeal, as the cult followers believe through their prophecies and myth dreams that they will be reunited with long-dead ancestors in a golden age of prosperity.

     These cults also put the Indians in charge while the White men are eradicated - but leave their possessions (cargo) behind for the Natives to enjoy.

     Indeed, the cargo cults offer a heady mixture of salvation and revenge and prosperity.
     We'll also explore the rare, exulted status Indians enjoyed through the boom times of the fur trade.

     To a significant degree, the extent to which Euro-Canadians depended on Indians, for survival, furs or food and provisions, strongly influenced the degree to which Indians were valued in the emerging Canadian society and the extent to which their personal freedoms, culture and autonomy could be sustained.

     The fur trade had a profound impact on the independence of Indians and their ability to be masters of their own destiny.

     Our chapter on the fur trade will argue that in sharp contrast to dispossessed east coastal Indians, those Indians engaged in the fur trade were accorded a far higher status and effective recognition of autonomy by white society due to the dependence of Euro-Canadian fur traders on Indians to trap and supply furs, and provisions.

     However, this temporary prosperity was not without its cultural and spiritual costs. As we'll learn, the Indians lost a great deal when the fur trade boom times came to an end.
To get a sense of how badly things can go awry when Indians lose their value in White society, we have a review of Hugh Brody's excellent maps And Dreams.

     Brody spent a great deal of time with the Beaver tribe of British Columbia as an expert participant observer, and he reported at length on various government efforts to help the Beaver - while disregarding their native culture.

     Brody invariably found the consistent government assumption was that the Beaver were a dying people - who just happened to be taking thousands of years to die out.

     Finally, we'll explore the Gisaro ceremony and the way it reveals a great deal about the cultural and societal values of the Kaluli people of the Bosavi region of the great Papuan Plateau on the island of New Guinea.

     As we'll discover, with its central characteristics of reciprocity and emotional release, Gisaro transcends the limitations of a ceremonial dance to embody the deepest, most personal experiences of the audience.

     Gisaro is very much both a spiritual and emotional experience in which members of the audience are made to cry and then burn the dancers for making them weep.

     In the Gisaro chapter, we'll examine these aspects of this cultural phenomenon, as presented by Edward L. Schieffelin in his book The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers.

     Schieffelin, whose field work included two years - 1966-1968 - among the Kaluli, remarked on the powerful socializing role of Gisaro, observing that Gisaro is the "most elaborate and characteristic ceremony of this type."

     And we'll explore how Gisaro plays a key role in illustrating and perpetuating the societal value system of the Kaluli.

     We have a fascinating journey ahead of us. And our journey begins now.

- Michael B. Davie.

Chapter 1:
Dances with Ghosts

     Exploring the North American Indians' Ghost Dance as a cultural phenomenon of nativism and revivalism

     The Ghost Dance arose during a period of great cultural and social upheaval in the latter half of the 1800s, when many North American aboriginal groups were displaced from hunting grounds to accommodate encroaching white settlements.

     These groups were also dispossessed of their lands and left struggling to resist cultural encapsulation by the European-derived culture spreading across North America.

     The Ghost Dance arose as an expression of nativism and revivalism by Plains Indians and other aboriginal peoples who turned to a new, somewhat-utopian spiritual belief system to help them cope with displacement, alienation and despair.

     This chapter will compare and contrast the Ghost Dance to cargo cults, another manifestation of an oppressed people's spiritual need to find a utopian solution to an all-encompassing threat against the continued existence of their culture.

     A combination of dire circumstances placed the Indian peoples of North America in a very precarious position in the latter half of the 1800s.

     Small pox and other European diseases had virtually wiped out two-thirds or more of many tribes.

     As well, the buffalo, a major source of food for Plains Indians, had almost been rendered extinct through over-hunting by largely non-native hunters. (Thornton, 1987: pp. 103-125).

     And, the Cherokee and many other aboriginal groups were forcibly dispossessed of hunting lands and relocated to marginal areas to make room for agrarian colonization by the rapidly expanding society of white settlers. (Thornton, 1987: pp. 103-125).

     The severity of the Indians' collective plight, and their seeming inability to push away the intruding European presence that was clearly dominating them, resulted in a religious, spiritual response, the Ghost Dance.

     The Ghost Dance served to comfort the oppressed Indians by offering the assurance that practicing the dance would bring the return of lost people and game in abundance, with Indians displacing whites to regain their former relationship with the land.

     Anthony Wallace asserts that the Ghost Dance was rivivalistic as it had the purpose of reviving and restoring a lost way of life, to the extent that even dead Indians, animals and fish would come back to life in a reborn age of abundance with Indians very clearly in control. (Wallace, 1972: pp. 340-343).

     Wallace also describes the Ghost Dance as nativistic because it also held the intent of purging the lands of white European-American settlers to free the Indians from domination by white people. (Wallace, 1972: pp. 340-343).

     With its features of nativism and revivalism, the Ghost Dance formed the core of a wider revitalization movement to breathe new life and hope into an impoverished and oppressed culture. (Wallace, 1972: pp. 340-343).

     Wallace also finds similarities between the Ghost Dance and another revitalization movement; the cargo cults of New Guinea and Melanesia.

     Both the Ghost Dance and cargo cults practitioners use religious principles to help their followers cope with a crisis that has thwarted their efforts to have a more satisfying culture. (Wallace, 1972: pp. 340-343).

     As in the Ghost Dance, the cargo cults are religions of the oppressed.

     Cargo cults offer a revivalistic appeal, as the cult followers believe through their prophecies and myth dreams that they will be reunited with long-dead ancestors in a golden age of prosperity. (Wallace, 1972: pp. 340-343).

     Cargo cults can also be seen as nativistic, as the cults also call for the presence of white people to be removed. (Wallace, 1972: p. 342).

     However, cargo cults differ from the Ghost Dance in one important area: The cargo cults are somewhat acculturalistic as they conveniently predict that when the whites vanish, they will leave behind all of their various material possessions - or cargo - for native use.

     Such a 'heritage' would thereby lead to the natives' adoption and expansion of alien ways and technology at the probable risk of losing some native ways.

     Describing the more extreme forms of cargo cults which feature an apocalypse of white people, Peter Worsley notes the cargo cults offer a heady mixture of salvation and revenge and prosperity.

     Worsley suggests that it's this promise of better times ahead that serves to lure many into the cult and turns an oppressed people into believers of a cult-offered salvation.
As Worsley observes:
     "...these cults all advance the same central theme: the world is about to end in a terrible cataclysm. Thereafter God, the ancestors, or some local hero will appear to inaugurate a blissful paradise on earth. Death, old age, illness and evil will be unknown. The riches of the white man will accrue to the Melanesians." (Worsley, 1959: p. 346).

     In contrast, the Ghost dance seeks a total rejection of both white people and their culture (with the exception of previously adopted technologies, horses and goods) while restoring native customs and ways.

     Instead of embracing white culture, the Ghost Dance strives to more fully restore the aboriginal culture which would then cease to fall under the influence of the formerly dominant, alien white culture. (Wallace, 1972: p. 342).

     Despite this significant difference, both the Ghost Dance and cargo cults share a greater number of similarities, already outlined, and both fall well within the bounds of revitalization movements. (Wallace, 1972: p. 342).

     Indeed, some later, more extreme versions of the Ghost Dance also called for an apocalypse of white people. (Wallace, 1972: p. 342).

     The concept of apocalypse gives comfort to followers of religions of the oppressed because it flows from a set of ultimately-rewarding assumptions, including: the belief that the present is a pivotal point in history in which great change will occur.

     Other assumptions include; that evil enemies who now dominate will soon be wiped out; and that the formerly-dominated people will rise from the wreckage to enjoy lives of abundance and happiness, free from former oppressors who would no longer exist. (Cummins, Green and Verhulst, 1972: p. 255).

     I. M. Lewis, a noted anthropology professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, has examined this phenomena and asserts that the spiritual power of "religions of the oppressed" often arises through the emergence of leaders who:
"...in response to new stimuli and pressures announce messianic revelations and inaugurate spiritually inspired religions with a new and wider appeal." (Lewis, 1986: p. 46).

     For the message of a spiritual leader or prophet to gain acceptance from the masses, a set of pre-revivalist movement conditions are usually present.

     The set of phases leading to a Ghost Dance is described by Wallace as including: a steady, calm state in which the society is somewhat at ease with itself and is not interested in radical change. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     Another phase is a period of increased stress in which "depression, famine, conquest by an outside, alien society, and acculturation pressures... lead to the awareness of a growing discrepancy between life as it is and life as it could be," notes Wallace. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     All of this, according to Wallace, results in a population in duress; And this in turn leads to a period of cultural distortion in which people find their intolerable situation cannot effectively be resolved through conventional beliefs or ways.

     And so, in desperation, they then turn to idiosyncratic, deviant or somewhat radical solutions. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     A movement phase follows in which a prophet emerges from the society's severe state of unrest with a soothing vision, allegedly sent from supernatural beings, which offers salvation and a better, even utopian, life to those who carry out the vision's instructions. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     Next, the prophet preaches his revelation to the people, attracting mass followers and social organization while converting disbelievers to the cause. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     And, finally, the prophecy may eventually become an institutionalized part of the society. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     Given the dire conditions Indians found themselves in, it is not altogether surprising that some of the oppressed Plains Indians went through the phases just described. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     Nor is it surprising that they turned to a prophet in their midst, and embraced the Ghost Dance as their way to escape oppression and achieve a better life. (Wallace, 1972: p. 341).

     In essence, a desperate people were embracing the Ghost Dance - tailor made to turn around the forces of oppression.

     As Russell Thornton observes:
"In response to severe demographic losses... social and cultural collapse, many western American Indian tribes... sought to re-establish former societies, cultures, even populations. To do so, they created two new religions, or revitalization movements - one around 1870, the other around 1890 - which were deliberate group efforts to reaffirm or recreate established ways of the past. Prophesied in both was a return... of American Indian dead through the performance of prescribed ceremonial dances. Hence the religious movements came to be known as Ghost Dances." (Thornton, 1987: p. 134).

     Alice Kehoe notes that the Ghost Dance originated in 1870 among the Paiute of Nevada. Devastated by small pox epidemics, the Walker River Paiute turned to band leader Wodziwob - also known as Fish Lake Joe - who led them in his own version of the dance. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

     The Wodziwob-Paiute Ghost Dance involved the painting of faces and dancing in a circle, round dances, along with trances and the dancers' expressed visions of a restoration of the lost buffalo herds. Wodziwob's Ghost Dance featured a return of the dead to the land of the living. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

     The formerly dead were to arrive in Nevada aboard a train from the east. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

     Although Wodziwob's Ghost Dance and vision of restored game were followed by a drought and no restoration of lost game or Indian ancestors, the Ghost Dance religion still spread throughout Nevada and into California. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

     It also spread as far north as Oregon where it rapidly came to be adopted by other tribes who added their own variations to the dance itself. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

The Klamath of Oregon practiced Ghost Dances from 1870 to 1873 when the ritual was suppressed by Indian agents of the American government who did not fully understand the ritual and were deeply distrustful of its practitioners and their aims. (Kehoe, 1992: p. 328).

     Describing this early manifestation of the Ghost Dance, Leslie Spier observes:
     "The Klamath thesis was the familiar one that the dead would return if the living danced in a prescribed fashion. Not only the people of the land of the dead, the Nolinskankni, but animals, fish, and food of every description would appear on earth again. The ghosts appeared to visionaries who danced themselves into a trance state, instructed them in the procedure of the dance and gave them songs for it." (Spier, 1927: p. 47).

     Recounting details relating to preparation for the Ghost Dance, Spier provides this illustrative passage:
"Dress was stripped away... Both sexes wore only the fringed skirts of sagebrush, the garb of those long dead... Only the face was painted; commonly in short lines marked diagonally inward down the cheeks and on the chin in many colours together. Such painting was dreamed; they saw the ghost painted in this fashion..." (Spier, 1927: p. 48).

     Of the Ghost Dance itself, Spier describes in detail an intricate ritual which began with Klamath participants avoiding sleep for many hours. (Spier, 1927: p. 49).

     This was in accordance with their professed belief that they would turn to stone if they gave in to sleep during the lengthy dance which began with the Klamath clasping hands and forming a circle ringed by small fires. (Spier, 1927: p. 49).

     Spier then adds:
     "At the centre of the circle was a striped pole; as each song was begun, the pole swayed to jangle cowbells tied to the top. As they danced, singing, some would topple unconscious in their tracks; then they dreamed songs given by the ghosts. They were carried to the centre and laid in a row while the dance went on without interruption. There were several men called dodeuks, dreamers or prophets, who tended them in their trance... They sprinkled the recumbent forms with branches of white sage dipped in water, and when they revived, led them back to the circle so that they could immediately sing the songs they had dreamed." (Spier, 1927: p. 49).

     In 1890, another Ghost Dance vision was expressed by another Nevada Paiute prophet, Wovoka, who was a child of 10 when Wodziwob's vision first generated excitement among the Nevada tribes.

     Wovoka's Ghost Dance of 1890 was also partly in response to the dispossession of huge tracts of land lost to settlement.

     And it was partly in response to the efforts of some Indian agents of the American government to assimilate - if not disintegrate - aboriginal cultures, in their zeal to take over lands.

     Not surprisingly, all of this served to further alienate the Indians.
As Janet McDonnell notes:
     "They demanded that the Indians adopt white ways and move into the twentieth century along with the rest of American society, even though the Indians already had their own highly developed culture and value system. The Indians had no concept of permanent ownership and title to land and did not place the same importance on money..." (McDonnell, 1991: p. 124).

     The Wovoka Ghost Dance, arriving 20 years after the first known Ghost Dances occurred, also in Nevada, was to have even more dramatic rates of participation and generate more excitement than the original.

     In the two-decade period leading up to Wovoka's Ghost Dance, the unacceptable conditions the Indians found themselves in had not improved. (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     In many ways, white domination had increased with new sets of regulations for the white-controlled Indian reserves. (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     The severity of these conditions provided a fertile breeding ground for a new Ghost Dance religion which would assure the troubled Indians that their culture and way of life were noble and worth keeping; that only the domination of an evil, alien presence was keeping them from fulfilling a greater destiny; that this situation would soon be corrected as the white presence would be wiped out; and dead Indians would soon rejoin the living in a new golden age. (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     Commenting on the Indians' dismal conditions and the rise of the Wovoka Ghost Dance, Robert Murphy observes:
     "The native peoples of the American West had been mostly subjugated and confined to reservations by the 1870s; their entire economic base had collapsed with the destruction of the buffalo herds and the occupation of their lands by the whites; their political systems had been smashed and outside coercive authority imposed on them; and their religions seemed largely irrelevant to their new way of life. In this atmosphere of total defeat and numbing discouragement, the preachings of a Nevada Paiute shaman named Jack Wovoka offered hope, spreading rapidly across the Rocky Mountains and the Great Plains." (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     The Ghost Dance also made its way into Canada where Plains Indians had also experienced the loss of the buffalo.

     However, the Plains Indians here
had generally encountered a less hostile federal government presence and the Ghost Dance was slower to catch on. (McMillan, 1988: pp. 145-146).

     In fact, the dance did not spread very far in Canada. As Alan McMillan observes:
     "The late religious cults which swept the American Plains were largely ignored in Canada. In their demoralized state, American Plains natives welcomed such messianic movements as the Ghost Dance... In Canada, the Ghost Dance religion was adopted by only small numbers of Dakota in Saskatchewan, and then without the militaristic interpretation of their American Kin." (McMillan, 1988: pp. 145-146).

     James Mooney, a nineteenth-century ethnologist who began studying the Wovoka Ghost Dance shortly after it first appeared, conducted an interview with Wovoka in 1892 to gain further insight into this version of the dance and the tragic slaughter of Sioux Indians, which followed its rapid spread. (Mooney, 1896: p. 15).

     In a report to the American government, Mooney advised that Wovoka had appeared honest and open during the interview. (Mooney, 1896: p. 15).

     For his part, Wovoka denied rumours that he was a reincarnation of Christ although he did assert that he was a prophet who had received the Ghost Dance vision while suffering from a severe fever. (Mooney, 1896: p. 15).

     Mooney also advised that the Ghost Dance was a peaceful phenomenon because although it preached the coming return of Indian dead and the vanishing of whites, nothing in its doctrine advocated the forceful expulsion of whites. (Mooney, 1896: p. 15).

     Mooney reported that the Ghost Dance had a high moral code of non-violence and merely expressed a belief that white people "will be left behind with the other things of the earth that have served their temporary purpose, or else will cease entirely to exist." (Mooney, 1896: p. 19).

     However, Mooney also observed that Wovoka's Ghost Dance became subjected to gross misinterpretations and outright distortions of meaning as it spread across the United States. (Mooney, 1896: p. 19-35).

     The Sioux of the Dakotas, embittered by land expropriations and suffering food shortages due to numerous sharp reductions in government-provided rations, gave the Ghost Dance its harshest interpretation, calling for a violent end to white people. (Mooney, 1896: p. 19-35).

     So caught up were they in the Ghost Dance culture, the Sioux also created specially-painted Ghost Shirts which were believed by some to be blessed by spirits to make them bullet-proof. (Mooney, 1896: p. 19-35).
As Reginald and Gladys Laubin would later observe of the Ghost Shirt:
"The early antagonism shown... to the new dance and the fact that the government had now sent up troop reinforcements to alleviate the settlers' fears led to the adoption of the Ghost Shirt as the most peculiar property in the Sioux Ghost Dance. The Ghost Shirt... was cut in the style of the old-time war shirt and sewed with sinew...The fringe and portions of the shirt were painted with sacred paint obtained from the Messiah... The Sioux were the only Indians to make the garments of cotton and to proclaim them bullet-proof. The Sioux medicine men started this belief in order to allay fears due to the presence of soldiers." (Laubin and Laubin, 1976: p. 60).

     Unfortunately for the Sioux, any belief that the Ghost Shirts were bullet-proof was soon proven to be completely unwarranted.

     As tensions mounted over the Ghost Dance, the soldiers observing it opened fire with tragic results. (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     As Murphy observes:
     "It was a thoroughly non-violent form of protest, but the whites were contemptuous of Indian religion and suspicious of any gatherings of large numbers of people. In this atmosphere, the U.S. Army attacked a Ghost Dance meeting at Wounded Knee on the Sioux reservation in South Dakota on December 29, 1890, killing over 200 children, women, and men, and even managing to hit a few of their own in the crossfire." (Murphy, 1979: p. 214).

     It is difficult to comprehend how, even given their state of deep despair, the Sioux were able to believe that cotton clothing could repel bullets.

     However, the late, Pulitzer Prize-winning social theorist, anthropologist, sociologist and psychologist Ernest Becker has shared some insightful thoughts on underlying motivations for any given culture embracing, beyond apparent reason, an unusual yet heroic mythology of salvation. (Becker, 1962: p. x).

     Becker suggest that such a seemingly bizarre action may stem from man's:
"…basic animal fears... his deep and indelible anxieties about his own impotence and death, and his fear of being overwhelmed and sucked up into the world and into others." (Becker, 1962: p. x).

     As Becker notes in an observation that could well apply to the Sioux:
"Whole societies have been able to persist with central beliefs that bore little relation to reality. About the only time a culture has to pay has been in encounters with conquerors superior in numbers, weapons, and immunity to disease." (Becker, 1962: p. 128).

     Finally, in a direct reference to the Sioux and the Ghost Shirt, Becker describes the result that can occur when a movement based purely on myth and wishes for a better life is finally exposed.

     As Becker notes:
     "...anthropology has taught us that when a culture comes up against reality on certain critical points of its perceptions, and proves them fictional, then that culture is indeed eliminated by what we would call 'natural selection'. When the Plains Indians hurled themselves against White man's bullets thinking themselves immune due to the protection of Guardian Spirits in the invisible world, they were mowed down pitilessly." (Becker, 1962: pp. 127-128).

     Although the Ghost Dance has survived as a sometimes-practiced cultural event, it has ceased to exist in the extreme, distorted and discredited form used by the Sioux in the late nineteenth century.

     The Ghost Dance simply no longer commands a mass following, having lost its deeper significance and purpose, and it's doubtful anyone now believes in the magical properties once attributed to Ghost Shirts.

     Yet, as we've seen, the Ghost Dance arose as a powerful cultural force and revivalist movement in the 1870s and again in the 1890s when it assumed an even stronger - and ultimately more tragic - form.

     The Ghost Dance offered a comforting and culture-justifying, religious expression which was both nativistic and revivalistic in content. It provided a utopian vision in response to overwhelmingly desperate conditions facing the Plains Indians.

     Those conditions, from the disappearance of the primary food source buffalo; to the loss of lands; to the forced regulations and military domination inflicted on the Indians, all provided a set of problems that were beyond human control, thus opening the way for supernatural solutions offered through a new religion preached by a new prophet.

     We've gained further insight into the Ghost Dance by exploring the existence of somewhat similar aboriginal responses to despair and oppression in other parts of the world.

     And we've examined some of the potential psychological and spiritual aspects of the Ghost Dance movement .

     From all of this analysis, the Ghost Dance has emerged as a less surprising and unusual phenomenon than it may at first have appeared.

     Indeed, based on all of the evidence cited, this paper has shown that the Ghost Dance was an understandable, if somewhat radical, response to severe problems that defied anything less than a supernatural solution.