A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance by Rani-Henrik Andersson (review)

Abstract

RaniHenrik Andersson’s impeccably researched book makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the Ghost Dance that swept across Lakota country in 1890 during one of the darkest periods of tribal history marked by extreme famine, governmental and Christian assimilationist policies, persecution, and forced relocation into the new reservation system. White settler and government fears of the Ghost Dance set into motion the tragic events that would ultimately culminate in the 7th Cavalry’s massacre of some 350 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation on December 29, 1890. Building from his previous work, The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), Andersson breaks new ground by privileging a wide range of Lakota voices as the exclusive subject of this study of the Ghost Dance. His research is rich in primary materials that he carefully curates while pointing out how certain Ghost Dance accounts have become standardized over others, and how some Lakota language sources have been riddled with errors and mistranslations. Andersson revisits over 100 firsthand Lakota accounts pulled from across an impressive collection of archives and organizes these “voices” into four distinct categories that make clear there never was a single Lakota perspective on this historic ceremony inspired by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Andersson also notes there have been very few recorded accounts by Lakota women on the Ghost Dance. To his credit, he brings women into the conversation by including several of their voices in this study— most notably Alice Ghost Horse and Josephine Waggoner. The handful of other women are cited as “anonymous woman” or “anonymous Lakota girls”— stark reminders that their voices and identities have long been halfhidden in the shadow of the archives. Andersson wistfully acknowledges in the final pages of A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country that there is a fifth category of Lakota voices that remains beyond his reach as a nonnative scholar. Lakota stories of the Ghost Dance and its aftermath have been carefully passed down through an oral tradition across eight generations of descendants. It will be up to a new generation of rising Native scholars and historians alone to decide what from this private collection of firsthand accounts can be respectfully shared with those who wish to learn more about the Ghost Dance beyond the limits of the archive and the written page.