WANÁGI WACHÍPI KI¸The Ghost Dance Among the Lakota Indians in 1890 - a Multidimensional interpretation

Abstract

Tämä tutkimus tarkastelee vuosina 1889-1890 Yhdysvaltain intiaanien keskuudessa laajalle levinnyttä, henkitanssina, tunnettua uskonnollista liikettä. Erityistarkastelun kohteena on sioux-kansan suurimman ryhmän, lakotojen, henkitanssi. Heidän harjoittamanaan henkitanssi aiheutti levottomuutta valkoisen väestön keskuudessa ja johti Yhdysvaltain armeijan lähettämiseen lakotojen reservaatteihin. Tämä puolestaan johti monien väärinkäsitysten kautta kuuluisaan Wounded Kneen verilöylyyn, josta muodostui Yhdysvaltain intiaanisotien loppunäytös.

Tutkimuksessa käytetään ns. moniäänistä (multiple Voices and Viewpoints)tutkimusmetodia, joka sallii useiden eri menneisyyden "äänten" kertoa tarinansa. Kyseistä metodia ovat Yhdysvaltalaiset tutkijat Patricia N. Limerick ja Robert F. Berkhofer käyttäneet menestyksekkäästi omissa tutkimuksissaan. Tällä tavoin tämä työ osaltaan vastaa ns. New Western History -tradition esiin nostamiin kysymyksiin Yhdysvaltain Lännen tutkimuksessa.

Tutkimus tuo uusia näkökulmia siihen kehitykseen, joka johti Wounded Kneen verilöylyyn ja se antaa aivan uudenlaisia mahdollisuuksia ymmärtää tätä hyvin monimutkaista taphtumaketjua, jossa eri kulttuureja, rotuja ja uskontoja edustaneet ihmiset joutuivat ristiriitoihin keskenään.

Vaikka tässä tutkimuksessa esimerkkinä on käytetty lakotojen henkitanssia, on tämä metodi sopiva muihinkin Yhdysvaltain Länttä koskeviin tutkimuksiin, etenkin kun kyse on rotujen, kulttuurien ja uskontojen välisistä konflikteista.

In the late 1880s a revitalization movement known as the ghost dance swept across the North American plains and galvanized tens of thousands of Indians from more than 30 tribes. The ghost dance was a religious movement that took many forms as it passed from one tribe to another, yet its core message of return to the old ways and a future of peace and happiness remained the same. The ghost dance was the physical expression of a religious movement that advocated peace. The most important instructions of the prophet of the religion, a Paiute Indian called Wovoka, were: You must not do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. According to Wovoka, the whites were going to disappear in a great earthquake, and only those Indians who believed in his message were to survive. Then they would live forever in a world of happiness where no hunger or disease would exist. To make all this to happen, the Indians were to dance a certain sacred dance. Thus no fighting was needed to bring about this new Indian paradise.

In the late 1880s Indians in the United States were living on reservations where they were fed and clothed by the government. They were basically poor wards of the government with little hope for the future. The ghost dance offered new hope to Indians, who had been forced to give away their lands and abandon their traditional ways of living. Even their religious ceremonies were forbidden. The ghost dance, however, returned religious ceremonies to a central place in the daily lives of the Indians. All over the Western United States Indians started to dance and pray as Wovoka taught. Unfortunately, among the Lakotas, the western branch of the Sioux people, the dance produced tragic consequences. The United States military, under orders to put a stop to what many whites thought was a war dance, opened fire on Lakotas in December 1890 resulting in what would become known as the Wounded Knee massacre.

The Lakota ghost dance has been the subject of a wide scholarly and public interest from the late nineteenth century throughout the twentieth century. The first publications about the Lakota ghost dance that used historical documents as source material were published as early as 1891. James P. Boyd s Recent Indian Wars, Under the Lead of Sitting Bull and Other Chiefs; With Full Account of the Messiah Craze and Ghost Dances and Willis Fletcher Johnson s The Red Record of the Sioux. Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890-1891, for example, were among the very first to set the tone in studying the Lakota ghost dance. Articles in various journals and magazines soon followed. The first and foremost study of the ghost dance is The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 by the early anthropologist James Mooney. The book was originally a part of the 14th Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution 1892-1893 and was a result of several years investigation of the ghost dance among various Indian tribes. Mooney s work is still essential and invaluable, but also somewhat problematic and contains some errors. Among the Lakotas, for example, Mooney was not able to get any information from the Indians. The Lakotas simply refused to talk to him: The dance was our religion we will not talk any more about it, was their reply to Mooney s requests. For this reason his study, although the first actual attempt to try to understand the ghost dance as a religious movement, lacks information from the Lakotas themselves. Even the Lakota ghost dance songs he published were received from a local schoolteacher Emma C. Sickles who, in turn, got them from George Sword, an Indian informant. Mooney constructed his story of the Lakota ghost dance and the outbreak, as he calls it, from primary government documents and newspapers, but not with the help of Indian informants like he was able to do among several other Indian tribes.

From the very beginning the Lakota ghost dance was studied mainly from the perspectives of white Americans, and the Lakotas views were only briefly incorporated into this main narrative. These earliest accounts created a tradition of treating the Lakota ghost dance as a military, political, or religious-political movement. Their approach is well characterized by phrases such as Sioux outbreak, Messiah Craze or ghost dance war, so often used even in the titles of these works. This tradition continued into the late twentieth century, when alternative interpretations have emerged. While some of these accounts do incorporate the Lakotas point of view as a legitimate part of the story, most fail to put the ghost dance in a wider cultural and social context. Often these accounts are written to convey a particular perspective, focus narrowly on some specific aspects of the Lakota ghost dance, or are analyzed chronologies. All too often the story of the Lakota ghost dance, even in some of the most recent accounts, is based on already existing literature or one-sided interpretations of the primary documents. However, critical analysis of the primary sources is essential, since they do not simply reveal facts, but must be interpreted in the context of the late nineteenth century.