From Lakota Woman...a reflection...

After reading the clipping from Mary Dog Crow, I feel slightly awestruck…not by anything in particular either; only by the power with which this woman writes about her culture. In the article, Mary Dog Crow describes a resurrection of an ancient tradition of the Plains Indians: the Ghost Dance.
The Ghost Dance and its accompanying songs developed in the 1890’s. When the Native Americans were going through their hardest time on reservations, a new religion began to circulate; something like a combination of Christianity and the Native American Paganism. Wovoka, who was a Paiute Indian, said he had been sent from heaven with a prophecy. The prophecy stated that, if all Plains Indians preformed the sacred Ghost Dance, then they would be removed from the Earth while it was remodeled. The white men would be buried under fresh soil, and the Indians would be returned to the land they used to have. This caused the agents in charge of the reservations to panic which, in turn, led to the Wounded Knee Massacre in December 1890.
She says that you can’t live off of the legends of others like a parasite…at least not forever. At some point, you need to make your own. She and her husband returned to Cankpe Opi, a hollow close to where Wounded Knee occurred, and danced with others in a final Ghost Dance in 1970. They still had to do it in secret, afraid if the “feds” found them, but they did it…that is so powerful to me. It isn’t like they expected the prophecy of Wovoka to come true; but by doing this ancient ritual, they brought themselves closer to the Earth and to Her spirit. I can feel the power ebbing in and out of the words she types, and also feel the pain she must have felt to watch. A mixture, really, of pain and joy: joy that her people (even those of different tribes) were united again…but pain that so many had to die in order to accomplish it. How much strength she and her husband have; it is amazing, primal almost, to feel that spiritual energy, even from a paper dotted with the tears of a pen.
I hope that, by doing this, they found what they were looking for.