The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890 : $b Fourteenth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, part 2.Mooney, James
Religion
The Ghost-dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890 : $b Fourteenth annual report of the Bureau of Ethnology, part 2.
Mooney, James
Dakota Indians -- Wars, 1890-1891; Ghost dance
were honest in their statements.
As a result of the confidence established between the Indians and
myself in consequence of my visit to the messiah, one of the Cheyenne
delegates named Black Sharp Nose, a prominent man in his tribe, soon
after voluntarily brought down to me the written statement of the
doctrine obtained from the messiah himself, and requested me to take it
back and show it to Washington, to convince the white people that there
was nothing bad or hostile in the new religion. The paper had been
written by a young Arapaho of the same delegation who had learned some
English at the Carlisle Indian school, and it had been taken down on
the spot from the dictation of the messiah as his message to be carried
to the prairie tribes. On the reverse page of the paper the daughter
of Black Sharp Nose, a young woman who had also some school education,
had written out the same thing in somewhat better English from her
father’s dictation on his return. No white man had any part, directly
or indirectly, in its production, nor was it originally intended to be
seen by white men. In fact, in one part the messiah himself expressly
warns the delegates to tell no white man.
+Chapter X+
THE DOCTRINE OF THE GHOST DANCE
You must not fight. Do no harm to anyone. Do right always.—_Wovoka._
The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine is that
the time will come when the whole Indian race, living and dead, will
be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal
happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. On this
foundation each tribe has built a structure from its own mythology, and
each apostle and believer has filled in the details according to his
own mental capacity or ideas of happiness, with such additions as come
to him from the trance. Some changes, also, have undoubtedly resulted
from the transmission of the doctrine through the imperfect medium of
the sign language. The differences of interpretation are precisely such
as we find in Christianity, with its hundreds of sects and innumerable
shades of individual opinion. The white race, being alien and secondary
and hardly real, has no part in this scheme of aboriginal regeneration,
and will be left behind with the other things of earth that have served
their temporary purpose, or else will cease entirely to exist.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account