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
I found my children were bad, so I went back to heaven and left
them, I told them that in so many hundred years I would come back
to see my children. At the end of this time I was sent back to try
to teach them. My father told me the earth was getting old and worn
out and the people getting bad, and that I was to renew everything
as it used to be and make it better.
He also told us that all our dead were to be resurrected; that
they were all to come back to earth, and that, as the earth was
too small for them and us, he would do away with heaven and make
the earth itself large enough to contain us all; that we must tell
all the people we met about these things. He spoke to us about
fighting, and said that was bad and we must keep from it; that the
earth was to be all good hereafter, and we must all be friends with
one another. He said that in the fall of the year the youth of all
good people would be renewed, so that nobody would be more than
forty years old, and that if they behaved themselves well after
this the youth of everyone would be renewed in the spring. He said
if we were all good he would send people among us who could heal
all our wounds and sickness by mere touch and that we would live
forever. He told us not to quarrel or fight or strike each other,
or shoot one another; that the whites and Indians were to be all
one people. He said if any man disobeyed what he ordered his tribe
would be wiped from the face of the earth; that we must believe
everything he said, and we must not doubt him or say he lied; that
if we did, he would know it; that he would know our thoughts and
actions in no matter what part of the world we might be. (_G. D.,
5._)
Here we have the statement that both races are to live together as one.
We have also the doctrine of healing by touch. Whether or not this is
an essential part of the system is questionable, but it is certain that
the faithful believe that great physical good comes to them, to their
children, and to the sick from the imposition of hands by the priests
of the dance, apart from the ability thus conferred to see the things
of the spiritual world.
Another idea here presented, namely, that the earth becomes old and
decrepit, and requires that its youth be renewed at the end of certain
great cycles, is common to a number of tribes, and has an important
place in the oldest religions of the world. As an Arapaho who spoke
English expressed it, “This earth too old, grass too old, trees too
old, our lives too old. Then all be new again.” Captain H. L. Scott
also found among the southern plains tribes the same belief that the
rivers, the mountains, and the earth itself are worn out and must be
renewed, together with an indefinite idea that both races alike must
die at the same time, to be resurrected in new but separate worlds.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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