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
SMOHALLA
I have only one heart. Although you say, Go to another country, my
heart is not that way. I do not want money for my land. I am here,
and here is where I am going to be. I will not part with lands, and
if you come again I will say the same thing. I will not part with
my lands.—_Umatilla Chief._
We have never made any trade. The earth is part of my body, and I
never gave up the earth. So long as the earth keeps me I want to be
let alone.—_Toohulhulsote._
Their only troubles arise from the attempts of white men to
encroach upon the reservations. I verily believe that were the
snow-crowned summits of Mount Rainier set apart as an Indian
reservation, white men would immediately commence jumping
them.—_Superintendent Ross._
About the time that the Paiute were preparing for the millennial
dawn, we begin to hear of a “dreamer prophet” on the Columbia, called
Smohalla, who was becoming a thorn in the flesh of the Indian agents
in that quarter, and was reported to be organizing among the Indians a
new religion which taught the destruction of the whites and resistance
to the government, and made moral virtues of all the crimes in the
catalog. One agent, in disregard of grammar if not of veracity,
gravely reported that “the main object is to allow a plurality of
wives, immunity from punishment for lawbreaking, and allowance of all
the vices—especially drinking and gambling—are chief virtues in the
believers of this religion.” (_Comr., 8._)
This was bad enough, but worse was behind it. It appeared that Smohalla
and his followers, numbering perhaps about 2,000 Indians of various
tribes along the Columbia in eastern Washington and Oregon, had never
made treaties giving up any of their lands, and consequently claimed
the right to take salmon in the streams and dig kamas in the prairies
of their ancestral country undisturbed and unmolested, and stoutly
objected to going on any of the neighboring reservations at Yakima,
Umatilla, or Warmspring. There is no doubt that justice and common
sense were on the side of the Indians, for by the reports of the agents
themselves it is shown that the dwellers on the reservations were
generally neglected, poor, and miserable, and subjected to constant
encroachments by the whites in spite of treaties and treaty lines,
while at the same time that agents and superintendents were invoking
the aid of the military to compel Smohalla’s followers to go on a
reservation these same men were moving heaven and earth to force the
Indians already on a reservation to give up their treaty rights and
remove to another and less valuable location—to begin life anew under
the fostering care of the government until such time as the white man
should want them to move on again.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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