19th century american history
19th century native american history
A01=Gregory Smoak
american indian ghost dance movement
american indians
Author_Gregory Smoak
bannocks
Category=JBSL11
Category=JHM
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=QRRT
cultural studies
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnogenesis
ghost dance
history
identity
indigenous cultures
indigenous peoples
missionary
nationalism
native american culture
native americans
native peoples
new religion
politics
prophets
race in america
religion
reservation life
shamans
shoshones
social identity
spiritual
supernatural forces
united states government
united states of america
Product details
- ISBN 9780520256279
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 11 Mar 2008
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This innovative cultural history examines wide-ranging issues of religion, politics, and identity through an analysis of the American Indian Ghost Dance movement and its significance for two little-studied tribes: the Shoshones and Bannocks. The Ghost Dance has become a metaphor for the death of American Indian culture, but as Gregory Smoak argues, it was not the desperate fantasy of a dying people but a powerful expression of a racialized 'Indianness'. While the Ghost Dance did appeal to supernatural forces to restore power to native people, on another level it became a vehicle for the expression of meaningful social identities that crossed ethnic, tribal, and historical boundaries. Looking closely at the Ghost Dances of 1870 and 1890, Smoak constructs a far-reaching, new argument about the formation of ethnic and racial identity among American Indians.
He examines the origins of Shoshone and Bannock ethnicity, follows these people through a period of declining autonomy vis-a-vis the United States government, and finally puts their experience and the Ghost Dances within the larger context of identity formation and emerging nationalism which marked United States history in the nineteenth century.
Gregory E. Smoak is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Colorado State University.
