week of 7/3/02
 
 
 

Appealing to the skies in time of need
By George Ellison

“These late eclipses of the sun and moon
portend no good to us. Though the wisdom
of Nature can reason it thus and thus ...
Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers
divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries,
discord ... We have seen the best of times
... Machinations, hollowness, treachery and
all ruinous disorders follow us to our graves.

— William Shakespeare, “King Lear”



Have you ever noticed how the more things supposedly change the more they seem to remain the same? In times of dismay and danger, we inevitably look to the skies and revert to ritual ... trying to appease the gods, we play drums, we sing, we chant, and we dance.

The Cherokees living here in the southern mountains did so, as we shall see, during the pre-removal era. Few know that there was a Ghost Dance movement among the Cherokees 80 years before the infamous epoch in the American west that culminated in the Indian massacre at Wounded Knee.

What set me to thinking about the western Ghost Dance in relation to the eastern Cherokees was an Associated Press wire release posted on the Indian News list-serve — IndNews@aol.com. If you subscribe to this free service, you get a daily summary of Native American news from across North America.

Published June 28, 2002, and datelined “Fort Apache Indian Reservation, Ariz.,” the story was written by Brian Melley:

“As a flaming orange moon rose in the smoky sky, an Apache medicine man raised his voice in song to pray for rain to save both the Indians’ land and their livelihoods ... More than half of the forest blackened by the biggest wildfire in Arizona history lies on this reservation ... The blaze was formed from the convergence of two fires. One was caused by a lost hiker, a non-Indian who lit a signal fire; officials do not know who started the second fire.

“‘To us, the land provides — when part of our land is destroyed, we feel our home is destroyed,’ said an Apache spokesman. ‘It’s always been a part of us. This land is where we are going to live and where we are going to die.’

“On Wednesday night, nearly 100 members of the tribe gathered at the tribe’s holy ground, near tribal ruins outside of Whiteriver, to pray throughout the night for healing. The medicine man, Harris Burnette, beat his water-filled drum and called for an end to the fire. The chorus of male voices joined in, their song punctuated with an occasional whoop. The patter of feet quickened in the soft earth as the women moved clockwise in their long camp dresses, swaying with crosses as they danced. Winds died, smoke began to settle along the mountains and the only thing overhead was a sky full of stars. But no rain.”

(The gods were not appeased, and for the Apaches things have just gotten worse. As I write this on July 1, national headlines scream that Leonard Gregg, 29, a firefighter for the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs has admitted setting one of the Arizona fires. Gregg, alas, is a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe.)

Flash back 113 years. In January 1889, a Paiute Indian named Wavoka (aka Jack Wilson), while suffering from high fever, had a vision during a total eclipse of the sun. This revelation became the genesis of the religious movement known as the Ghost Dance. At first the Indians believed the dance would simply unite them with friends and relatives in the ghost world. As the movement spread from tribe to tribe, however, the dancers began to imagine that the dance would make them invincible.

It consisted of slow shuffling movements following the course of the sun. It would be performed for four or five days and was accompanied by singing and chanting. It would, they imagined, cause the world to open up and swallow all other people, while the Indians and their friends would remain on this land, which would return to its beautiful and natural state. In addition, a ghost shirt made of buckskin cloth was said to render the wearer immune to bullets.

The unity and fervor that the Ghost Dance movement inspired, however, caused only fear and hysteria among white settlers and contributed to the events ending in the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. When the smoke cleared and the gunfire ceased, more than 300 Sioux, some wearing ghost shirts, lay dead.

Flash back another 78 years. The story of the much earlier Cherokee version of the Ghost Dance is related in an essay titled “The Cherokee Ghost Dance Movement of 1811-1813” by William G. McLoughlin in the book The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861 (Mercer University Press, 1984). McLoughlin’s essay is presented as an overview of the extant 19th century accounts of the movement: as told by two Cherokees, Major Ridge and James Wafford; as published in the “Cherokee (Oklahoma) Advocate” in 1844; as recorded in the official mission diaries, 1811-1812, of the Moravians; and as observed by two U.S. Indian agents. It was James Mooney, author of Myths of the Cherokees (1900), who first characterized the events as a Ghost Dance movement. Mooney, who lived among the Cherokees during the late 1880s, was also the author of The Ghost-Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, the definitive study of the western events.

McLoughlin summarizes the eastern Ghost Dance events as follows, with this writer’s additions in brackets:

“In the troubled years 1811-1812 ... a prophet named Charlie [i.e., Tsali, but not the individual involved in the Removal events of 1838] appeared among the Cherokee and described a dream or vision in which the Great Spirit spoke to him. [Some accounts speak of there being several prophets rather than just one.] The Great Spirit said he was angry with the Cherokees because they had departed from the customs and religious practices of their ancestors and were adopting the ways of the white man. To regain the favor of the Great Spirit and overcome their troubles, the Cherokees were told by their prophet to give up everything they had acquired from the whites (clothing, cattle, plows, spinning wheels, featherbeds, fiddles, cats, books) and return to the old ways: they must dance their old dances ... The prophet also said that those who did not heed this message would be punished and some would die. [‘Now I have told you the will of the Great Spirit, and you must pass on it,’ he is reported to have said in one account, ‘But if you don’t believe my words, look up into the sky’] Though Charlie met some opposition, he found many ready to accept his revelations, and he went on to say that it had been revealed to him that on a specific date, three months hence, a terrific wind and hailstorm would take place that would annihilate al the white men, all the cattle, and all the works of the white man. [Some accounts predicted a three-day eclipse rather than a hailstorm.] The hailstones would be ‘as large as hominy blocks’ and would crush all those who did not retreat to a special, charmed spot high in the Great Smoky Mountains where they would be safe. [The charmed spot was perhaps Clingmans Dome, the highest peak in the Smokies, which the Cherokees know as Yonah.] After the storm, these true believers would be able to return to their towns where they would find all of the deer, elk, buffalo, and the other game that had disappeared. Then they would live again as their ancestors did in the golden era before the white man came.”

Well, the prophet’s predictions didn’t pan out, of course. The Ghost Dance fervor among the Cherokees withered and died. In the end, as was inevitable, the white man’s superior numbers won out. Four thousand Cherokees died during the 1838 forced removal. No telling how many of them died in the various wars and confrontations prior to that date. But we and they keep looking to the skies. We keep on dancing. What else is there to do?

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com