Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century

by Gregory Ellis Smoak

Book Overview

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."...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0520256271
• ISBN13: 9780520256279
• Release Date: March 2008
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"