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Ethnography, Reform, and the Problem of the Real: James Mooney's Ghost-Dance Religion

1998; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 50; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/aq.1998.0020

1080-6490

Michael A. Elliott,

Archaeology and Natural History

Ethnography, Reform, and the Problem of the Real: James Mooney's Ghost-Dance Religion Michael A. Elliott (bio) Mak' sito'maniyañ ukiye, Oya'te uki'ye, oya'te uki'ye, Wa'ñbali oya'te wañ hoshi'hi-ye lo, Ate heye lo, ate heye lo, Maka o'wañcha'ya uki'ye Pte kiñ ukiye, pte kiñ ukiye, Kañghi oya'te wañ hoshi'hi-ye lo, A'te he'ye lo, a'te he'ye lo. The whole world is coming, A nation is coming, a nation is coming, The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe. The father says so, the father says so. Over the whole earth they are coming. The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, The Crow has brought the message to the tribe, The father says so, the father says so. Sioux Ghost Dance song as transcribed and translated by James Mooney in The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896). We are for a vanishing policy. —Merrill E. Gates, "President's Address," The Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Lake Mohonk Friends of the Indian (1899). In the late nineteenth century, an ideology of the real came to play a crucial role in the arenas of American art, science, and [End Page 201] politics. 1 American realist ideology, larger than the aesthetic movement commonly referred to as literary realism, emphasized the bifurcation of the "romantic" and the "real," and it also suggested that this division held the key to social improvement. 2 A speech made in 1896 by Amherst College president Merrill E. Gates at the Lake Mohonk Friends of the Indian Conference reveals something of the power and importance of this approach, especially in the relationship of the United States to the indigenous peoples living within its borders: Perhaps our work in the successive sessions of this Mohonk Conference might be epitomized in the phrase, letting go the Indian of romance, and learning what the real Indian is and how to help him to intelligent citizenship, to civilization, and to Christianization. We are no longer seriously misled by the romantic ideal of the Indian which those most entertaining novels of Fenimore Cooper made current. (emphasis added) 3 Gates's "Friends of the Indian," those reformers who hoped to Americanize the indigenous peoples of the United States by breaking up the reservations and enrolling young Indians in boarding schools, argued that their ability to aid American Indians rested in their divestment of romantic notions of Native American life. As realists, they believed that they could take a hard-nosed look at U.S.-Native relations and devise more effective strategies for the survival of indigenous peoples by recognizing the economic issues at the heart of their understanding of the real. Working under the premise that the real was connected to a certain kind of suffering and to a particular relationship with property, the realist reformers' efforts to learn "what the real Indian is" were intimately connected to their contention that assimilation, rather than tribal sovereignty or revitalization, held the only possible solution to "the Indian question." 4 During this same period, ethnographers were often considered, by themselves and by the reformers, to be working toward a much different end. Founded in 1879 under the leadership of John Wesley Powell, the Bureau of American Ethnology attempted to describe with often painstaking precision and accuracy the details of Native American life during the same years that the "Friends" were most active. 5 Such efforts, these social scientists believed, would salvage the invaluable scientific information that would be lost if Native peoples became either Americanized or physically extinct. A discipline in the process of developing its professional standards, late-nineteenth-century ethnography [End Page 202] aimed to document tribal ways of life at the same time in which the "Friends" were assiduously laboring to eradicate them. And yet despite these differences with realist reform, late-nineteenth century ethnography, too, participated in and contended with the period's stress upon a specific version of the real. The ethnographers were after "real" Indians, not those portrayed by Cooper novels nor the characters offered Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, nor those who had become...