Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context

Western Folklore, Winter 1999 by Browner, Tara

Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion: Poetry Songs and Great Basin Context. By Judith Vander. Music in American Life. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Pp.xxiv+ 631, preface, key to orthography, note on textual transcription and translation, key to musical transcriptions, photographs, maps, epilogue, appendices, notes, references, index. $65.00, cloth)

According to most texts about Native North American societies, women lived (and live) on the musical margins, possessing limited repertoires rarely worth recording and preservation. Indian women and their lives did not catch the eyes and ears of ethnomusicologists until the last two decades, despite the fact that some of the earliest and arguably most influential scholars on Native music and culture were themselves women, including Alice Fletcher, Helen Hunt Roberts, Frances Densmore, and Ruth Benedict. Unfortunately, none of them spent time documenting the place of women in Indian musical life, something especially disheartening in the light of how many songs have been lost in the last century, most often in tandem with the erosion of indigenous land bases and languages.

Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of female scholars specializing in the study of indigenous North American musics emerged from the academy. Although none initially focused exclusively on women's musics, a number included inquiries about women (or girl)-centered ceremonies, or female roles within the larger tribal society as components of their work. During this time, Judith Vander was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. While doing fieldwork on the Wind River Shoshone reservation in Wyoming, she forged relationships with two elderly sisters, Emily Hill and Dorothy Tappay, who would serve as her primary consultants for Ghost Dance Songs and Religion of a Wind River Shoshone Woman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), and Songprints: The Musical Experience of Fine Shoshone Women (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), works which finally broke the scholarly barrier by focusing directly upon Native women and their music.

Vander's focus on the Ghost Dance for her third book on Shoshone musical life draws from her earlier work with Hill and Tappay, and is in one sense a memorial to them, as the warmth of their friendship resonates throughout the text. Also inspired by James Mooney's massive study of the Great Plains Ghost Dance a century earlier, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Reprint. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [1896] 1991), Vander purposely attempted to release her book on the one-hundredth anniversary of Mooney's study. The contrast between the two works, each of which represents a larger philosophical approach to documenting Indian life, could not be greater.

Mooney's work, until now considered the definitive history of the Ghost Dance and related Native North American apocalyptic movements, was broad and shallow, stressing "salvage-ethnology": a common attitude among ethnologists of his time, most of whom were bent upon saving traces of disappearing Indian culture for "posterity" before all the Indians "vanished" (although for whose posterity it is not clear). In contrast, Vander's Great Basin orientation is narrow and deep, stressing the connections between Shoshone life and their Naraya ceremony, principal precursor to the Pan-Indian Ghost Dance. Although she gives brief outlines of the 1870 and 1890 Ghost Dance movements, Vander's focus on a single division (Western) of a single tribal group, combined with an emphasis on song poetics, differs remarkably from any previous Ghost Dance studies, most of which center on historical events.

After the first two introductory chapters, Shoshone Ghost Dance Religion is organized according to a Shoshone cosmology of song contexts, with five core chapters on water, mountains, animals (including spirits), plants, and beings that "inhabit the sky" (310). The concluding three chapters discuss textual and musical analysis, and song text comparisons of Naraya with Great Plains Ghost Dance texts. The central five chapters on songs, all transcribed and translated, are where the author's dialogic methodology shines: After each song, the first and privileged-commentaries and interpretations are those of Hill and Tappay. Only after the two sisters have their say are academics allowed to speak. At the same time, Vander occasionally falls into one of the pit falls of the dialogic method by coming dangerously close to leading her consultants when their answers are unclear (314). Other commentaries, which include the phrase "I believe Emily means..." (314), use this style of interpretation by necessity, since Hill was deceased by the time Vander began work on Ghost Dance Songs.

Vander's work offers those with minimal knowledge of American indigenous history and culture an accessible window into the lives, music, and oral texts of the Western Shoshone, one of the least-glamorized and commercialized Indian groups in the United States. In clear and concise prose, the author presents the rich Shoshone past as flowing into a surviving Shoshone present, assisting two elderly women in preserving their culture for their own posterity as well as ours.