The Ghost Dance and Resistance in American Philosophy

As I have been discussing, contemporary American philosophers Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt claim that pluralism in American philosophy is linked to philosophical resistance. Pluralist American philosophies are resistant in theory and practice, since they arise from lived experiences that are different from the dominant patterns of experience in the United States, and they guide thoughtful practices that challenge dominant ways of living and provide alternatives. 

The first example of a resistant practice that they mention is the Native American Ghost Dance. According to their account, in the spring of 1890, Kicking Bear, an Oglala Lakota Sioux, addressed a Lakota council and described “a journey to the Great Spirit who entrusted him with a message for all Native American peoples that, with sufficient faith and the practice of a ceremony called the Ghost Dance, white people would be covered over with earth, indigenous plants and animals would be restored to the land, and Native peoples would again ‘eat and drink, hunt and rejoice’” (p. xi). 

White people interpreted the Ghost Dance as a “curiosity,” a “craze,” “fanaticism,” and finally “a certain cause for war.” The U.S. military prepared for war even as Lakota people such as Little Wound explained to a New York Times’ reporter that “our dance is a religious dance” and made pleas for peace rather than war (p. xi). The United States Army’s response to the Ghost Dance and Lakota resistance ended in the massacre of several hundred Sioux at Wounded Knee (p. xi-xii). 

The Lakota and other Native American peoples were attempting to defend their culture and ways of living and to affirm a self-determined future. However, “while the Ghost Dance offered hope to Native peoples, it posed deep questions for whites…Was it possible to coexist with people who held such beliefs [as the Ghost Dance]?” (p. xii). It was a practice of resistance. It defended alternative ways of living to the hegemonic patterns. 

McKenna and Pratt hold that, in the end, most white people responded with one of two attitudes that quashed the possibility of coexisting with difference. Whites either demanded the assimilation to their culture or the exclusion and even extermination of people who were different from them (p. xii). They were unable to offer a pluralist response that could allow coexistence in a context of difference. I have discussed McKenna and Pratt’s thesis in previous entries. 

I want to turn, rather, to reflect on various ways of dancing as forms not only of cultural resistance but of recreation of communal bonds. 

Citations: Erin McKenna and Scott Pratt, American Philosophy: From Wounded Knee to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).

1890 Sioux Ghost Dance Illustration - "Large Circle" by Mary Irvin Wright