In November 1890, anthropologist and conservationist George Bird
Grinnell reported that tribes living in Indian Territory “frequently” received
letters from “Northern Indians . . . touching on religious topics.” He noted that Northern and Southern Cheyennes, separated by a thousand miles, regularly
visited “back and forth” and kept “a constant correspondence by letter”
with each other. Shoshones and Northern Arapahos at the Wind River
Reservation in Wyoming were
sending “reports and letters . . . relative
to the second coming” of Christ, which created interest among Southern
Cheyennes and Arapahos. “The new Messiah excitement had taken possession”
of the Cheyennes, Arapahos, and Pawnees he visited, “and fills their
minds to the exclusion of everything
else.” Some of the letters, Grinnell
said, contained “most extravagant statements, which, however, are received
by the Indians with implicit faith.” Grinnell also noticed that “a lot of letters”
were
being received by the Pawnees from the “Sioux,” who were
“trying
to get the Pawnees to unite with them.” Grinnell thought the intertribal
correspondence regarding this new Ghost Dance religious movement was
“one of the disadvantages, perhaps, of the Indian education.” Using skills
learned in government schools, Indians were
spreading information that
seemed to conflict with the goals of Americanization and was outside the
control of the US government.
The intertribal networks of correspondence and off-reserve
visitation
that formed in the 1870s and 1880s facilitated the rapid dissemination of the
Ghost Dance in 1889 and 1890. By the time Grinnell noticed what was going
on at the Cheyenne-Arapaho
Reservation, most Native Americans in the
country had already heard about the Ghost Dance, and thousands believed
in its decolonizing promises to make their world better. No other religious
movement reached so many Native Americans in such a short amount of
time. Information was sought, gathered, and relayed across a network that
spanned the continent. Some Natives defended the movement, and others
criticized it, but because
of the well-established
networks among tribes, a
set of ideas originating in the mind of a Paiute in western Nevada named
Wovoka (or Jack Wilson) became part of a continental, Native-controlled
conversation (with believers from southern Arizona to Saskatchewan).
The Ghost Dance movement
was intentionally transmitted, via all methods of late nineteenth-century
transportation and communication, among Paiutes, Hualapais, Shoshones,
Bannocks, Utes, Northern and Southern Arapahos, Northern and Southern
Cheyennes, Lakotas, Eastern and Western Dakotas, Kiowas, Apaches,
Wichitas, Pawnees, Poncas, Crows, Mandans and Hidatsas, Blackfeet, and
many others.
