Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
71. What is the Ghost Dance?
Indigenous Religious Traditions in Five Minutes - Molly Bassett
Tiffany Hale [+]
Barnard College, Columbia University
Tiffany Hale is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University. She is a scholar of Indigenous religious traditions whose work focuses on nineteenth-century Native American history and US race relations. Professor Hale teaches courses in global Indigenous religious traditions, Native history, and religion in the Americas. Her current book project, Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Native American Resistance After the Civil War, is under contract with Yale University Press.
Description
This overview provides a description of the circumstances that produced and ascribed meaning to religious movements known as Ghost Dances among Native American communities. Rather than think of the Ghost Dance as possessing a single doctrine, I show how the term reflects a range of strategies indigenous groups employ in asserting selfhood.