Cutting into Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance
Rob Appleford
University of Alberta
Those of my children who doubt will be left in undesirable places,
where they will be lost and wander around until they believe and
learn the songs and dances of the ghosts.
“I Bring You Word From Your Fathers the Ghosts.”
Kicking Bear
Occasionally Shosoni Indians visited [Ghost Dance] congers in
Nevada. One such visitor was Egon Edmo Bonatsie (1872–1939).
He went on horseback to […] western Nevada to take part in
sprinting races, and afterwards attended a Ghost Dance, led by
a woman. This dance terminated in what he considered a fraud:
a supposed dead woman appeared in buckskin clothes and moccasins and shook hands with the dancers. However, a young man
peeped into the leader’s tent after the ceremony and saw how her
daughter took off the dead woman’s clothes.
Belief and Worship in Native North America
Åke Hultkrantz
When asked in a 2002 interview to comment on indigenous literary criticism, the Cherokee-identified writer and critic Diane Glancy
responded, “I could give you one statement about the American Native,
which is that we do not agree on anything.[…] Who can write, and who
ESC 39.2–3 (June/September 2013): 251–275
Rob Appleford is
Associate Professor in
the English and Film
Studies Department at
the University of Alberta.
His work on film and
performance has been
published in Social Text,
American Indian Culture
and Research Journal,
Modern Drama, Theatre
Research in Canada/
Récherches Théâtrales
au Canada, Canadian
Literature, and several
anthologies of criticism.
He is the editor of
Critical Perspectives on
Canadian Theatre in
English, Volume One:
Aboriginal Drama
and Theatre (Toronto:
Playwrights Canada
Press, 2005).
can’t, and what you can write—these are very debatable questions. We, as
writers, get into big arguments. It’s war in Indian Country, it is!” (Andrews
658). Glancy’s characterization of the debate in 2002 seems good-natured,
but it elides her own already-polarizing role in this debate. While her
career has been distinguished by many awards and honours,1 her work
has also provoked an extreme range of critical response: from puzzled
non-engagement (Krupat 2005),2 to damning faint praise (Justice 2004),
to outright character assassination and charges of ethnic fraud (Rathbun
1997). The polarizing effect of Glancy’s work, I will argue, is largely due
to the vexed subjectivity that she explores outside or against collective
cultural revitalization. To illustrate her handling of this subjectivity, this
paper will focus on the use Glancy makes of the nineteenth-century Ghost
Dance movement as a metaphor for indigenous identity. The paradox
that Glancy refuses to resolve, and one that I will focus on here, is that
the nineteenth-century Ghost Dance’s revelation, its divine certainty, is a
story woven out of performances, texts, and ghosts: three things that are
inherently ambiguous in their expression of what it means to be human.
Diane Glancy would be, according to Kicking Bear’s opening admonishment, a particularly doubtful “child.” Her critical and creative explorations of mixed-blood identity often focus on indeterminacy and doubt
as states of being, and her right to speak for indigenous peoples has frequently been (and continues to be) challenged by critics and other artists.3 As someone who was raised “white” and who later came to explore
her Cherokee heritage as an adult, she has frequently been criticized as
someone whose ideas about indigenous subjectivity are more imaginative
than born of experience. And, admittedly, some of her more playful pronouncements about her own creative process can leave her open to these
charges: “As I traveled over the land those [Cherokee] voices were there.
I never heard them with my ear, but in my imagination. For all my books
1 See “Diane Glancy: Awards, Fellowships, and Grants.”
2 I say this because Krupat’s analysis of Glancy’s 1996 novel Pushing the Bear is
little more than a fact-checking exercise, with some brief head-scratching over
Glancy’s editorial choices and use of historical sources (Krupat 2005).
3 In a 1991 letter to Paul Rathbun, Oklahoma poet Frank Parman calls Glancy “a
fraud”: “When she found out how much easier it was to get published as an
Indian she started writing about her ancestral memory. I know of several Native American writers … who want to denounce her” (quoted in Rathbun 381).
As recently as June 2012, an anonymous commenter on a blog post about a
recent production of one of Glancy’s plays charged that Glancy is “fraudulently
violating the 1990 Native American Arts and Crafts law” by claiming Cherokee
heritage (“offstage”).
252 | Appleford
I drive and pick up rocks. I have a wonderful collection of rocks, and I
have a wonderful collection of voices in all of my books” (Andrews 651). If
there is a common thread to the negative or skeptical criticism of Glancy
and her work, it is the charge that she is overly fond of “absence.” While
acknowledging that Glancy’s 2002 novel The Mask Maker was “provocative
in content and richly textured in form,” Cherokee-identified critic Daniel
Heath Justice ultimately felt that “the book is itself something of a mask.
[…] fundamentally defined more by absence than presence” (“Review” 74).
In a far more ad hominem vein, non-indigenous critic Paul Rathbun,4 in
his 1997 discussion of Glancy’s theatrical work, attacks Glancy as an ethnic charlatan: “Glancy’s own authority hinges explicitly upon unfounded
assumptions, assumptions which present Native dramaturgy as an absence
rather than an ideologically obscured invisibility. Having identified that
absence, she inserts herself and her interests into the space of the other,
thereby to profit economically” (348). If both Justice and Rathbun complain that Glancy seems fixated on absence, what might we learn about
Glancy and her work if we consider this complaint directly? With what
does she fill these absences? Or to reframe the question: If nativist critics like Justice and Rathbun advocate that indigenous writers fill absence
with presence, why is the presence that Glancy explores in her writing
unsatisfying or even offensive to these critics?
What links the criticisms of Justice and Rathbun beyond their use of
the term “absence” is the shared assumption that the individual writer
must write to restore connections between indigenous individuals and
the tribal group. These connections are presumed to be both positive and
material. Justice’s review of Glancy’s The Mask Maker wonders why “tribal
nationhood and tradition [are] relegated only to the margins of this story”
in favour of the “individualistic mixed-blood angst […] which ultimately
undermine[s] the communitistic ethos implied by the other stories interspersed throughout [the novel]” (“Review” 74). Elsewhere, Justice affirms
that while positive (and collective) tribal stories “expand or narrow our
imaginative possibilities,” negative (and, by implication, individualistic)
stories that focus on “corrosive pain eat away at our humanity or [make]
us destructive and violent” (Our Fire 206). Rathbun is even more blunt in
4 I had to do some Googly detective work to establish Rathbun’s biography. He
does not state if he is indigenously—or non-indigenously—identified in his
1997 doctoral thesis. However, in a 2011 interview on a different topic, Rathbun
implies that he is not indigenous but has “close ties” to the Lakota people on
the Pine Ridge Reservation (Esper). It is important to note this here because it
indicates that a tribalist critical position is an ideological rather than a narrowly
genetic or filial one.
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 253
his conflation of art and life than Justice: “If a play, poem, story, interview,
or material artifact defers or supplants the interests of Indigenous peoples,
then it acts colonially, against the interests of Indigenous peoples” (367).
This is mimesis-as-sympathetic-magic: stories make and change the world
as much as relate to it or reflect on it. That these stories must transcend the
self-absorption of personal doubt is a sentiment typically associated with
“tribalist” or “nativist” critics, many of whom advocate a nation-centric
model of mimetic indigenous “interest” or “tradition.” While there are
many examples of this rhetoric in indigenous criticism, two will suffice
here: the first from Métis scholar Howard Adams and the second from
Assiniboine scholar Kathryn Shanley:
Aboriginal consciousness cannot be a façade; it is an intrinsic
or inner essence that lies somewhere between instinct and
intuition, and it evolves from the humanness and spirituality
of our collective, Aboriginal community. (38)
An Indian can write about a teapot or a blue balloon or a day
at the Field Museum of Natural History, but he or she must
situate himself or herself in relation to Indian people. (696)
Along this line of thinking, the writer has an unavoidably tribal responsibility. Expression must fill the absences made by the colonial project with
storied presence and must counter the centrifugal spin of indigenous anomie with a centripetal spin back toward a tightened communal purpose.
As both Justice and Rathbun (and other tribalist critics) warn, there is little
place for deferral in this tribal context, unless it is clearly used as a weapon
against colonial oppression. When nativist literary critic Craig Womack
(Muscogee/Creek) asks for an indigenous literary approach “that at least
lets me dream” (101), we can assume that this dream is not an isolating
nightmare, that this dream is more Martin Luther King than Stephen King.
This conscription of the indigenous writer into community service
might puzzle critics and readers accustomed to freedom of literary speech
and to the diversity that presumably comes from this freedom. To help
better understand why this call is so vital for nativist critics, we can think
of it as a contemporary version of what American anthropologist Anthony
F. C. Wallace described in a 1956 essay as an indigenous “revitalization
movement.” According to Wallace, who studied Iroquois and Delaware
nativism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these revitalization
movements were not simple atavism but, instead, “deliberate, organized,
conscious effort[s] by members of a society to construct a more satisfying
culture” in the face of colonialism (265). Wallace relied on an “organismic”
254 | Appleford
analogy to suggest that when put under stress by colonial domination, a
stress which often fragmented and atomized communities, indigenous
societies strove to remake themselves not as stronger individuals but as
interconnected “cells and organs” of a renewed body politic:
This holistic view of society as organism integrated from
cell to nation depends on the assumption that society, as an
organization of living matter, is definable as a network of intercommunication. Events on one subsystem level must affect
other subsystems (cellular vis-a-vis institutional, personal
vis-a-vis societal) at least as information; in this view, social
organization exists to the degree that events in one subsystem
are information to other subsystems. (266)
In this model, the metonymic relationship between self and nation allows
the former to remake the latter by communicating “information” to other
selves within this nation. Thus, if we think of indigenous writing solely
within a Western tradition of authorship, the prescriptive statements of
nativist critics may harken back to an obsolete, pre-Romantic notion of
authorial indenture. But if instead we see the nativist critics’ tribal emphasis as part of a larger ongoing revitalization movement, where every indigenous person must, as Cree/Métis scholar Kim Anderson verbs it, “resist,
reclaim, construct and act“ (15), the literary call to community seems more
about what might be called the “viral” affect of expression, or about how
information must be able to travel along often attenuated networks of
affiliation and build alliances as it travels. What this information contains
in terms of content is perhaps less important than how it strengthens connections between those listening in on these networks.
However, the suppressed implication of this idea that one can, and
indeed, must “act” indigenous—in order to both revitalize the nation
and establish one’s place within this nation—is that this act unavoidably
involves a performance of some sort. This performance is enacted, through
time and desire, with various levels of self-consciousness by its performers.
And, further, the identity performed is often interpreted, through time and
desire, as being a straightforward representation (rather than a rehearsal)
of reality. Wallace does n0t spend much time in his early essay discussing the ambiguities of being the individual “cell” in his social organism.
After all, to accept a “cell to nation” model of cultural renewal requires a
doubled faith: faith that the “more satisfying culture” will emerge out of
this process and faith that one has in fact a place within this revitalized
culture, that one’s voice is welcomed on the network of intercommunicaDiane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 255
tion. Twenty years after Wallace, the anthropologist Dell Hymes describes
this pressure on the individual nativist to “represent” as the ineluctable
pressure of performance. In order for an individual to be taken seriously
as a member of a cultural group, he or she must first be willing to “assume
responsibility” for the presentation of the group’s culture. This responsibility is a performative one because it requires the individual to treat
the group’s culture as a learnable script—“full” and “repeatable” but also
“authentic” and “authoritative”—that can be performed such that “the
standards intrinsic to the tradition in which the performance occurs are
accepted and realized.” The challenge for the cultural performer is to join
together “responsibility for knowledge of tradition” with “the willingness
to assume the identity of tradition’s authentic performer” (18–19).
When we consider indigenous revitalization movements as complex
political performances, we can see how ambiguity both enriches and
threatens the revitalized cultures that emerge through these performances.
The challenge for contemporary indigenous writers, from a critical performance standpoint, is to self-consciously act Indian without relinquishing
defensible claims to difference and the material and ideological rights
accrued through this difference. This challenge is not unique to indigenous cultural performers. All cultural performance evokes and revokes
truth: we see it with our own eyes, but what is it that we are truly seeing?
While there has long been a performance-theoretical strain in cultural
and critical race studies—beginning at least with Franz Fanon’s 1952 essay
“The Fact of Blackness” and continuing through the work of contemporary critics like Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Paul Gilroy, Rey Chow, and Anne
Cheng—performance theory seems to have had relatively little influence
on indigenous literary criticism.5 When the notion of performance is
studied in this context, we mostly see a critique of non-indigenous persons
who self-consciously “play Indian” in order to escape “the conventional
and often highly restrictive boundaries of their fixed cultural identities
based in gender or race” (Green 31). There is another focus, less bifurcated
but also less precise, where indigenous literature is itself loosely defined
as a performance that is still only understood as an irresistible lure for
the non-indigenous. For example, while non-indigenous scholar Arnold
Krupat calls indigenous literature “ongoing Indian literary performances,”
he does not explore how the writers themselves are performers or what
indeed makes their works performative. Instead, it is the non-indigenous
5 The few scholars in the field (that I am familiar with) whose criticism is clearly influenced by performance theory are Philip Deloria (2004), Louis Owens (2001),
Carrie Dawson (1998), and Randall T. J. Hall (1997).
256 | Appleford
critic who “cannot help but threaten to swallow, submerge, or obliterate
these performances” (Ethnocriticism 186). Thus, to be pro-indigenous is
also, by implication, to be anti-performative.
If we view Diane Glancy’s work through the lens of performance theory,
it is possible to see her not as a native informant (trustworthy or otherwise) but as a native performer, someone who assumes the role of cultural
performer in order to explore its contingent, stage-managed nature. In
this context, it seems obvious why she would be fascinated in her critical and creative work by the revitalization movement known as the 1890
Ghost Dance, a movement comprised of performances, texts, and ghosts.
It begins, like most revitalization movements do, with an intensely personal vision. Wo’voka (“The Cutter” in his Numu language) or Jack Wilson
(a name given to him by his rancher employer) received his great inaugural
revelation from God at Walker Lake, Nevada, during a solar eclipse in 1888
when he was around twenty years old, when he “fell asleep in the daytime
and was taken up to the other world” (Mooney 13–14). In his vision, God
showed Wo’voka a heaven full of dead ancestors, renewed with youthful
vigour, hunting in a land full of game. God told him that He intended to
renew the earth by resurrecting the dead Numu, curing the sick and aged
of their infirmity, and restoring the plentitude of the land. Wo’voka was
also told that the white race would either be destroyed during the catastrophic upheaval or simply cease to exist. If the Numu put aside warlike
ways and lived peacefully alongside whites and danced a particular dance
in a five-day sequence, they “would secure happiness for themselves and
hasten the event” (14).
Upon waking, Wo’voka began to preach this gospel of renewal to his
own people until eventually curious representatives from several Western and Plains nations, including the Ute, Shoshoni, Washo, Mohave,
Cohonino, Pai, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Assiniboin, Gros Ventre, Mandan,
Arikara, Pawnee, Caddo, Kichai, Wichita, Kiowa, Comanche, Delaware,
Oto, and Western Lakota (Kehoe 8), came to Walker Lake to learn about
the new ritual and seek teachings from Wo’voka, now popularly known
as the Messiah. These representatives returned to their communities and
sought with varying degrees of success to adapt the Messiah’s millennial message to local contexts. Wo’voka’s original songs and dance ritual
became infused with ecstatic trance and healing ceremonies. Participants
who had performed the dance swooned and were rewarded with visions
of their dead relatives. The most tragic adaptation of the rituals occurred
among the Western Lakota, who innovated the practice of wearing white
shirts with painted designs, perhaps inspired by the “endowment robe”
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 257
Thus, to be proindigenous is
also, by
implication, to
be antiperformative.
worn by Mormon initiates (Mooney 34), that were believed to render the
wearers invulnerable. On 29 December 1890, nearly two hundred and fifty
“Ghost Dancers,” the majority of whom were women and children, were
massacred at Wounded Knee Creek by the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry.
Upon hearing of the massacre, Wo’voka counseled his followers to stop
dancing lest their communities suffer the same fate (Moses 343). While the
Ghost Dance movement ended as a truly pan-tribal phenomenon after this
slaughter, ethnographers recorded hearing Ghost Dance songs being sung
by elderly Lakotas in the 1930s, and isolated congregations continued to
practice Wo’voka’s teaching as late as 1980. The Messiah himself retired to
his Walker Lake home and continued to counsel his flock, by correspondence and sometimes in person, up until his death in 1932 (Kehoe 8–9).
In any vision of immanent apocalypse, doubt must be managed for
the vision to travel and convince. The Ghost Dance was no different. The
ethnographer James Mooney cites Captain J. M. Lee’s description of the
evolution of the earlier Northern Numu Ghost Dance movement in 1870
(eighteen years before Wo’voka’s own revelation) to highlight the persistent
skepticism of the Numu people toward millennial promises. According to
Lee, Tävibo, the earlier Ghost Dance prophet, promised the Numu that
“all the improvements of the whites—their houses, their goods, stores, etc.
—would remain, but the whites would be swallowed up, while the Indians would be saved and permitted to enjoy the earth and all the fullness
thereof, including anything left by the wicked whites.” While this prophecy
attracted a few adherents, many Numu “ridiculed the idea that the white
men would fall into the holes and be swallowed up while the Indians would
not.” To dispel this skepticism, the prophet Tävibo returned to the original
spot of revelation and was granted a second clarifying vision:
when the great disaster [came], all, both Indians and whites,
would be swallowed up or overwhelmed, but that at the end of
three days (or a few days) the Indians would be resurrected in
the flesh, and would live forever to enjoy the earth, with plenty
of game, fish, and pine nuts, while their enemies, the whites,
would be destroyed forever. There would thus be a final and
eternal separation between Indians and whites.
“This revelation,” writes Lee, “which seemed more reasonable, was rather
popular for awhile, but as time wore along faith seemed to weaken and
the prophet was without honor even in his own country.” In a progression more Monty Python than Mosaic, the prophet then went back up
the mountain again and came back down with a final, testy revelation:
258 | Appleford
“The divine spirit had become so much incensed at the lack of faith in the
prophecies, that it was revealed to his chosen one that those Indians who
believed in the prophecy would be resurrected and be happy, but those
who did not believe in it would stay in the ground and be damned forever
with the whites” (quoted in Mooney 2–3). We can see how this process
of revision from 1870 to 1890 was infused with doubt, and how the narrative that emerged from this revision struggled to reject the ambiguity
of its origin.
But, indeed, this ambiguity could never be fully exorcised. The Ghost
Dance, as an intervention in the acculturating process well underway
in indigenous communities, brought the underlying tensions between
acculturation and traditionalism to the surface. Historian Russell Thorton
argues that one of the substantial effects of both the 1870 and 1890 Ghost
Dance movements was to re-establish tribal boundaries based upon racial
and cultural affiliation, where the first movement served to “keep fullbloods within the tribe” and the later revival served to “keep mixed-bloods
within tribal boundaries” (44–45). In this way, the Ghost Dance movement
performed not only an apocalyptic but also an eschatological function. The
prediction of the coming irruption of divine judgment into human history
is coupled, as happens in all apocalypse visions, with a prophetic call for
individuals to “translate the vision of divine activity from the cosmic level
to the level of the politico-historical realm of everyday life” (Hanson 12).
The Ghost Dance served notice that God saw the increasing acculturation
of the indigenous population and was not pleased. He gave the Ghost
Dance to His children with the expectation that they would be “dancing
the world back to normalcy” (McMullen 268). For an indigenous person
to get right with God was to get right with one’s own community, its
traditional practices, and with one’s identity as defined by these practices.
The later 1890 Ghost Dance revitalization movement can be seen as
a practical example of Wallace’s cell-to-nation theoretical model, where
the ecstatic vision of a single cell becomes amplified and spread through a
network of intercommunication to motivate and inspire a pan-American
nation.6 But it also reveals how the apocalyptic vision of renewal must
both capitalize upon and strategically suppress its own scripted nature as
6 Of course, this is only one possible interpretation of the movement. Depending
on the sources you consult, the 1890 Ghost Dance movement was an earnest
nativist attempt to revitalize local indigenous religious practices with Christian
millenialism (Linton 1943; Wallace 1956; Kehoe 1989), an entirely Christian
ecstatic movement with only cosmetic traditional trappings (Brown 1970), the
first truly pan-Indian political network (Thorton 1986), a cynical “despair cult”
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 259
a performance in order to gain adherents and secure their commitment.
Once its promises were set as script, then exegesis could commence; the
Ghost Dance could then be variously recomposed, performed, and interpreted as a viral text. But despite its protean nature, what never seemed to
change in the Ghost Dance’s script was its demand that nineteenth-century
indigenous peoples clarify their own existence in order to be worthy of
God’s coming reward. Clarification of the Ghost Dance vision allowed it
to travel and to convince, but this clarification also reveals that to accept
its demands as an indigenous person was both a choice and a coercion.
One of Mooney’s own Numu informants, Captain Dick, reaffirmed the
indigenous skeptic’s fate in the 1890 revival: “Indians who don’t dance,
who don’t believe in this word, will grow little, just about a foot high, and
stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in
fire” (26). To doubt the eschatological truth of the Ghost Dance is possible,
but it is the doubt of the damned.
While I indicated earlier that there is a general revitalism in tribalist/
nativist literary criticism and the creative work it promotes, the Ghost
Dance phenomenon itself has figured extensively as a specific trope in this
critical and creative writing. Writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Sherman Alexie, Gerald Vizenor, Diane Glancy, and others7 have used it repeatedly in different contexts as a metaphor for both indigenous resistance
and indigenous identity. In the critical realm, for example, indigenous
literary scholars such as Jason E. Murray (Chickasaw/Chocktaw) have used
the Ghost Dance as a strengthening metaphor for indigenous women’s
writing-as-resistance. I venture to guess that part of what attracts artists
and intellectuals to this particular revitalization movement is the creative
resistance that it models: the strategy of dancing—rather than battling or
killing—the New World back to normalcy. These contemporary writers
adapt the Ghost Dance for varying reasons, but they typically emphasize
the noble-yet-tragic, unproblematically collective resistance the movement
has come to represent in the popular imagination. Yet while the process
which traded on indigenous gullibility to buttress the authority of local shamans
(Greenway 1969), or an “abreactive” ritual enactment of cultural dissolution,
trauma, and death (Harkin 2004).
7 Although there are many examples here, I’d recommend starting with Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999) and Almanac of the Dead (1992);
Gerald Vizenor’s Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (1994),
“Native American Indian Literature: Critical Metaphors of the Ghost Dance”
(1992), and “Socioacupuncture: Mythic Reversals and the Striptease in Four
Scenes” (1990); Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1998); and “A Wounded Knee
Fairy Tale” (1982) by Cherokee-identified science fiction writer Craig Kee Strete.
260 | Appleford
of bringing about the apocalypse can be seen as an inventive collective
enterprise, history also shows us that the desired goal of this process would
have been a complete ethnic cleansing of both people and culture. As far as
I can tell, Glancy is one of the few indigenous writers to use Ghost Dance
as a way to articulate her own ambivalence about the movement’s (and by
extension, indigenous tribal criticism’s) clarifying demands.
Dance to prove your belief in words, or else: this is God’s command that
attracts a native performer like Glancy. She has employed the Ghost Dance
metaphor in both her critical work and as the leitmotif for her collection
of short prose entitled The Dance Partner. As a critic, Glancy uses the
Ghost Dance as a metaphor for the revisionist energies of contemporary
indigenous writing. In the co-authored introduction to a poetry collection
that Glancy edited with non-indigenous poet and critic Mark Nowak in
1999, the Ghost Dance is evoked to suggest how the poetry in the collection
“formulate[s] a reality that comes into being as the words are spoken; an
atavism to the old belief that what was spoken actually came into being.” By
emphasizing the word “form” as simultaneous verb and noun, “to fashion”
hypostatized as “what is fashioned,” the introduction advocates an indigenous literary practice that “becomes a ghost dance in which the power
of language to (form)ulate/re(form)ulate a lost or endangered world
returns.” By defining indigenous literary practice as a creative Ghost Dance,
the co-editors leave open the possibility that authors’ imaginations can
somehow retrieve the “unretrievable” worlds lost through colonization (as
in the historical Ghost Dance iterations). But the co-editors also suggest
that these retrievals do not reformulate a clarified, self-authenticating
ideal of indigeneity; indeed, they use “cross-blood” Anishnaabe writer
Gerald Vizenor’s neologism “postindian,” meaning indigenous identities
beyond terminal creeds, to describe this poetics (“Cruizing the Iceberg”
iv–v). And like Vizenor, the goal of both Glancy and Nowak in the introduction is to valorize the free play of “postindian” literary practice. But
unlike Vizenor, Glancy’s extended engagement with the Ghost Dance in
her creative work reveals the anxiety of those who attempt to critique the
coercive performance of authentic indigenous culture. In other words,
she makes it clear in her creative work that her liberation from authentic
identity often results in being left behind in clarification’s wake.
In a short prose piece entitled “Wovoka or Jack Wilson and Christ
My Lord,” published in the collection Firesticks (1993), Glancy’s female
mixed-blooded narrator explores the idea of exclusion in relation to gender,
ethnicity, and subjectivity. The only direct reference to the Ghost Dance,
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 261
apart from the piece’s title, occurs in a passage attributing the historical
movement’s failure to hubris:
Now this is what I have against Indians. I don’t think they care
for the land they say they care for. I think they’re irresponsible.
They only care about their good times. High hooters. Rooty
fluters. Ghosters. Who thought they could chase away the
white man. Thought they could call back buffalo. Thought they
could return the ancestors. Handle firewater. Handle a bigger
than. (12)
The inheritors of this historical failure, the present-day ghosters, merit
the piece’s fullest criticism. Glancy’s narrator feels invisible under the
gaze of an “Indian poet dude” she had invited to speak during a “Native
American Awareness week” at her college. To counteract the spectacle
of the “buck warrior,” who “looked at a young girl and asked to be kissing cousins, asked almost in front of everyone to touch her sweet brown
hide,” the narrator remembers a spiritual experience where she was told
by a bird “in his language […] [that] I was visible in the invisibility I would
feel.” Dismissed as an unworthy sexual object by the “superior-ass” poet
(12), the narrator comforts herself with the memory of the bird’s affirmation that “I was pretty but not in the meaning you think of. Not exactly
spiritual either. But in presence. Substance. That something visible” (13).
This “presence” is the product of what Justice might call “individualistic
mixed-blood angst,” and “that something visible”—the joint recognition
of gender and race—is predicated on mattering in the face of “an ideologically obscured invisibility” (to redeploy Rathbun’s phrase). Later that
week, another male speaker who, the narrator suspects, “probably had
the same attitudes as the other [poet] dude just hid them better,” told of a
traditional apocalyptic prophecy,
of how the white man would come and use up even the stars.
But one star was saved for us and he snapped a cottonwood
twig right in two and there was a star something the way
you cut an apple crossways and there’s a star just our slice of
heaven right there in an apple.[…] A star from another place
and it was ours yes because we held the broken twig of cottonwood in our hand.
The narrator rolls her eyes when this second speaker claims that he had
made it snow that morning by holding a sweat-lodge ceremony. She points
out the fact that rather than addressing “the hunger disease injustice” in
262 | Appleford
the world, the speaker instead used his “Indian spirituality” to make it
possible for him to tell his traditional winter story to the college (15–16).
In performance studies, when you are trying to isolate the choices
a performer makes, it is often wise not to focus solely on the script in
hand or on your own subjective impression of the performance in question. Rather, you can learn what the choices are when comparing the
performance to another performer’s version of the same script. While
we cannot do this literally in this case, we can make a brief comparison
with another defensive performance of mixed-blood indigenous identity,
this one performed by Gerald Vizenor. In an unusually candid (for Vizenor) semi-autobiographical essay published in 1976, he describes a 1972
incident where, because of his light skin, he is prevented from entering
a camp established by American Indian Movement militants (“I Know
What You Mean” 108). Vizenor relates how, after being called a “honky”
by two aim members, he retorts, “Drop the color shit.[…] Since when
do all tribal people look like you two?” (111). Like Glancy’s narrator in
“Wovoka or Jack Wilson and Christ My Lord,” Vizenor is a doubly barred
subject here: barred from an indigenous past and barred from assuming
the privilege of those who claim to be this past’s revolutionary avatars in
the present. He tells us in this early personal essay that his transformation
as a writer occurred when he realized that “imagination and humor expire
and people grow too big for their eyes when they seek cultural perfection
through the exalted structures of the past” (96). Vizenor himself later
reformulates the Ghost Dance as an individual’s act of strategic forgetting
in “Socioacupuncture” (1990): “When [cross-blood hero Tune Browne]
cannot see a tree he loses four white faces from his memories, an urban
revision of the Ghost Dance” (415). In Vizenor’s hands, the Ghost Dance
becomes not a clarifying vision that creates and coerces a nation but a
personal metaphor for “survivance” and imagination that draws strength
from coercion’s failure. His star-turn of indigenous performance is fearless
and powerful; because of this potency, his contemporary Ghost Dance
vision continues to travel and convince.
For Glancy, however, doubt cannot be banished so decisively or a
personal vision travel so confidently. As a mixed-blood writer who, like
Vizenor, did not grow up immersed in her indigenous traditions, she makes
the case that those who accepted the Ghost Dance’s rapturous invitation
to reclaim lost ancestors and their way of life appear to be part of a selective guest list. Glancy’s narrator mocks both autobiographical atavism
of the “dried out” poet “jabbering about his life and firewater fleamarket
days along the bar-rails of life” (12, 16) and the impotence of the storyDiane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 263
teller who leaves his audience with only the “broken cottonwood twig in
our hand” (16). But while the defiance of Vizenor’s narrator is inspired by
the aim warriors who thought that he looked too white, Glancy’s alter
ego is provoked by the fact that she both looks and feels too white. Her
narrator’s self-definition as “Indian” is based on being a defaulted other,
“everything nobody else wanted to be,” someone who could claim to be
Indian because she could “synthesize the fragments and live with hurt”
(14). Vizenor’s 1976 narrator is forced to conjure his vision of transcendent identity, but his is a story of gleeful release from cultural atavism. In
contrast, Glancy’s narrator is caught between what she perceives as the
sexist objectification that atavism promotes and the neo-traditionalism
that betrays its own wistfulness. Her narrator refuses to give herself over
to this particular dance because this dance is a dance of sexual and ethnic
abjection. By implication, “Wovoka or Jack Wilson” (Glancy’s “or” between
the Numu and white names of the Ghost Dance prophet suggesting a
choice between an indigenous and white identity, a choice she feels unable
to make) becomes a male judge whose clarification is both gendered and
absolute. Left outside of clarification, Glancy’s narrator must contend with
the fragments that the “communitistic ethos” of revitalization (Justice)
rejects. Like Vizenor’s narrator, Glancy’s narrator must seek self-definition
through inspiration, through the comfort of an animistic universe outside
of language that seems strangely at odds with the two narratives of indigenous atavism represented in the story. Hers is a visible contention with
the invisibility she has no choice but to feel.
In “Wovoka or Jack Wilson and Christ My Lord,” Glancy gives voice
to an angry cell on the network of tribal intercommunication. In the later
short prose collection The Dance Partner (2005), there are more anxious
voices clamouring to be heard on this same network. In her introduction,
the author evokes the Ghost Dance’s eschatological power to give order
to “what is in relationship to what was and will be.” But she also describes
the stories in the collection as being less about holism or postmodern
erasure than about “sharp fracture lines and disparities” (xii). These “sharp
fracture lines” relate not only to the formal aspects of the fiction but also
to the lives of her characters. While she used the Ghost Dance as a critical metaphor for imaginative seancing of the past in 1999, she appears in
this later context to acknowledge the inherent impossibility of reclaiming
the Ghost Dance movement’s truth in any trustworthy sense. It is this
very absence of knowable texts and selves in the Ghost Dance that allows
Glancy to imagine her own versions of apocalyptic yearning and anxiety.
264 | Appleford
Glancy coins the term “ghosting,” which “presents a blueprint of voices
that might have been, along with the structure of those voices that are
known to have been” (x). Ghosting is the active process of imagining the
voices that, due to their questioning of what it means to be indigenous
or even human, do not register in the more coherent and prescriptive
revitalization narratives. For Glancy, the Ghost Dance does not embody a
divinely predetermined pattern of crisis-judgment-vindication that clarifies the indigenous subject; rather, it is the symptom of the more pressing
problem of enforced abjection created by both the indigenous and colonial
performative drives. As she says, the narratives of the Ghost Dance are
less attempts by individuals to revitalize relationships with land, ancestors, and traditions than uncertain and fragmented stories “reenacted in
contemporary lives as Indians attempt to regain life” (x). If read in isolation, this statement suggests a compatible project to the one championed
in the typical understanding of the historical Ghost Dance phenomena.
Wo’voka’s original vision was, after all, about creating a livable life for
indigenous peoples in the present and future. But an important tension
in Glancy’s revisions is her emphasis on the sham aspect of the historical Ghost Dance, its same old song and dance quality. Glancy catalogues
the Ghost Dance as “a moment of truth (there is a beyond), a lie (there is
nothing but trance induced by endless dancing), a conspiracy, a manipulation, a trick, a closeout that had ongoing effects” (xi). Given the author’s
demonstrated familiarity throughout her collection with James Mooney’s
study of the Ghost Dance, I would guess that Glancy’s use of the word “lie”
here is at least partly inspired by the skeptical remarks offered by one of
Mooney’s informants, Z. A. Parker, a non-indigenous schoolteacher who
witnessed the Sioux Ghost Dance on 20 June 1890, six months before the
massacre:
[The Ghost Dancers] kept up dancing until fully 100 persons were lying unconscious. Then they stopped and seated
themselves in a circle, and as each one recovered from his
trance he was brought to the center of the ring to relate his
experience. Each told his story to the medicine-man and he
shouted it to the crowd. Not one in ten claimed that he saw
anything. I asked one Indian—a tall, strong fellow, straight as
an arrow—what his experience was. He said he saw an eagle
coming towards him. It flew round and round, drawing nearer
and nearer until he put out his hand to take it, when it was
gone. I asked him what he thought of it. “Big lie,” he replied. I
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 265
The narratives
of the Ghost
Dance are less
attempts by
individuals to
revitalize
relationships
with land,
ancestors, and
traditions than
uncertain and
fragmented
stories.
found that by talking to them that not one in twenty believed
it. (quoted in Mooney 181; emphasis added)
What is the truth behind this “big lie”? Is the “straight as an arrow” Ghost
Dancer being straight with the skeptical white schoolteacher? And what
might be the veiled motivations to lie in this context? It is this kind of
irresolvable ambiguity that teeters the entire collection. By suspending the
revitalizing impulse alongside the deception this impulse allows, Glancy
re-choreographs the Ghost Dance as a pas de deux for desire and doubt.
Their eternally awkward clutch pushes Glancy’s ghosting forward.
The Dance Partner emphasizes the spectrality of the Ghost Dance, both
as an historical movement and as an activating metaphor for contemporary indigenous identity. In the first, largely historical section, Glancy
intersperses documentary materials excerpted mainly from Mooney’s 1890
study with fictional narratives told by participants in the historical Ghost
Dance and its immediate aftermath. While this structure demonstrates the
ghosting technique, it also allows the author to retroject a contemporary
anguish back into the historical context. The first piece, “Ghost Dance,”
set in Walker Lake, Nevada, 1888 (the birthplace of Wo’voka’s movement),
poses the persistent question of the entire collection: If the act of ghosting
involves regaining life, what is the existential nature of those doing the
ghosting? To answer this question, the author explores the fraught negotiation of the distance between the living and the dead.
On one hand, the unnamed narrator worries about the futility of the
dance: “Sometimes the Ghost Dance began to fade. There was the thought
it was an image without meaning. We felt panic at the thought. We kept
dancing” (18). But the narrator also suggests that the dance’s real clarifying
effect was to reveal the haunted nature of the dancers: “Maybe we were
the ghosts who danced, and in the dance, we saw the real world [that is,
the apocalyptic visions] above us. We were the ghosts who danced, and
in the dance we saw the spirit world” (14).8 This spectral identity not only
8 By (mis)identifying the dancers as the ghosts they are ostensibly trying to sum-
mon, Glancy echoes the more recent tendency by historians and anthropologists
to read the Ghost Dance phenomena as a traumatic re-enactment of cultural
dissolution to produce self-haunting subjects. For example, in his discussion of
the 1870s Oregon equivalent of the Ghost Dance known as the “Warm House
Dance,” Michael E. Harkin describes the participants with a similar rhetorical
collapse: “This quest [to bring about apocalyptic revitalization] became increasingly desperate, as is evident in the extended periods during which participants
would dance […] like ghosts, dancing to no evident purpose” (“Revitalization
as Catharsis” 154).
266 | Appleford
emphasizes the abjection of the dancers but also suggests the desire to
become a ghost, to perform one’s own death. In a reversal of the historical
Ghost Dance’s trajectory, Glancy writes, “The ancestors had been above
us, yes, but not to return. No, I knew it then. They had come to take us
where they were” (21). Glancy’s voices here read as ghosts trapped in the
purgatory of their failure and shame—“Don’t come,” the narrator wants to
warn a returning ancestor, “we didn’t want him to see what had happened
on the earth” (14). The real information in this danse macabre, this “image
without meaning,” is not a clarifying vision of a lost world; it is the spectre
of (ab)original sin. As Glancy’s narrator confesses to us, “In brokenness
we were formed. In brokenness we were framed” (95). When compared to
other more celebratory uses of the Ghost Dance movement by contemporary indigenous critics and artists, this reads as a kind of cultural apostasy.
If the performance anxiety in the first half of the collection appears
too anachronistic and self-conscious to be taken as history, it is because
Glancy’s seeming intent is to establish the Ghost Dance revitalization
movement as the script for contemporary indigenous self-performance.
In this script, doubt and desire, so central in the historical section, become
two ghosts that haunt the network of interconnected lives narrated in the
second, contemporary half of the collection. In this section of The Dance
Partner, Glancy explores the relationship between the Ghost Dance’s
“seeming absence” and its promise as a way to provide “the possibility of a
rewritten life” (xii). While there are several very direct invocations of the
historical Ghost Dance throughout the contemporary sections of book, I
will focus on one particular section where the Ghost Dance is not specifically mentioned in order to foreground Glancy’s performative technique.
The first section of “A Green Rag-Braided Rug” is based on the true story
of Richard Cardinal, a Fort Chipewyan Métis adolescent who committed
suicide in 1984 after being shuffled among and abused in twenty-eight
foster homes, group homes, and shelters in Alberta, Canada. His case
became particularly sensational because he left behind a diary, which
subsequently became part of the public record, in which he catalogued
his misery. Glancy ghosts the excerpts from Cardinal’s diary with her own
rewrite (or what she calls “overwrite”) that “gives [Cardinal] a life he could
have had with the right foster parents and opportunity” (xii).
The excerpt from the actual diary included in Glancy’s piece is overwritten with a significant change, where the diary’s description of suicide
attempts is replaced by the fictional description of Cardinal’s discovery
of his writer’s voice. Glancy makes no apologies for the subjective nature
of her overwrite of the boy’s story; she juxtaposes what was with what
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 267
could have or ought to have been for Richard Cardinal. On one hand, the
revision redeems a lost life and a lost voice, and what is conspicuous in
this context is what has been changed in the original diary entry to make
this redemption possible. Glancy’s version of the boy “Richard Cardinal”
does not repeatedly attempt suicide, he is not separated from his biological siblings in his foster homes, and he does not decide to shut himself off
from the world. Glancy gives him a foster brother named Charlie to play
with, he is taught about the culture and history of the Chipewyan people,9
and he discovers his talent for storytelling. But, on the other hand, what
makes this revision more ambiguous is what Glancy has chosen to let
stand and, in turn, to amplify from the original.
In the original diary entry, Cardinal relates an experience as a young
boy where he set fire to a shed and haystack at his foster home in the town
of Wandering River and received as punishment “the wipping [sic] of my
life” (82). In Glancy’s revision, this original event is juxtaposed with a
fictional transformation of it into a metaphor for Cardinal’s awakening to
the power of story: “I wanted to write a story about a match. I had stolen
matches in the first place I lived. I had struck fire that lit the haystack. A
match was an oar on a river of fire. It brought down a stack of hay. When
I struck matches I had something from another world. I had power. I had
caused heat and light. I wanted the magic of blaze, of burning, of running
fire” (89). In her revision, Glancy transforms a brief biographical incident
into a more fundamental desire for power and destruction through storytelling. The match itself becomes a fitting symbol for this conflagration,
since the match’s flame “was only air but air that had a story about it” (89).
Glancy’s “Richard Cardinal” is drawn to this flame, not only as a symbol
for the externalized violence of heat and light but as a symbol for internalized violence, his own heat and light that must be struck out through
violence. Just as in Glancy’s revision where the match “explodes into fire
when struck on the head,” Cardinal, in his original diary entry, tells how
he was backhanded across the face by one of his foster parents. But the
original diary entry Glancy reprints indicates that the real Richard Cardinal’s reaction was less a pyromaniacal rage than an introverted smolder:
“My lip begin to bleed quite badly. When I tasted the blood I spit it beside
his [foster father’s] shoe’s and told him to go to hell, and with that I
walked away” (86). He withdraws even farther into himself and, follow9 Glancy implies that Cardinal is ethnically Chipewyan, but this would be to con-
fuse Cardinal’s ancestry with his birthplace, Fort Chipewyan. In reality, Cardinal
was Métis, a mixed-race ethnicity whose history, culture, and political fortunes
are distinct from those of the Chipewyan, an Athabascan-speaking people.
268 | Appleford
ing this episode, the real-life Cardinal recounts another nearly successful
suicide attempt (86–87). In Glancy’s overwrite, the young boy is still struck
in the face and receives a bloody lip but at the hands of his foster brother
Charlie during a playful tussle. Instead of using the experience to mark
either Cardinal’s awakening or his final withdrawal, the author inserts a
judgment and punishment in the form of a Biblical “correction” told to
Cardinal and his foster siblings by their angry foster parents. In this story,
children who were encouraged to mock the prophet Elisha were torn apart
by two bears (ii Kings 2:23–25). Glancy concludes her overwrite of Richard
Cardinal’s story with the young boy’s terrified certainty that “we would be
out on the road by our own doing like those children [in the Biblical tale],
and who knew what bears would come from the woods” (90–91). While
Cardinal’s victimization within the child welfare system is minimized,
and he is given the hope that a story’s flame could “lick other things and
give them its flame” (89), he is ultimately vulnerable to a divine, clarifying
judgment against which he is powerless to defend himself. We are denied
the redemptive ending foreshadowed by the author’s earlier alterations to
the real life story. But why such an ambivalent end here? Why is Glancy’s
“Richard Cardinal” left agonizing over his imagined fate, to be torn apart
by wild animals?
One answer may be that the earlier iterations of the Ghost Dance in
the collection emphasize the many risks involved in raising the dead. As in
many revenant tales, Glancy’s seancing of Cardinal comes at a cost. While
he is spared abuse and self-harm, the awakened imaginative faculties of
“Richard Cardinal” reveal to him an ineffable and capricious universe where
he is powerless to defend himself against divine judgment. Imagination,
the weapon of self-confident self-fashioners like Vizenor, here foments an
exaggerated sense of individual guilt. Later in “A Green Rag-Braided Rug,”
Glancy asks, somewhat rhetorically, “Is it possible to go back and change
history?” (92). Clearly, the answer here is no. While she changes the facts
of Richard Cardinal’s painful life, his anguish continues to trouble the
author’s creative project of redemption. Like the historical Ghost Dancers,
he must keep dancing.
However, I think that the best answer to these questions lies in the
interlinear approach that Glancy employs in this piece. By reprinting the
original diary entries alongside her own ghosting overwrites of them, the
author foregrounds the often occluded process through which historical
pain is massaged into redemptive narratives. By doing so, Glancy also
foregrounds her own problematic role as authorial masseuse. Once again,
we can compare Glancy’s choices to another’s, in this case, to those of
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 269
a far more disingenuous chronicler of the Ghost Dance, ethnographer
James Mooney. In his massive history of the movement, Mooney tells
us that he was entrusted to carry a letter—which Wo’voka the Messiah
had dictated to a member of the Cheyenne delegation who had visited
him in Nevada the preceding year—back to Washington, as proof that
“they loved their religion and were anxious to have the whites know that
it was all good and contained nothing bad or hostile.” This valuable letter
was being kept safe by Black Short Nose, one of the Cheyenne delegates.
Originally transcribed in “broken English” by Casper Edson, an Arapaho
graduate of the government Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the
letter was then re-transcribed into “somewhat better English” by Black
Short Nose’s unnamed daughter, a “school girl.” Mooney notes with some
satisfaction that because the letter contained the prescription that it was
not intended to be seen by a white man, “the daughter of Black Short
Nose had attempted to erase this clause before her father brought the
letter down to me, but the lines were still plainly visible.” Mooney reprints
three versions of this dictated letter: the first Arapaho version dictated
by Edson, the second Cheyenne version rewritten by Black Short Nose’s
daughter, and his own third “free rendering” of the letter “for the benefit
of those not accustomed to Carlisle English” (22–23). In all three versions,
the clause forbidding white readership, imperfectly erased from the second
version, has been restored.
One can speculate endlessly about Mooney’s motives for including
all three letters and for including the erased clause in all three. Given the
consistent foregrounding of his own privileged position within his study
overall, the inclusions could reflect the ethnographer’s desire to demonstrate his own providential role as the reader’s guide. The three reprinted
letters, each one more “plainly legible” for the white reader than the one
before, are presented not as synoptic equals but instead as proof that
Mooney can both descry the secrets of the Ghost Dancers and make these
secrets legible for this white reader. The letters are evidence of Mooney’s
pride as an intervening lecteur, and Mooney’s entire study is a confident
decryption of the Ghost Dance as a knowable phenomenon. But like a
detective who thinks he must fudge the evidence to strengthen a just case,
Mooney’s self-conscious and self-congratulatory rewriting of the two letters betrays the active (and selective) rewriting of the partially effaced text
he claims is “plainly visible.” He breaks faith with his native informants
in order to demonstrate their harmlessness to white rulers and to white
readers. To gain the white reader’s trust, he must reveal that he is more
than capable of violating such trust.
270 | Appleford
Like Mooney, Glancy wants us to notice her presence as an intervening lecteur, in her case, of Richard Cardinal’s painful life. And again, like
Mooney, she preserves for the reader the earlier diary entries that she
ultimately overwrites in her “free rendering” of his experiences. But in
Mooney’s case, the three letters printed side-by-side are evidence of a
deliberate, graduated erasure. We can see Wo’voka’s original voice gradually disappearing as it travels along and is replaced by Mooney’s free rendering of this voice in the final document. Instead of smoothing over the
process of textual erasure as Mooney does, Glancy attempts to suspend
for the reader the problem of comingling performance, text, and ghost in
Richard Cardinal’s story. She does this by employing the same ghosting
narrative technique she used in the Ghost Dance section of the collection. Here, as in the earlier section, the stories of the past are not simply
valorized or cleansed of doubt but, instead, are reformulated as blueprints
and structures for contemporary, and sometimes troubling, performance.
The author treats Richard Cardinal’s diary as a performance script and
shows us the possible choices to be made in the acting of it. We as readers
are not asked to trust her interpretation of events, and Cardinal’s earlier
textual traces refuse to be erased, revised, and thus exorcized.10 It is this
ever-present haunting that distinguishes Glancy’s ghost dancing from
Vizenor’s and what leads her to her own “undesirable places” where desire
and doubt can never be laid to rest.
The various incarnations of the Ghost Dance—with their prophecies of
the return of the dead, the rebirth of the landscape, and the disappearance
of the whites—presume a very particular indigenous subject, one who
sees herself as already elected to receive this bounty, who welcomes these
transformations when they occur, and who works hard to be worthy of
10One can compare Glancy’s handling of the Richard Cardinal case with the
documentary film entitled Richard Cardinal: Cry From a Diary of a Métis Child
(1986), produced by Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin. While Glancy’s
meditation on Cardinal’s case leads her to consider more general questions of
haunted lives, Obomsawin’s film resulted in fundamental changes in the way
Métis children were cared for in the child welfare system in Canada. Yet, like
Glancy’s overwrite, Obomsawin’s film caused the filmmaker to consider the
ethical questions which the resurrection of the ghost of Richard Cardinal for
political ends raised. Instead of rewriting the diary entries, the filmmaker cast
an indigenous actor named Cory Swan to portray Cardinal on screen and narrate diary excerpts. Just as Glancy’s reconstruction of Cardinal’s life is haunted
by the original, the documentary film required Obomsawin to be conscious of
the danger of bringing the young actor too close to the character he was meant
to inhabit: “[Swan] could feel [Cardinal’s story] but I didn’t want to damage him”
(Steven 181). Like Glancy, Obomsawin must carefully negotiate the distance
between the living and the dead.
Diane Glancy’s Ghost Dance | 271
The various
incarnations
of the Ghost
Dance presume
a very particular
indigenous
subject.
the coming gift. Since this presumption may seem (oppressively) familiar
to indigenous writers who are called to promote “tribal nationhood and
tradition” or “the interests of indigenous peoples” in the present day, no
questions asked, writers like Glancy instead choose to write about those
who struggle and perhaps fail to satisfy these requirements for salvation.
But while implicitly coercive, these ideals of revitalization cannot be dismissed as harmless spooks so easily. They bedevil indigenous subjects, like
the bears who will come out of the woods to tear apart children, children
who are lost on the road at night by their own doing. And yet, with their
promises of collective redemption and personal judgment, they will also
be pursued with determination by these same subjects. The ideals become,
as the title of one of the stories in The Dance Partner puts it, “little ghosts
running from children” (75).
As Jonas Barish reminds us in his invaluable study The Antitheatrical Prejudice, the theatre is a place where we go to see our own doubt
performed by others, where we are confronted “with an account of our
own truth struggling against our own falsity.” This struggle is threatening
because it is “a consequence of the ambiguous facts of our own condition”
as human beings that we may actively, futilely seek to suppress (477). Of
course, the work I have been exploring here is not theatre in the literal
sense, but Glancy’s approach to narrative is very much that of a cultural
performer. She takes the reader to the kind of undesirable place that Kicking Bear warns against, where indigenous subjects struggle to perform the
truth about themselves because they doubt the easy answers they have
been asked to give. These children who doubt either cannot or will not
learn the songs and dances of the ghosts. Glancy shows us that they are
instead building new networks of intercommunication, new networks
for new information about indigenous desire and doubt. If contemporary
indigenous cultures are indeed performances, those of us who study these
cultures must attend to all of their performances, whether confident or
doubtful, communal or individual, mending or rending, big truths or big
lies. Otherwise, we are choosing not to witness the entire dance that is
unfolding before us.
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