h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kyaa quoted from professor Davis as follows,

'Perhaps the explanation can be found in the following excerpts from the 'OC Register' of what the Ghost Dance tradition offers to the historian, as expressed by History Prof. Mike Davis of UC Irvine:

"White People Are a Bad Dream." The title doesn’t come from a white guy; it is a quotation from Wovoka, the Paiute spiritual leader who introduced the Ghost Dance into Native American culture at the end of the 1880s.

The quotation of the above noted statement isn’t Davis’ entry in the Self-Loathing Whitey Sweepstakes but rather an examination of the Ghost Dance, including its continuing religious significance for some Native Americans and its potential value to historians.

Davis sets out what he’s trying to accomplish in the rest of 'Dead Cities' (a recent book by Mike Davis, well worth the read): to turn on its head the traditional approach to the history of the American West.

Though they differ on many points, Davis says, the major schools of Western historiography "acknowledge a certain stable core regional identity and historical continuity." But "the heirs to Wovoka" reject this. As Davis recounts, they reject a belief in "the finished product, the conquered landscape, the linear historical narrative, the managed ecosystem. . . . They know the supposedly ‘permanent’ structures of tradition and meaning in the white West seldom endure more than a single generation . . . including our most dearly held conceptions of the West as a region."

This is the meaning of the concept of "radical contingency."

"Radical" is the key word, both in its original sense of getting to the root of the matter and because of its political connotations. Davis isn’t indulging in some New Age fawning over Native Americans; he is exploring how the teachings of the Ghost Dance tradition complement the very secular tradition in which he works. "Like a certain German philosopher," he writes of Wovoka’s heirs, "they are all too aware that ‘all that is solid melts into air.’" Davis would expect his readers to recognize that famous line from The Communist Manifesto.

It’s a measure of just how eclectic and non-dogmatic Davis’ radicalism is that he can blend the insights of a Paiute shaman with, among others, those of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and philosopher Ernst Bloch.

"Wovoka, in other words, sustains his great-great-grandchildren with an apocalyptic vision of the history of the American West. Since "apocalyptic" is such an overused and cheapened term, it is important to recall its precise meaning in the Abrahamic religions. An apocalypse is literally the revelation of the Secret History of the world as becomes possible under the terrible clarity of the Last Days. It is the alternative, despised history of the subaltern classes, the defeated peoples, the extinct cultures. I am claiming, in other words, that Wovoka offers us a neo-catastrophic epistemology for reinterpreting Western history. . . . He invites us to reopen that history from the vantage point of an already visible future when sprawl, garbage, addiction, violence and simulation will have overwhelmed every vital life-space west of the Rockies."

Davis is interested in "catastrophes" and "apocalyptic" themes; he isn’t reveling in the misfortune of others but attempting to make use of the unique vantage point that can be found in the midst of the sprawl and the garbage and the violence. And, far from being "a merchant of spiritless misanthropy," as Jim Lewis of the NYC 'Village Voice' calls him, Davis acknowledges the wisdom of the Ghost Dance tradition—that the "end point is also paradoxically the point of renewal and restoration."'

I recently responded to that as follows,

I can't help wondering though if this ought to be seen in such abstract, academic terms. That's rather typical of the Euroamerican take on things. It makes it easy to discuss atrocity with some measure of detachment.

Wovoka's faith, however, wasn't academic or detached but based on a real vision interpreted in the light of Christian eschateology. It was a response to real, not abstract, desperation.

Wovoka tells of how the savior will come if the people dance and show true contrition. The savior will come and stop the atrocities, the abuse, the assimulation. The savior will restore what was promised but never rendered by the whites. The savior will make good on those promises contained in the treaties.

So here we see the abused people trying to take some control over their destinies, trying to become protaganists rather than passive victims. The military options have been brutally suppressed and the legal options thwarted. What's left is the spiritual option, the power to make things happen.

That is what Wovoka sought to use in implementing the Christian Apocalypse. Justice will be served sooner or later. That's the faith and we're just going to try to make it sooner than later. That's the dance.

If Davis or others sees some sort of conceptual convergence with what a reasonable person might predict will happen with continued environmental abuse, that's an interesting correlation, but again highly impersonal and unvisionary. However, it explains in satisfactory Euroamerican terminology what people ought to feel in their gut, having been there already a few times.

I should note that Wovoka revealed the Ghost Dance a good deal earlier than the end of the 1880s. The dance was introduced to the Lakota at the end of the 1880s. That's what caused the hysterical US military reaction at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1890.

So we're just trying to make the end come about, eh. Sound like what Ashcroft and his cadre want too. Weird how everyone wants it all to end, especially once it starts getting difficult. I can see why people reject that interpretation. It jjust doesn't give you a lot of room to negotiate once you talk about ending everything. Or maybe I'm to thick-skulled once again to understand you and Kyaa.

Well, like I said, it was a response to despair. The last paragraph of Kyaa's quote probably illustrates something else about it that's important to remember. The end is also a time of renewal.

What's interesting is you don't need any complicated philosophical or theological framework to appreciate this. Renewals happen all the time, especially when spring comes or a new baby arrives. So instead of the Ghost Dance being a time of desperate measures taken to alleviate the suffering, it ought to be a time to affirm one of the most wonderful things about this world, it's custom of renewing itself.

In a certain sense a competent sorcerer knows what's likely to happen in the world and takes advantage of it. Nowdays they call it science or something like that, but there's really also an art to it that involves not huge attempts to divert what's happening but little impulses applied at just the right time and place that slowly change the courses of things. It also helps if you're kind of flexible in what you consider to be an acceptable outcome.

It's sort of like the magic associated with the bow. You store the power of your body's muscles in the bow which you can release suddenly and much more quickly than if you tried to fling the arrow with just your arm. That's something I think you can probably appreciate more than many people. The bow limbs can deflex much faster than your elbow with a good deal less wear and tear. So you make this alliance with the juniper or whatever wood so that together you can do something that neither could do alone.

So magic then is really more about relationships than about some abstract supernatural power. For example, I could call down the power that resides in the atmosphere. There's a huge reservoir of it that could light up the cities of the earth for centuries maybe. But nobody knows how to tap into it using conventional Euroamerican engineering techniques.

So they sit around scratching their ears while watching the lightning and wishing they could do that. What they frequently fail to appreciate is that like the bow, if you don't put something in, you can't get much out. So when the people dance they're putting something in. They're drawing the bow.

For the Euroamericans who like others to do the work for them, this isn't acceptable. They want to touch things off, to detonate the process, but they still can't get around the debt that's imposed. Their fossil fuels or nitrates come from the sacrifices of countless organisms over millions of years and it takes that long to replace what's depleted. So, inevitably, the Euroamericans encounter repeated energy crises, repeated endtimes.

It is they who came up with the idea of the savior, the supernatural being who would redeem their debts without them actually having to pay anything, that Wovoka borrowed thinking maybe since they'd won they might know something worth knowing. Was he mistaken? Or did he see that the sacrifice would have to be made sooner or later in order to renew the resources?

What do you think?

I had a cat named Wovoka once.

He looked at the apocalytpic blather of the Restoration Movement in the mainstream Protestant churches and decided that if the 'faithful' in Christ wanted to be pulled up into heaven, then that would be a very good thing. And soon, too!

He believed that in every 'Raptured' white person's place would be a buffalo, as it seemed that for every buffalo slaughtered, a white had popped up in its place.

But he never advocated violence. The frightened opponents of the "Ghost Dance" were ignorant white savages who picked up on some of the shamanistic 'fringe' elements that didn't really come from Wovoka and sold some newpapers and some ammunition at the expense of hungry and homeless people.
Even he thought the 'bulletproof' shirts were a bit much.

I think the concept of having someelse do all the "leg work" for you is one of the least appealing elements of Christianity. Funny that it has such a powerful influence. I wish I could say I am self-reliant, or at least as much so as a modern man in the richest nation on earth can be. That is to say, not at all. So we're just victims of the Christian mind set. What a cool way of looking at things. No wonder I was so intrigued by Lucifer early in adolescence. He is trapped just as much as the rest of us by the power of communal though and action. You can't get a different answer because the enemy has inescapably framed both the question and dictated the terms that the answer must contain. You just blew my mind. I am going to have to sleep on that one.

There were probably never that many buffalo in the Great Basin. Pronghorn and desert mulies were usually about as big a game as the forage would support in large numbers and even those large numbers weren't as big as in the mountains or the prairies further east.

So I wonder if Wovoka really thought about buffalo that much. There probably couldn't have been enough slaughtered to account for all the whites that came into the Great Basin country. Maybe out on the prairie it made more sense?

By the late 1880s, all that was left of the big herds of anything native, with the possible exception of the passenger pigeon, was the legendary memory of herds and flocks that took hours and days to pass and of forests covering entire territories from horizon to horizon.

If you're gonna dream, as a native wearing white man's clothes, writing in his language and surrounded by his detritus, then dream BIG!

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/s_z/wovoka.htm

http://www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/resources/archives/eight/gdmessg.htm

Just a little background for some who might wonder what we're talking about.

Dream big huh? I wonder where that comes from? I don't seem to recall it from my childhood. I wonder why that is?

I have known some big dreamers too. It's hard sometimes to understand the purpose of big dreaming. It's hard not to associate it with certain things like sales pitches and alcohol.

Well, I guess we can all dream about big things sometimes. We can dream about running the whole world a little. Funny thing about that. When you follow the dream through, you sort of discover sometimes that the world you end up running isn't so big after all.

Well, Sequoyah Guess dreamed big and created a world!

Iron Eyes Cody, well, did more with a single tear drop than years of legislative noise... by the way, that was Chief Joseph's suit he was wearing... that's why he was paddling through the trash so carefully...

I grew up in the white man's world and I had to dream big, because they kept saying, "Shut up and go along or go wash dishes for a living..."
and I'm white... for the most part...

Yes, I figured as much. It's not difficult spot really, but I should say that it shouldn't automatically condemn you. That's not my point.

There are good dreams and bad dreams. I wish good dreams for you. I wish especially that you will get what you need. Unfortunately, that may not be what you want, but that doesn't mean it won't be good for you.

I have a big dream, several actually.

I dream that someday most people will recognize that what they need is more important than what they want so that then everyone will get what they need.

I dream that people will understand this like grownups and not keep whining about and pushing for what they want even if it deprives others of what they need.

I dream that we can share this planet peacefully and relatively prosperously if we all learn to share, play fair, take turns and tell the truth.

Those last words came from my recently deceased cousin. I think she was a very wise woman, don't you?

I'm sympathetic to your loss.

I had a cousin die two weeks ago. He was 44. He died in his 21 yr old daughter's living room. She came home and found him.

I won't go into details, but he was one person I was not unhappy to hear of dying. My encounters with him when a little boy and a teenager made my life a living hell.
My father tells me that about a month before, this fellow called up my uncle, his father, and apologised for a lot of stuff.

After a life of drug abuse, abuse of other persons, and jail time ...

My father said that at least he had a little peace at the end, because he might have had some inkling that the end was near...

The most charitable thing I could think to say was that I had a lot of peace with the knowledge that he was gone...

I grew up in a land whose "tribes", the remainder of the Illini Confederation, were long gone and cloistered in small groups on reservations far away.
I didn't learn of their existence for many years after I left Illinois.

I didn't learn about the "Trail Of Tears" crossing the area I grew up in, Mt. Vernon, until this year.

The part of Texas I live in was once traversed and farmed by the Caddo, who were gone a long time ago from this place. What remains of them is scattered.

I hate being lied to by people who don't even know that they are lying.

The original inhabitants of these lands were never mentioned to me, except in passing and usually as a reference to an archaelogical dig or a grave that was disturbed.

I have a friend who is a farmer. He collects arrow heads, many of them found in tilling on his land and others...

he says that the amount of visible effort that went into many of them displays a persistence of spirit that keeps them from just being chipped bits of rock...

My cousin's loss was a bit more aggrieved than yours I guess.

All of us probably have people in our lineage we'd rather not acknowledge. But she wasn't one of those. She was brave and beautiful and stubborn and profane and temperamental and sexy and funny and so very very loving. She was for me the big sister I looked up to. The one who could do nothing wrong, even when she did wrong things. She taught me to be proud of who and what I am, even if I do bad things once in awhile.

She would have been 28 on February 14th, Valentine's Day. That's just how it is usually. Most of our people are under 20, which should tell you something.

Many times in real life people ask me why she looked so white and why I do, and I usually answer, "Well, I don't know. Maybe it's whites who look like us sometimes." But I guess we should admit that the blood has been mixed along with everything else, even a little bit.

Sometimes people will greet me at school with Cherokee words. I don't know Cherokee of course, just enough to know when somebody is talking it. And so I'll ask them how they know and they say their grandmother's Cherokee or something like that and they'll call themselves t-sa-la-gi, that's how they say it, and I'll say, "Oh, so you're 'cha-lagee then?" And they look like they're thinking, "Oh no, she knows I'm just a white." So then I say, "Well, we all got some of that blood a little maybe, eh?" thinking that yes, I got probably got some white blood, a Irish grandmother maybe. So maybe I should learn to mispronounce Irish or something. Say, "My grandma's i-'lis."

It's easy to understand why we might be a little mixed up.

One of the founding fathers of the United States complained to James Madison that indians were wild because they shared their women, their wives and daughters with white men. He thought that was a very reprehensible thing to do, very immoral. It's a pity really that he and others like him misinterpreted the gesture.

These things were done so the white men would be relatives not strangers and, therefore, not enemies. But even the "indian lovers" misinterpreted things a lot. They saw their indian wives as a meal ticket, as title to land they appropriated for themselves and for the "good side" of the family, the white side. The Chalagee know about this a lot I think. Much of their land has been alienated in this way.

I think it's a good thing that you're trying to connect with the people who stood on the land before your people came. If you're ever going to put down roots finally, you need know how much we have loved and continue to love this land, how much she owns us, and maybe share that love and be owned too. At least I can dream that can't I?

And if we can love our common mother, maybe we can really live like true cousins someday and not like how your cousin lived with you.

I am sorry for both of your losses. I know that good or bad as they may have been, losing any person you feel a kinship to is painful. Most difficult of all is losing someone for whom you don't feel it is time yet. But hopefully they will live on in positive memories for you both.

If you haven't already, Nelson, I hope you'll go to RCO and read her stuff. I think it's pretty amazing but I'm kind of prejudiced. I'd be curious to know what you think of it. It's in the Archive mostly although I think she wrote a few articles in the Voices part too.

to your comments in response to mine.

I often wish I knew more about my ancestors. The idea that some of them might have painted themselves blue and frightened Caesar is very nice.

I think you already know they probably scared Mr. Caesar shitless. Why else would he have raised the walls? He probably sweated on his bed at night worried that they'd burst in and whack off his head and display it on a stake.

And maybe it wasn't even that long ago. The English, who fancied themselves as Caesar's heirs, didn't really break the clans until the 18th century, about the time people started streaming in their multitudes and dispair to America. What's tragic is that when they got here, they broke the clans they found here. It's ironic don't you think? That instead of fighting our common enemy we ended up fighting each other?

hello, my name is kea.

i've just read through this thread. there is much here and i am pleased to have found such an interesting and thought provoking conversation.

Analiese, your earlier post above is one of the best descriptions of magic i have seen in a long time.

i need to rest, and then come back and have a look at the links posted above. i don't know much about first nations history, but i recognise some of the themes here and hope i can join the conversation.

blessings,
kea

Thanks, Kea. I hope you'll join in when you can. I really don't like to discuss magic that much because I've kind have been taught it's not good thing to do that, but sometimes it's necessary to illustrate something.