hloride, New Mexico, is a dusty mining town slowly bleaching away in the sun, a casualty of the big copper firms' exodus to South America. To the dying place returns Roselle More -- hometown girl and faded Hollywood star -- for the premiere of her new film. The even is a cynical promotional gimmick, one that her director, Bill Brodkey, making a last-ditch attempt to affirm his own artistic integrity, hopes will also resurrect the actress' bottomed-out career. Naturally the citizens of Chloride hope the publicity will do the same for their town. But Roselle vanishes. A double assumes her place -- and suddenly nothing is as it seems. In this eerie, beautifully crafted novel, Gladys Swan presents an impressionistic palimpsest of myth and modern life, in which the present is revealed as only a play of light and shadow over a ghost dance that -- tenuously -- ensures the world's continued existence. Part history, part myth, part meditation on truth and illusion, the novel becomes a kaleidoscope of plots and subplots, each refracted through the perceptions -- the voices -- of a cast of characters as intriguing as the Southwest itself. And as the town giddily whirls toward its rendezvous with truth, these characters find themselves precariously balanced between a lost past of blood-deep spirituality and an unknowable, terrifying future, between the world of drama and the drama of the world. Presiding over and in some mysterious way engineering this ultimate rendezvous is the oracular A.J. ("Bird") Peacock, archetypal trickster, Oberon, Puck, Prospero to the town. Truth, Bird points out, is not always comforting. The truth (or a truth) is finally revealed when the voices of the title -- of the past, the land itself -- speak during the novel's apocalyptic conclusion. There, in the wilderness, in a dazzling play within a play, the past comes face-to-face with the present, the spiritual with the profane. In this crowning union of memory and desire, this shoring-up of fragments against ruin, the discerning reader will hear echoes of writers as disparate as Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Joyce. Never less than consummately entertaining, Ghost Dance: A Play of Voices works flawlessly on many levels at once. The demands of this remarkable novel are great, but so are its rewards.
Classic of American anthropology explores messianic cult behind Indian resistance, from Pontiac to the 1890s.
Dr. Washington Matthews, a physician with the Navajo who was among the first to record their language and beliefs, and A. M. Stephen, a Scotsman who lived with the Hopi nearby for years and also learned to speak Navajo, ...
The 1870 Ghost Dance was a significant but too often disregarded transformative historical movement with particular impact on the Native peoples of northern California. The spiritual energies of this “great...
An account of the Ghost Dance movement, recalls how Native American peoples danced together in the hope of restoring their old world but soon encountered tragedy with the massacre at Wounded Knee
Ghost Dance
Two dazzling dramas on American themes from the Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, Walker and Ghost Dance.
In 1890, the United States government outlawed the Ghost Dance.
The Cherokee Ghost Dance: Essays on the Southeastern Indians, 1789-1861
Indispensable for understanding the prophet behind the messianic movement, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance addresses for the first time basic questions about his message and This expanded edition includes a new chapter and appendices covering ...
" This is a compellingly nuanced and sophisticated study of Indian peoples as negotiators and shapers of the modern world."—Richard White, author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815