Tribes Unite

The Great Plains Indians and those of the Great Basin and Plateau regions illustrate what happens when people’s communal system is broken down and they are forced to relocate. They illustrated this quite literally in the men’s art of pictorial drawings on tipis, hide, and, later, paper. The most interesting phenomenon to happen to these people is that, even though they often didn’t have a common language until English was learned, different tribes banded together in ceremonial traditions. They shared a common thread, that being pushed out of their original community into an area they didn’t know very well by white people who didn’t recognize their rights as American citizens. The buffalo, which these people considered sacred, was the source for many aspects of their lives, such as food, tools, art, clothes and more, were killed off to near extinction by the Europeans when the Transcontinental Railroad was constructed in the 1880s. Two intertribal movements, both influenced by aspects of Christianity, banded together tribes of this area. These two religious movements, however, were not recognized as legitimate, and one of these religious ceremonies, the Ghost Dance, ended in a drunk U.S. Cavalry killing many Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1890 (“Coming to Light” p. 358).

There is a denial of anything relating to the Ghost Dance beliefs now. According to “Coming to Light,” the prophet Wovoka, a Paiute native, had visions that there were worship songs and dances that could keep away the bullets of the U.S. soldiers who would come in and try to stop their ceremonies (p. 357). This movement was the strongest among the Wind River Shoshone, who have their roots both in the Great Basin and the Plains region. This religion involved faith in a god that was not seen, which is not physically manifested through masks during the ceremony. Most Native Americans we’ve studied thus far have made graven images or symbols of some sort so that they could see the god(s) that they worship, but Ghost Dance ceremonies were built on faith. The Bible does say to beware of false prophets, and these native people had to learn the hard way that Wovoka was one of them. Some of the visions, according to “Coming to Light,” dealt with the end of the world, the rising of the dead to a new world and a paradise for the people who believed in this god (p. 358). Some of these visions he described having can be found in the book of Revelations, but, unfortunately, it wasn’t the whole truth.

These people have been greatly influenced by the Christian missionaries on one hand, but have been corralled into small communities and reservations with little means for modern entertainment, jobs, and convenient stores on the other. It strikes me as ironic that the ancestral people of the American frontier were denied their own religious freedom up until recently. Didn’t the Europeans come to the New World to get away from religious persecution and a domineering government? They were, and we still are doing the very thing we ran away from in Europe to the native people of this land. We had to deal with the Native Americans the way the British and French dealt with the colonists, except the native people had no means to escape the dominant ruling class of Europeans. We were founded as a nation under God, and I believe we have such freedom in this country because God has given us a free will and we usually exercise that right in America. Once we take away the people’s free will to choose how they believe, like Americans have done by the way they’ve treated the Native Americans, then we will be a country like that of Bosnia, where religious and ethnic factions have fought against each other to prove who is right and who is wrong. The right of God’s free will is granted to everyone, so Christians can tell of God and His love and let the people we touch decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong. Government shouldn't take away the choices of its free people, by limiting the power of their economic, political, and spiritual freedom.