Description
The Ghost Dance was a late-19th-century phenomenon among Native American groups in the West. Followers believed that whites would disappear and that the "old ways of living" would return. In fact, Glancy's stories form a kind of Ghost Dance, circling what is with what was and will be. History is not in the past at all, but has a presence in the present in a way that transforms the future. In a culture where much has been erased, forgotten, or lost, the fragments of what is known are woven with the possibilities of what could have been in a technique that is called ghosting. Ghosting in writing presents voices that might have been alongside voices known to have been.
Glancy takes the words of Native Americans Porcupine and Kicking Bear, along with those of ethnologist James Mooney, and adds imagined voices. The past roams into the present. History comes down the road in many vehicles, out of chronological order, carnival trucks with different rides, each setting up unreality in fun-house mirrors that distort them into new ways of seeing what is true. Glancy writes from a historical perspective and the imagination of what could have been. In the end, the Ghost Dance symbolizes the possibility of a rewritten life.
Book Information
ISBN 9780870137570
Author Diane Glancy
Format Paperback
Page Count 115
Imprint Michigan State University Press
Publisher Michigan State University Press