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“Dying Prophecy”: Ghost Dance Texts and the Paradox of Terminal Modernity
Kathleen Washburn, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
May 18, 2006

This paper takes up the ways in which the massacre of Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee in 1890 becomes coded as a terminal “Indian” and national moment, even as this event functions as a site of extraordinary textual proliferation.  From James Mooney’s sprawling ethnography to S. Alice Callahan’s sentimental novel Wynema and Charles Eastman’s autobiography From the Deep Woods to Civilization, texts that often insist upon their own historicity situate Wounded Knee as the final conflict of the Plains wars, the grim end point in the cultural logic of the “vanishing Indian.”  Yet the Ghost Dance as prophetic movement also marks a rupture of progressive history—and a problem of narrative.  Troubling the critical alignment of Native American literary beginnings with terminal histories, I investigate these accounts of spectral futures in order to suggest alternate possibilities for narrating indigenous modernity.