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Ghost Dancers and Magic Shirts


By the late 1890s, it was evident that Native Americans were going to lose their land, and their way of life.  The White Men kept coming, like a storm, wave after wave of trappers, explorers, soldiers, hunters, prospectors, soldiers, farmers, merchants, miners, soldiers, railroad men, cattle buyers, wagon trains, families, towns, cities, soldiers, and disease.  They shot the bison, plowed the ground, cut the trees, dug great gouges into the earth, and claimed the land with fences.

Out in Nevada, there began a kind of religious/cultural movement that was, in fact, an admission of defeat and, at the same time, a howl of defiance.  They danced.  The time was coming, they said, when the plague of destruction brought by the White Men would come to an end, and the skies would shine bright again, when new soil would roll out over the prairies, and the bison would return, and the good life of the people who land this had been would return, and the land would be clear and clean and fine again.  They danced the dance.  Sometimes they wore magic shirts that would protect them from the bullets of the swarm of White Men and their soldiers, until the new land rolled out and the bison returned.

That is what happens when a culture is overrun, and the old ways are pulled down and burned to the ground, when no end of courage and bravery and song and dance and savagery can save what used to be.  There are times when nothing can save you except dancing with ghosts and magic shirts.

There are times when what used to be cannot endure.  Then people do human and hopeless things.  We live in such a time, too.

Detroit is bankrupt.  What had been the symbolic, if not the actual, capital of the old industrial Midwest, is a ghost town, compared to what it had been when thousands of bison surged through the city, and the grass had been green in the suburban streets, and the steel and cars had streamed through their gates to the ends of the earth.

Once the South had been the heart of a great slave-holding society, growing cotton and sending textiles down the rivers and through the ports to all the world.  Once there had been lovely ladies in the best of those textiles, laughing and singing in great homes and sunny cities.  Once there had been American Downton Abbeys everywhere in the South, and there had been servants downstairs, and cheap labor in the fields.

When I was young and insulated, boys knew that if they were lucky, they could do what their Daddies did, and live a good life.  Farm kids learned to farm, factory kids followed their Dads into the factory, and kids whose parents taught school became school teachers themselves.  Girls looked at their Moms and knew what they would have to learn.  Your preacher told you what a good life was, and you looked around in Sunday School and the Youth Group for a husband or a wife.  You ate what you had always eaten.  You tried to forget that your grandparents or parents had an accent.

But then the Rust Belt rusted.  The family farms incorporated.  The steel mills went to Korea.  The cars went to Japan, and stayed there.  The textile mills went to China and Thailand.  Strom Thurmond went to heaven.  The South lost the Civil war, and pretended it had been all about Yankee Industrial Imperialism.  Your son married a Catholic girl, and your daughter married a guy from India, and your other son quit believing in God.  They don't need harness salesmen, any more.  The firm is laying people off.

It is time to buy a Magic Shirt, and dance a Ghost Dance.  It is time to believe that the bison will return; time to believe that the good times will return; time to throw every politician out of office, to throw every immigrant out of the country, and time to believe that what we used to pretend we were will come true, again.

It is time to be free, white, and twenty-one, again!

Do you like my new shirt?





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