Back to category: Novels

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.

American Literature - Eastman and Wovoka

EASTMAN AND WOVOKA
By Orlin Grigorov


Ghost Dance Songs: Wovoka, “The Messiah Letters”

Before reading the actual literature text, it is extremely important to go over the history of those letters, as well as part of the biography of the author.

Notes from pages 843-845:
Ø Wovoka was a Numu (Paiute) Indian, and he was born in 1856 or 1857 at Walker Lake, which is the present-day Nevada State.

Ø On the New Year’s Day of 1889 he was sick with scarlet fever (funnily, I suspect that this is some kind of STD), and fell into coma, which coincided with a total solar eclipse. While drifted away into unconsciousness, he had a vision, in which he was transported to heaven. There he spoke to God. The Messiah (Jesus) told ordered him to serve as a messiah himself among the American Indians, and tell them to perform a certain ritual (later called “The Ghost Dance”) in order to bring back all the buffalo, other game animals, the rain (because the region was su...

Posted by: Asare Mabel

Limited version - please login or register to view the entire paper.