Lyric Thinking: Poetry in the World

"Ghost Dance," Forestier (Facing p. 182.) In the late 1880s, the new religion of the Ghost Dance spread rapidly among Native Americans throughout the American West in response to the dire conditions they faced. Forcibly moved onto reservations by the U.S. military but inspired by the revitalist vision of a Paiute shaman named Wovoka, the desperate tribes suffering from poverty, hunger, and disease embraced this last hope--the ghost-dancing rituals intended to hasten the arrival of an Indian messiah who would liberate them and usher in an all-Native future world.