Desert Notebooks by Ben Ehrenreich

Author:Ben Ehrenreich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781640093539
Publisher: Counterpoint
Published: 2020-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

Bison skulls, 1870

It’s worth asking again. Is it possible to write without plundering? To leave something behind that is true? I don’t mean writing that is innocent. Such a script could have no meaning. I mean writing that takes sides, without compromise or dissemblance or theft, that stands not only with the living but with the dead, with everyone and everything that this society is working to erase.

George Laird danced the Ghost Dance too. It arrived among the Chemehuevi in 1890, which would have made him about eighteen. Both the Chemehuevi and the Mohave hold strong prohibitions against speaking of the recently dead, which may be why the Ghost Dance did not establish deeper roots among them. George apparently said little about it, except, Carobeth wrote, that he “was not seriously impressed by its teaching,” and joined the dancing only “for fun.”

But aren’t the enthusiasms of youth often an embarrassment to the old? Perhaps, after the failure of Wovoka’s prophecy, he preferred to downplay the earnestness of his involvement. Even lighthearted acceptance of an apocalyptic creed would likely have been inconceivable to the generations that preceded him. So long as time wheeled smoothly through the seasons, its interruption, destruction, and restoration would hardly have seemed desirable. The trauma of conquest broke all that. By George’s adolescence, “with the influx of white settlers and the assertion of governmental authority, the curtailment of hunting ranges, the frightful smallpox epidemics,” Carobeth wrote, “time had become suddenly, frighteningly linear.”

The Ghost Dance, she judged, “at once expressed and alleviated the sense of impending doom.” Perhaps it was something more than that, a way of transmuting death into survival, despair into togetherness and even hope. Viewed in retrospect, from a distance of forty years, that might have felt like fun.

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