CHAPTER 21 | THE MUSIC OF PANTRIBALISM 515
The Ghost Dance religious movement emerged in 1889 under the leadership
of Wovoka, a Paiute shaman who taught that the dance would revive Indians
who had died in battle and restore the dwindling buffalo herds, thus allowing
the religion’s followers to repulse the whites who had been systematically exter-
minating the buffalo as a tactic in the Plains Indian Wars. The religion swept
through Great Basin and Plains tribes, who resisted confi nement to reservations
even though the destruction of their main food sources was leading to starva-
tion. Although the U.S. government outlawed the Ghost Dance in 1890, propo-
nents preserved its practices, and many recordings of Ghost Dance songs were
made in the twentieth century, some as late as 1980. The songs display features
of Great Basin music: they are sung unaccompanied with a relaxed, open vocal
quality; they frequently have paired phrases (aa bb cc, etc.); and they stress words
over vocables.
The peyote religion, later named the Native American Church, is based on a
northern Mexican religious practice dating back to pre-Columbian times. Peyotism
was adopted by Apaches in the eighteenth century, and in the late nineteenth
and twentieth centuries it spread throughout Native North America in the wake
of the collapse of the Ghost Dance. Blending Christian elements and indigenous
shamanic practices, church members hold prayer meetings, beginning early
in the evening and continuing through the next morning, with prayer, songs,
ritual smoking, and the ingestion of peyote, a cactus traditionally used for its
psychoactive properties. Peyote songs, sung solo with accompaniment of water
drum and rattles, resemble traditional Apache songs in some respects but are
unique in the vocable refrain that closes every stanza, “he ye no we,” found in no
other Indian song type.
The most visible aspect of pantribalism today is the intertribal pow wow, a
major expression of Indian cultural identity. The powwow originated in the rit-
uals of men’s societies in Prairie tribes such as the Kansa, Pawnee, and Omaha,
in which feasting, dancing, and music celebrated military exploits. By the 1860s
the ceremonies had spread to the Northern Plains tribes, where they became
known as the Grass Dance or Omaha Dance, and gradually added practices bor-
rowed from other tribes and newly created ones too. In the early twentieth cen-
tury white observers began to call such a ceremony a “pow wow,” using a name
derived from the Algonkian word pauau, meaning a healer or a healing ritual. By
the mid-twentieth century the name was widely used by Indians as well.
Intertribal pow wows date back at least to the Ponca Pow wow, which began
in the late 1870s in Indian Territory (part of present-day Oklahoma). These early
intertribal festivals encouraged the sharing of traditional songs and dances
among Ponca, Omaha, Osage, Pawnee, and other tribes. Some of the tribes were
originally from the Southern Plains, while others had been relocated there. Relo-
cation itself was a strong encouragement toward pantribalism in the fi rst place.
Although the Bureau of Indian Affairs strongly discouraged traditional Indian
dancing during the 1890s, there is some evidence that pow wows occurred on
the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana and elsewhere in that decade. In
the early 1900s the pow wow began to resemble its modern form, partially as
a result of Indian participation in World War I; homecoming ceremonies hon-
ored returning war veterans as modern-day warriors who had fought alongside
members of other tribes. Flag ceremonies and the honoring of veterans remain
essential elements of many pow wows today.the Ghost Dancethe Native
American Churchthe intertribal powwow172028_21_514-530_r2_mr.indd 515 23/01/13 11:18 AM