Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900 295coast to the Midwest. It became the first genuinely intertribal experience: a dream of
a time when the enemies of the tribes would be overthrown and Indians would be
restored to their rightful inheritance. “A nation is coming, a nation is coming,” the
“Ghost Dance Songs” announce; “the whites are crazy,” “I’ yehe! We have rendered
them desolate – Eye’ ae’ yuhe’yu!” The song, the dance, a vision at once elegaic and
apocalyptic, a mixture of memory and prophecy, all expressed powerful, communal
feelings of loss and hope, betrayal and vengeance. And all created a moral panic
among the whites. White fear about the Ghost Dance was, in fact, to lead directly to
the massacre of 150 Indian men, women, and children at Wounded Knee in the
Badlands of Dakota. With that, the dream of Wovoka was dead.Voices of reform
For other American voices of the time, the vision of the future involved neither
resistance nor revenge, however, but restoration of natural rights and reform.
These included the Cuban immigrant essayist, journalist, and activist José Martí
(1853–1895), the African-American writer and scholar Anna Julia Cooper (1858?–1964),
and the Native American historian and folklorist Charles Alexander Eastman
(1858–1939). Martí described his vision in “Our America,” an essay published in- “The government must originate in the country,” he argued in this essay. For
him, that meant that European models of government had to be jettisoned. So had
other European models, for instance those of education and knowledge. “The
European university must bow to the American university,” Martí suggested. “The
history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and
to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take
priority over the Greece which is not ours.” Identifying the United States as “Anglo-
Saxon America,” Martí pleaded for “Our America”: a multicultural, multiracial
community founded on the aboriginal uniqueness of the New World, separate from
Europe and sustained by the mutual knowledge and respect of all its members. “The
youth of America” should create a new nation, not imitate an old one, he insisted:
“the pressing need of Our America is to show itself as it is, one in spirit and intent,
swift conqueror of a suffocating past.” In such a new and plural republic “there can
be no racial animosity, because there are no races,” “the soul, equal and eternal,
emanates from bodies of various shapes and colors.” Martí was well aware of the
forces that threatened the realization of his vision, and, in particular, the residual
forces of colonialism which he identified as “the tiger.” “The tiger lurks behind every
tree,” he warned, “the colony lives on in the republic.” But he believed fiercely in that
vision of an America that recognized its indigenous roots and its multiple identity:
an America, in short, that was not “theirs” but “ours.”
The aims of Anna Julia Cooper were rather more modest, or at least moderately
stated. In her book A Voice from the South (1892) she declared that she wanted to
break the silence, to give voice to the “hitherto voiceless Black Woman of America.”
And she wanted to do this, she explained, because “the fundamental agency under
God in the regeneration, the re-training of the race, as well as the ground work and
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