Ghosts Dancing

Native Americans call the northern lights the wawatay—ghosts dancing—and believe they appear when the earth is in peril. Travel back to a time when the Native Americans felt that everything was lost.

The Battle of the Little Bighorn, the assassination of Sitting Bull, the Ghost Dance Religion, Canada’s Northwest Rebellion, and the horrific massacre at Wounded Knee are all recounted as David St. Clair and his Métis friend Pilgrim journey through the Western Frontier.  Overhead, the northern lights—which the Ojibwe believe to be their ancestors’ spirits—swirl, warning of impending peril.

This is the story of two rascals, one a mysterious French-Anishinaabeg Métis known only as Pilgrim, and a scholar-adventuring (a not uncommon 19th century character) youth named David St. Clair. The two journey through the apocalyptic landscape of the Western Frontier as that romantic—and brutal—period in American history comes to an end.

It was a time of great unrest. In Canada’s northwestern territories, Louis Riel fought to create a new world for the new people, the Métis, who were doomed to failure from the very start by the rapacious and encroaching European immigration. In the Plains Wars of the United States, the visions of Sitting Bull and the Prophet Wovoka sought to bring about the Lost Paradise of Native Americans threatened—successfully, as it turned out—by the American counterpart of that same encroaching rapacity.

 

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Reviews for Ghosts Dancing

Ghosts Dancing, Steve Fortney’s historical novel, transports us back to times of agony and challenge, yet also times with promise and beauty. It’s a moving story told by Pilgrim who lives across cultures as a masterful survivor and witness to history…and through the eyes and interviews of companion and ethnographer St. Clair. They struggle to understand as they witness Native cultures being overrun and reduced. The most moving scene in the book might be when Pilgrim, alone on the vast prairie, comes across a tattered lodge. In one brief moment we can feel the immediacy of tragedy as well as its sweep. 

The novel is moving in an active sense, too. Between Pilgrim and St. Clair we have the story told by men who between them knew East, West, South, and North of this continent in the last half of the 19th Century. Their stories swing wide enough to include Civil War battles: in the United States and in Canada by way of the Métis.  They knew a diverse tangle of cultures ranging from St. Clair’s early years as a New England minister’s son to Pilgrim’s Great Lakes Ojibwe roots through the people sparse though energetic upon the plains. Pilgrim and St. Clair’s knowledge of strife change, and new people coveting an old land are twisted into a strong rope of story. 

The novel was a little slow-going at first in part because the rhythm of the dialogue takes a bit of getting used to. I also needed to wrap my head around the history here which I did not know before picking up this book. Real characters from actual history people this novel. Louis Riel, Wovoka, Custer, Sitting Bull, Territorial Governor Ramsey, and many more give this novel a solid underpinning in historical fact. Wise men, scoundrels, cruel monsters, misguided prophets, opportunists, blunderers, the pious, phonies, and sad victims of fates undeserved fill these stories.

This review of history leaves me considering its relevance in our time. These people, each and every one of them, might have a modern counterpart. The stakes were large and devastating for some while bringing windfalls of fortune to others. Despite the tumult, the beauty of the land and the richness of nature show through behind the scenes. Through fat times and lean, prosperity and misery, or hope and despair, were they that much different from us?  They watched their economies measured in pelts and buffalo and game just as we fret over the uncertainties of the stock market and joblessness figures and home values. They sought comfort in prophets and holy men just as we do from pundits and the pious we follow. Whether we learn anything from this history remains to be seen. We can in the pages of Steve Fortney’s Ghosts Dancing still hear its echo.

Al Long

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