"Ghost Dance"

The character Lucy Jacobs in the story "Turning Water into Gold" is a Paiute Indian woman raising her grandkids in a construction camp on the Truckee River while her husband and son work at building the Derby Dam, the first big federal dam project in the West.  She is repeatedly described as "practical" meaning that she has to accommodate herself to an entirely different means of subsistence than that of her own grandmother.  The fish in the river are gone, the lake water is falling, the trees have been cut and the family migrates in search of wages instead of seasonal foods.

But the descriptor "practical" also alludes to her rejection of spiritual belief.  We are left to infer that the spirits died along with the pine trees and the trout and the cattails.  We also have an implicit challenge to the currently-popular belief that Native Americans are "deeply spiritual" people… I guess stereotypes are acceptable if we consider them favorable.  There is also Lucy's sardonic observation that the whites are a deeply spiritual people.  She looks at the belief of the white people that sending the Truckee River through a tunnel and into the baking wastelands will make the desert bloom -- will "turn water into gold" -- and concludes that this is just magic thinking.  And she was right.  The dam only served to further lower the level of Pyramid Lake without making the fortunes of people who imagined that they could farm the desert.

But it is worth taking a longer look at the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who Lucy dismisses with the words, "if you make enough predictions, some of them are bound to come true."  Wovoka preached, first to his Paiute relatives and then to any Native Americans who would listen, that it is necessary to remain who you are and not to become a failed imitation of somebody else.  The Handsome Lake religion of the Iroquois is today considered "traditional" but it came originally from the visions of the Seneca, Handsome Lake, in 1799.  It was profoundly innovative at that time.

It is possible to look through this lens at a number of early anti colonial movements.  In the sixteenth century in both the Yucatan and the Andes there were prophets preaching renewed adherence to the old beliefs as a means of making the Spanish disappear.  Just prior to the Haitian Revolution, Francois Makandal offered a religious focus to resistance to the French.  In the Dominican Republic, the prophet Papa Liborio taught that modernization was making the streams dry up, and urged a return to traditional beliefs in his years-long war with the US Marines.

In three other stories from Stones from the Creek this adherence to traditional belief offers a rich source of resistance.  Magdalena sings the US Marshal's posse away in "Warrior Princess" with traditional alabados, or hymns.  Teresa Urrea provided support for the Tomochitecos in "Passion Flower" and the Mexican government responded by deporting her to the United States.  And Alchesay used the Apache origin story of White Clay Woman to explain how the people could continue being Apache under entirely new circumstance.

Marx described religion as an opiate.  Sometimes.

Below, Wovoka.