We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us

In popular culture, communication among Native Americans is often described using stereotypical phrases such as “smoke signals” and “the moccasin telegraph,” which imply primitive or even mystical means of sending information over great distances. By the late nineteenth century, however, Native peoples had become adept at using the infrastructure of settler colonialism to create intertribal networks that circumvented federal control. Justin Gage applies this valuable insight to explain the rapid diffusion of the Ghost Dance across the Great Plains during the 1880s and 1890s. Despite government efforts to suppress it, Wovoka’s anticolonial ideology circulated through the mail, over the wires, and along the railroad lines that increasingly connected even the remotest reservations to “an inter-Indian media community where all Native peoples could congregate” (p. 49). These networks, sustained by the growing literacy and “tenacious mobility” (p. 1) of Plains Indians, also fostered a sense of unity among them even as...

Abolitionism · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Dance · Genealogy · Government (linguistics) · Ideology · Media studies · Mysticism · Native american · Political science · Sociology · Visual arts · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy