The history behind this play is well known to readers of books on the American West, though not, I think, to Americans generally. Sources conflict about the real Sitting Bull's attitude towards the Ghost Dance, and though I believe some warrant could be found for the view that emerges in my play, the rightness of that view in dramatic terms should be warrant enough. My aim was not to demythologize the past - something not to be expected of a poet and certainly not of an American poet dealing with the American Indian - but to make the myth worthy of itself.
The idea, so obvious to the nineteenth century, of using traditional verse and poetic diction to render American Indian subjects is not much in favor nowadays. That, to me, was part of its allure. But an urge to go against the grain in matters of style was not the only thing involved. My subject, after all, was not the Indian as such, but the clash of cultures, and this story had an especially ironic twist. The Ghost Dance religion was a borrowing from Christianity, turned against the Christians themselves. I needed a language that could inject, into a world seemingly remote from us, echoes of the Bible, Milton and Blake, not to mention accents closer to home. If I could give my Ghost Dance emissary some of the fire of a down-home Baptist preacher, however that might slight the cultural specificity of the Dance, it was all to the good in terms of larger resonance. I have always been interested in other cultures, but in the absence of intimate knowledge, it seems to me our only choice, as writers, is either to leave such subjects alone, or else translate them into terms we can understand. Whatever its political charms, a flimsy multiculturalism is of no use to the serious myth-maker.
That there is an imperial element in language is something any poet would be hard put to deny. The resonance of certain words and myths is a kind of cultural capital, not always benignly acquired. What redeems it is that it belongs, in the end, to anyone who can make use of it. Appropriation, as the Ghost Dance shows, is not the prerogative of winners alone. Nor is loss confined to the losers.
If there is anything we can all understand, it is loss. It seemed to me that a frankly nostalgic language, one conscious of re-enacting, with its own sort of irony, the cultural engulfment that it describes, was not altogether out of place in my play. In any case that seemed like a more honest posture, and more fruitful for drama, than rage at what happened long ago, and not to me.
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Ghost Dancers main page | Preface
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| Notes for performers