Ghost Dancing/Wounded Knee

One religious movement incorporated by the Native Americans belief system is the Ghost Dance. Along time ago the practice swept the Western US in areas like California and Oklahoma. The prophet Jake Wilson was the influencer behind the Ghost Dance. The daqnce quickly spread to various American Indian nations and even started to take on different meanings. It was originally believed that if you performed the ceremonial dance, you could visit relatives who had left their bodies. It was healing for people who had lost friends or relatives. Later, people started to believe it could also protect in battle or ward off fears and suspicions. This ritual dance unified the Indian people even if two tribes were conflicting at the time. Unlike most other Native American dances, drums or instruments don't accompany the Ghost Dance. The rhythm of the chanting is all that guides the dancers' steps. Each song begins slowly and then rises in volume and speed each time it is sung. By the time the song is repeated for the fourth time, it is loud and fast. Throughout the dance most people would fall into trances and would claim to see their dead relatives.

http://www.native-americans-online.com/native-american-ghost-dance.html

http://www.google.com/imgres?

Perhaps the government was frightened of the dance's spiritual power. They reacted to this outburst of Indian behavior by gunning down ceremonial dancers at wounded knee during a peaceful ceremony. Women and children were shot in the back trying to escape. Approxiamtely 125 people at the beginning of the dance, and twice that number at the end. This day would go down in history as the Wounded Knee Massacre.

lastoftheindependents.com-Chief Big Foot

legendsofamerica.com

Works Cited
http://www.google.com/imgres?
http://www.native-americans-online.com/native-american-ghost-dance.html
lastoftheindependents.com
legendsofamerica.com

Culture and Society

The short story "The Bride" by Hallie Crawford Stillwell reminds me alot of how different cultures can be and how it takes time to adapt to a new one. What is the difference between culture and society? Culture is a peoples way of life that is passed on from generation to generation. It consists of physical objects as well as patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Although cultural and society are tightly interwoven and cannot exist without each other, they are not identical. A society is a group of people living in a defined territory and participating in a common culture. Culture is that society's total way of life. Culture underlines human social behavior. What people do and don't do, what they like and dislike, what they believe and don't believe, and what they value and discount are all based, in large part, on culture. In the story, Roy was use to living on the ranch and the with his cowboy friends while Hallie had to adapt to sleeping in a bedroll and being a school teacher which forced her to have to change her way of thinking and what she was use to when she was rasied. So then can we truely say culture provides the blueprints people in a society use to guide their relationships with others. If so, human social behavior, then, is based on culture.


Cultural Identity is the identity of a group or culture, or of an individual as far as one is influenced by one's belonging to a group or culture. To be with Roy, Hallie had to change her way of living and what she was use to, and because culture is not innate, human behavior must be learned. Despite how Hallie's father felt, she knew it might not be an easy adjustment, being the wife of a cowboy and being a school teacher by the Mexican border, but she was willing to take that chance. If you wanted to describe and analyze a culture, what would you look for? How could you begin to classify the components of a people's way of life?

  blog.thoughtpick.com

Cultural identity can be expressed through external attributes.