Reading Photographs:
Imaging and Imagining the Ghost Dance: James Mooney's Illustrations and Photographs, 1891-1893

Thomas W. Kavanagh

All photographs and other images used in this web essay are here reproduced courtesy of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution. They have been electronically watermarked for identification. They may not be electronically reposted without permission.

[In order to save downloading time, this HTML publication is in several parts.]




Of all the incidents in recent American Indian history, the Ghost Dance of 1890 is probably without equal in evocative power. From the ecstatic dancing, the mysteriously patterned clothing, to the bloody snows of Wounded Knee, the Ghost Dance is pervaded with visually powerful images. But because they are so powerful, those images must be constantly examined; one must see as well as look.



Fundamental to the way the Ghost Dance of 1890 has been perceived and visualized are the images James Mooney used to illustrate his 1896 Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology report on the ceremonial. Besides portraits of the principal as well as the peripheral participants, Sitting Bull the Hunkpapa and Sitting Bull the Arapaho, scenes of Wounded Knee and of the survivors of the massacre, Mooney also included eight illustrations of the Dance in progress. In the course of the century since Mooney published, his illustrations, and the photographs upon which they are based, have continued to be used to evoke and to illustrate the Ghost Dance. But the photographs themselves have seldom, if ever, been examined for their ethnographic and historical content, let alone for what they can say about the processes of imaging and imagining the Ghost Dance.

One reason for this has been that the entire corpus of Mooney's photographs has been unavailable to researchers. In 1991, through the generosity of the James Smithson Society, I conducted a search of the collections of the National Anthropological Archives for Mooney photographic materials. I located a total of about 2200 Mooney images dating from 1889 through 1918. A hard copy catalog of those images is available at the NAA.

Of those, I located a total of 78 Ghost Dance images. All were taken among the Southern Arapaho of Oklahoma. There are 60 Kodak round nitrate images, and 18 5"x7" glass plate images. In cataloging and inventorying those images, an attempt was made to place the individual images in a temporal sequence based on inferences from individual movements between frames, and other internal clues, but this was not always possible.

At the same time, comparison of these photographs with the published Ghost Dance illustrations revealed that although based on the photographs, the illustrations are actually paintings, made in Washington, DC, by people who had never seen a Ghost Dance. Moreover, several levels of intentional manipulation by Mooney and his artists can be detected in the illustrations. These range from a relatively minor changes of perspective, through the elimination or blurring of detail, the suppression of temporal or sequential context, to the combination of elements from several different events, or of phases in single events into a single image. While it is now impossible to determine exactly why the published images were manipulated, it is possible to reconstruct some of the "real" events as they were photographed. The result, while no less powerful, allows a deeper contextualization of the Ghost Dance images.

James Mooney and the Ghost Dance

In the summer of 1890, James Mooney was making plans to go to Oklahoma Territory to continue his study of the Cherokee. During his preparations, news of the Ghost Dance movement reached Washington, including its spread to Indian Territory--the western part of modern Oklahoma--and he asked for and received permission to change topics (Mooney 1896:653). Mooney arrived in Indian Territory in December 1890; by the time he reached the Darlington agency, headquarters of the Cheyennes and Arapahos, towards the end of the month, "the ground was covered deeply with snow, which stopped the dancing for several weeks" (1896:923). During the interval, "after having obtained their confidence, the Arapaho police [including Watonga 'Black Coyote', chief of the Agency police, and Cedar Tree, a policeman] invited me to come up to their camp at night to hear them practice the songs in anticipation of better weather for dancing. . . . Rehearsals were held in Black Coyote's tipi almost every night until the snow melted" (1896:918); then, "When the snow melted, the dances were renewed." (1896:923).

From his letters back to the Bureau, it is known that Mooney was with the Arapahos through the end of January, when he visited Anadarko, returning to Darlington in the middle of February. In early March he visited Eufala, returning to Darlington in May. He returned to Washington in late July or early August.

Based on the evidence of the photographs, e. g., the lack of leaves on the trees, most of his photographs of the Arapaho Ghost Dances were taken in late January or February, 1891. Again, based on the evidence of the photographs, during those periods, Mooney photographed at least two, perhaps three, Arapaho Ghost Dance events. Based on his letters, at least one of these events occurred January 25, 1891: on January 27, a Tuesday, Mooney wrote to Henry Henshaw, "Sunday [i.e. two days previous, the 25th] [I] counted at one time 139 dancers, besides outside spectators with 26 others inside the circle--some in a manic frenzy, some in spasms and others stretched out on the ground stiff and unconscious" (Mooney to Henshaw, 27 Jan 1891). In his letters during the following months, he made no further reference to having seen any other dances; the clear implication is that the primary Ghost Dance photographs were made no later than early February 1891. Mooney returned to Indian Territory in the fall of 1893 to observe and photograph the Arapaho Sun Dance of that year, postponed from the summer because of farm duties.
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