a
hin ah.
Ah hlun hla hlue i hi ei-ah whi no ei-ah whi no i-ah ei-ah hi-ah hin ni
ni ah.
Tur wey u tur p'hoa whe na he de a na lhen h'li he pun hi ni ni ah
Li u yu sa na a a a ya he wa a hi ni ni a hi ni ni a ni a a ha i hi.]

A SONG OF THE GHOST DANCE.

There are few more pathetic sights than that of an Indian ghost
dance,--pathetic in itself, not to consider the gloomy background of
fear inspired by it in the minds of so many of our own race who have
so widely misunderstood its meaning. The ceremony is but an appeal to
the unseen world to come near and to comfort those who have been
overtaken in the land of their fathers by conditions both strange and
incomprehensible.

The ghost or spirit dance is a modified survival of several ancient
ceremonies, blended into one and touched here and there with ideas
borrowed from our own race.

In the hypnotic vision which follows the monotonous dance, the
landscape of his former days, untouched by the white man, appears to
the "controlled" Indian: the streams wander through unbroken prairie;
no roadways, no fields of wheat, intrude upon the broad stretches of
native grasses; the vanished herds of buffalo come back to their
grazing-grounds; the deer and the antelope, the wolf and the bear, are
again in the land; and the eagles look down on the Indian villages,
where are to be seen the faces of old friends returned from the
spirit realm. These are the scenes which come to the homesick Indian,
who is stranded in his native land, his ears filled with foreign
sounds, his old activities gone, and his hands unskilled and unable to
take up new ones.

The ghost dance is the cry of a forsaken people, forsaken by the gods
in which they once trusted,--a people bewildered by the complexity of
the new path they must follow, misunderstood by and misunderstanding
the race with whom they are forced to live. In this brief ceremony of
the ghost dance the Indians seek to close their eyes to an unwelcome
reality, and to live in the fanciful vision of an irrecoverable past.

* * * * *

This song was given me by a ghost dancer, a leader in the Arapaho
tribe. Before he sang, he explained to me the ceremony, its peaceful
character, and, all unconsciously, made apparent its expression of a
pathetic longing for a life that can never return. Standing before the
graphophone, he offered an earnest prayer, then, with his companions,
sang this song.

The si