Image description front: Front cover of A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country featuring a stylized swirling abstract illustration with a central figure wrapped in motion.

Image description back: Back cover of A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country with summary text, author bio, publisher information, and barcode.

Back cover text: “Assembling a comprehensive array of Lakota voices, A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country undoes familiar understandings of the Ghost Dance as the last gasp of a people or a simplistic split between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive.’ Rani-Henrik Andersson opens readers to a strikingly wide range of Lakota opinions and experiences. A remarkable and important contribution.”
— PHILIP J. DELORIA, author of Indians in Unexpected Places 

“A sterling effort to recapture lost voices and offer them to a new generation of scholars, the public, and not least to the Lakotas themselves.”
— LOUIS S. WARREN, author of God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

The inception of wanáği wačhípi kiŋ, the Ghost Dance religion, in 1890 marked a critical moment in Lakota history. Yet, because this movement alarmed government officials, culminating in the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee of 250 Lakota men, women, and children, historical accounts have most often described the Ghost Dance from the perspective of the white Americans who opposed it. In A Whirlwind Passed through Our Country, historian Rani-Henrik Andersson instead gives Lakotas a sounding board, imparting the multiplicity of Lakota voices on the Ghost Dance at the time. The more than one hundred accounts compiled here—many of them never before translated from the original Lakota or published—show that the movement caused friction within Lakota society even as it spurred genuine religious belief. 

Rani-Henrik Andersson, author of The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890, has served as the McDonnell Douglas Chair Professor of American Studies at the University of Helsinki and is currently a Core Fellow at the University of Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. Raymond J. DeMallie is author of numerous books on the Lakotas and Chancellor’s Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and American Indian Studies at Indiana University. 

On the front: Oscar Howe, Ghost Dancer, casein on paper, 1975. Courtesy of Dakota Discovery Museum, Mitchell, South Dakota.