- Paperback: 115 pages
- Publisher: Michigan State University Press (Oct 18 2005)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0870137573
- ISBN-13: 978-0870137570
- Product Dimensions: 21.5 x 14.2 x 0.9 cm
- Shipping Weight: 204 g
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Product Details |
Product Description
Product Description
Diane Glancy sees books as being akin to maps,and often finds the Native American voices she writes about as she travels. Once, when driving through western Nevada, she stopped at Grant Mountain and Walker Lake, where the Ghost Dance began and still lives. There she found inspiration for The Dance Partner, this outstanding collection of short stories that begins in the present, jumps back to the time of the Ghost Dance, goes further back to the Sioux Uprising, and then moves forward again across 117 years of Plains Indian history.
The Ghost Dance was a late 19th-century phenomenon among Native American groups in the West. Followers believed that whites would disappear and that the "oldways of living" would return. In fact, Glancy’s stories form a kind of Ghost Dance, circling what is with what was and will be. History is not in the past at all, but has a presence in the present in a way that transforms the future. In a culture where much has been erased, forgotten, or lost, the fragments of what is known are woven with the possibilities of what could have been in a technique that is called ghosting. Ghosting in writing presents voices that might have been alongside voices known to have been. Glancy takes the words of Native Americans, Porcupine and Kicking Bear, along with those of ethnologist James Mooney, and adds imagined voices. The past roams into the present. History comes down the road in many vehicles, out of chronological order, carnival trucks with different rides, each setting up unreality in funhouse mirrors that distort them into new ways of seeing is true. Glancy writes from a historical perspective and the imagination of what could have been. In the end, the Ghost Dance symbolizes the possibility of a rewritten life.
About the Author
Diane Glancy is a professor at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches Native American Literature and Creative Writing. Among her many writing awards are the 1993 American Book Award, Minnesota Book Award, and a Native American Prose Award. Glancy is of Cherokee and English/German descent.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
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4.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review)
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
Native American culture shines through short tales of past/present, April 20 2006
By D. Donovan, Editor/Sr. Reviewer "California B... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Dance Partner (Paperback)
Collections strong in Native American literature and writings will find Diane Glancy's search of Native American culture shines through in her short stories, which begin in the present and move back in Native American history. Tales survey over a hundred years of Native history and provide poignant reflections on spirituality, massacres and more.
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