The Ghost Dancer

Arline Chase’s The Ghost Dancer, published 2001 by E-booksontheNet in both electronic and print form is a read that’s not easily categorized. After having read it, one asks, “Is it a romance? A spiritual quest? A lesson in Native American culture?”

Through Chase’s versatile command of the language and mastery in description, the story pulses, with the protagonist, Christy Lawrence, trying to figure out her life after a lengthy illness from “a leaky appendix” that resulted in “infection that has spread agony throughout her body.” What Christy is looking for is undetermined by herself and others, but reading this dynamic period piece circa 1890 transcends readers not only back into time but also into the daily lives of each of the finely drawn characters. Chase manages to craft conflict with love on all levels, from the obvious male-female connection of the debutante Christy and the feral Blackfoot White native, Rowan Cameron (“Walks Alone”), to the sublime affection by Christy for her domineering godfather who sways power over all: The imprisoned Algonquin tribe; the ruthlessness of Whites against Native Americans; and all against the railroad saboteurs. Most charming about Chase’s literary fare is the blossoming love between two different people, with two different pasts, and two different cultures, all intermixed in a mystical, mythical subtext centering on the omnipotent ghost dance ritual that “was heavily documented and demonstrated at Wounded Knee.”

 We learn that the Christy and Rowan share “visions” prompted by Rowan’s strive to be a shaman to somehow rectify the injustices done to him and his young orphaned siblings. Christy is smitten by the renegade though she has no clue about the life of Rowan’s people. In a stunned moment she asks, “You mean those Indians ate the horses?” to which Walks Alone replies, “My people starve...the government promises food and goods but they never come.” Here we see Chase’s infusion of politics into the piece; thus, she covers all grounds as though The Ghost Dancer is but a metaphor for today’s ills. In the primitive Rowan (at one point Christy tells him, “This is a fork”), we see that he is everything to everyone: Hero and antihero, warrior and savior, lover and beloved. We also come to see a gentility in him that only a man swept off his feet can shower upon his cherished.