Walker River Paiute
The Walker River Paiute , full name Walker River Paiute Tribe , are a nationally recognized tribe of the Northern Paiute . The own name is Agai-Dicutta (" Cutthroat-Forelle -Esser") or Numu ("People").
reservation
The tribe has about 3,300 members. 1200 of them live in the Walker River Paiute Reservation. It extends over 325,000 acres in Churchill , Lyon , and Mineral Counties in the US state of Nevada . The main town and only town is Schurz in Mineral County. The reservation is located in the Walker River valley, which is mainly used for agriculture. The environment consists of desert, mountains and swamps. The valley was used by the tribe as a winter pasture area because of its mild winter climate; in summer the Paiute lived on the Sierra Nevada . The banks of the Walker River are mostly farmland today, where alfalfa grass is grown.
The American authorities initially forced the tribe to live with other Paiute tribes in the Pyramid Lake Reservation. After a trip to Washington in 1874 the reservation was made by an executive order . It is administered under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 by a Tribal Council of seven members who are elected every three years.
Ghost dance
Wovoka , the founder of the ghost dance movement, is buried in apron. He had a serious illness on January 1st, 1889 and received a vision in which a divine voice gave him an assignment. By holding the "ghost dance" an ideal state should be achieved in which all dead Indians would rise again , the bison herds would return, a Messiah would appear and the land would emerge anew as paradise. The first ghost dance was celebrated in the reservation in January 1889. According to Wovoka's instructions, men and women held hands and danced in slow steps to the left in a circle. During the dance they sang songs of Wovoka's dreams and the animals whose spirits gave them protection and which were already mentioned in the songs of the Shoshone . The dances lasted six days and nights and were repeated every six weeks, after which all participants took a bath. The clothing consisted of a simple leather or cotton shirt, the "ghost dance shirt", which was supposed to make them invulnerable. Each participant painted it with the signs of their visions, mostly stars, crescent moon and thunderbirds. The edges of the square sleeves and the seams were mostly frayed, as with the old leather clothing, and the shirts were also decorated with individual feathers. The movement quickly spread to other parts of the country and to other Indian tribes.
Sources and web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Hans Läng , Kulturgeschichte der Inder Nordamerikas, Olten 1981, ISBN 3-530-50230-8 , pp. 287-288