University of Nebraska Press (2020)
304 pages
Review by john Peacock
Editor Daniel Beveridge, a lecturer in Dakota history at First Nations University of Canada, calls this book a rope made up of four strands, representing four voices: his own editorial voice, the traditional oral voices of Canadian Wahpeton Dakota elders Samuel Mniyo and Robert goodvoice, and another kind of voice in the form of pictographs that the Wahpeton artist Jim Sapa made for his own use in the annual Dakota Medicine Dance.
The Red Road Dance ritually performs the ancestors’ Red Road journey from far-off eastern lands to the West and a promised life where the sun descends. The first stage of the journey, as performed, ends with the ancestors’ arrival as a united body of families at their Saskatchewan reserve. On the second stage, the ancestors’ prediction of a good life with many arts to learn and pleasures to be had, fails, as the twin scourges of monetary greed and alcohol addiction bring disorder