Prairie Edge Book Review

We Do Not Want The Gates Closed Between Us
Author: Justin Gage

Justin Gage’s We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us offers a powerful reframing of the Ghost Dance, shifting it from the margins of American history to the center of a vast Indigenous communication world. Too often, the Ghost Dance has been reduced to a tragic prelude to Wounded Knee or dismissed as a moment of mass desperation. Gage rejects those narrow interpretations. Instead, he shows the movement as a sophisticated, relational network built on kinship, mobility, and the determination of Native nations to stay connected despite federal efforts to isolate them.

Gage’s central argument is that the Ghost Dance spread because Native people were connected, not because they were confused or irrational. Through letters, runners, family ties, shared ceremonies, and long-standing intertribal relationships, communities carried news of Wovoka’s vision with remarkable speed. Gage maps these routes with care, revealing a world in which Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Shoshone, and many others were active participants in shaping the movement. This emphasis on Indigenous agency is one of the book’s greatest strengths.

His use of sources is equally compelling. Gage draws from agency correspondence, Native letters, missionary accounts, and military reports, but he reads them with an eye toward Indigenous intention. He shows how Native messengers interpreted, adapted, and reshaped the Ghost Dance as it moved across the West. The result is a portrait of a movement that was not monolithic but dynamic—changing as it passed through different nations, each with its own history, grief, and hopes.

Gage also highlights the federal government’s attempts to sever these networks. Reservation boundaries, surveillance, and travel restrictions were designed to keep Native nations apart. Yet the Ghost Dance proved that these “gates” could not be closed so easily. Communication persisted, often in ways that federal agents failed to understand. This tension—between imposed isolation and Indigenous connection—gives the book its emotional and historical force.

If the book has a limitation, it lies in the unevenness of the archival record. Some nations appear more prominently than others, not because Gage overlooks them, but because the surviving documents are sparse. Still, the broader argument remains strong: the Ghost Dance was a continental movement shaped by Indigenous relationships, not a fringe episode misunderstood by outsiders.

Ultimately, Gage’s work matters because it restores depth and dignity to a story long distorted by federal narratives. It reminds readers that Native nations were not silent or isolated in 1889–1890. They were talking, traveling, praying, and refusing to let the gates close between them.

We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us is a vital contribution to Indigenous history and a necessary correction to the way the Ghost Dance has been remembered.

$45.00, 328 pages, Published by Yale University Press

The post Prairie Edge Book Review first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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