"The Father Says NO?"
Abstract
In order to account for several puzzling, if not inexplicable, things that happened to me while researching the life and times of Wovoka, also known as Jack Wilson, 1890 Ghost Dance prophet, I propose the neologism extraordinary personal experience (EPE). An EPE, simply put, references events and circumstances that occur during and beyond focused ethnographic field investigations and seem to defy scientific explanation. Mine began fifteen years after completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of New Mexico about opiate addiction that destroyed the lives of Northern Paiute (Numu) members belonging to the birth cohort who succeeded the 1890 Ghost Dance religion’s generation—the prophet’s daughter included. Intent on calling attention to the centennial of Wovoka’s Great Revelation, I approached the Yerington Paiute tribe’s council in 1988 to pitch the Wovoka Centennial Project (1889–1989), a proposed collaboration that would include my writing a tribally authorized biography of their most famous son. They, happily, approved. No sooner did I return “to the field,” however, than I experienced the first EPE. Having asked my adopted bia (mother), Ida Mae Valdez, in whose home I’ve lived off and on since 1968, to escort me to Pine Grove, Nevada, formerly a thriving gold-mining community in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and where the 1890 Ghost Dance religion effectively was born, she in turn suggested we bring along her wanga-a, or “younger brother.” Who better than Russell Dick, after all, to serve as our guide? “Hooks” had worked his entire lifetime as an irrigator and a cowboy at the Flying M Ranch, which was located in this same East Walker River country and was owned by hotel magnate Baron Hilton, who had purchased it from another financial tycoon, Max Fleischman, the margarine manufacturer.