And Now for Something Completely Different

Native dances banned because they were related to shaman­ism? In the twenty-​​first cen­tury? In America?

Chris­t­ian mis­sion­ar­ies banned Eskimo danc­ing when the vil­lage was founded in 1914.

It was asso­ci­ated with shaman­ism by the church after a min­is­ter wit­nessed a “wolf dance” in a nearby village.

Now, that’s fed­er­al­ism for you.

I couldn’t be more sur­prised if I found out that my mother was really Grou­cho Marx. And no jokes about mis­sion­ary posi­tion.

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Tags: ban, Christian, dancing, Eskimo, missionaries