Ghost Dances in Ivory Towers

From the Frontier of Indigenous Studies

By: Tina Bly

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eText | 17 October 2025 | Edition Number 1

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Ghost Dances in Ivory Towers reflects an ethnographic journey shaped by ancestral strength, resilience, and reverence. It is not merely academic—it is ceremonial: a remembering, a return, and a song to generations yet to come.

This is a project of Indigenous empowerment and ancestral reclamation, offering a constellation of guiding principles rooted in Choctaw ways of knowing. Ghost Dances in Ivory Towers moves beyond critique; it becomes ceremony—disrupting colonial frameworks of academia and reimagining higher education as a place of relational accountability, healing, and reciprocity. By centering Indigenous voices, it challenges the foundations of institutional knowledge production and invites a return to wisdom that lives in land, lineage, and spirit. The title itself is both metaphor and invocation—a tribute to the Ghost Dance, a sacred act of resistance and cultural resurgence. Through story, scholarship, and spiritual insight, this work becomes a pathway—guiding policy, pedagogy, philosophy, and practice toward life-affirming futures.

Speaking across generations, this scholarly work is crafted for Indigenous families and future ancestors, for students and scholars, policymakers and poets, chiefs and community leaders. Grounded in autoethnographic and narrative methodologies, it offers a breathtaking journey—where Indigenous wisdom reshapes the academy, society, and the stories we choose to honor.