Individuals are not the only ones to perish; nations and cultures crumble in mythic images, besieged from without and within. A Cheyenne proverb says, "A nation is not lost so long as its women's hearts are high. But if ever the women's heart should be lost, then the nation dies." Many stories tell of the coming of the white man, with his railroads and armies, and of the disastrous consequences for the Indian. For the Sioux, his arrival meant the end of the buffalo, and with them went an entire way of life.

Men and women die, nations disappear, and even the destruction of the world itself is foretold in apocalyptic images of the end of time. The eradication of the world by flood or fire is a widespread motif across the continent, but it is usually accompanied by tokens of renewal, for the end of this world does not mean the end of everything, but merely the passing of one state and the arrival of the next, just as other worlds were destroyed to make way for the one we live in now.

A Hopi prophecy foretells that when the Blue Star Kachinas dance in the village plazas, then the end will be near. And when a special song is heard during the Wuwuchim ceremony, then the world will be plunged into war. This song was heard before the outbreak of World Wars I and II, and it will be heard again just before the outbreak of World War III. Then everything will be destroyed except the Four Corners area in which the Hopi live. From there a new world will start. The end of this world, in which we are living now, will come when people fly through the sky, try to reach the stars, when the sun turns black, and when the Hopis travel to the House of Mica.

This particular vision was embraced in a rather dramatic way in recent years when, in the 1970s, a Hopi delegation travelled to New York to address a warning to the United Nations. One Hopi spokesman, when passing through Gary, Indiana, saw the sun hidden by clouds of smoke rising from many smokestacks. The sun he was seeing was black. When he saw the United Nations building for the first time, he knew that he had arrived at the house of Mica and that the old prophecies would be fulfilled. There will be a last warning -- earthquakes, eclipses, volcanic eruptions, and if this warning is not heeded, and the people of the world do not take better care of it, this world will be wiped out, and a new one will take its place.

Long before the days of world wars or atomic weapons, however, a Paiute medicine man had another vision of a new world. 1890 witnessed the second major outbreak of the apocalyptic Ghost Dance; in 1870, tribes near California and the far west had taken up the great ceremonial dance for the first time in many years, and now it swept with increased fervour throughout the Plains. While the dancers embued it with a more violent tone in the east, where Indian tribes suffered the most severe stress from the incursions of the whites, the first dancers began with more peaceful intent.

The medicine man Wovoka spoke of a fantastic vision of a world cleansed and renewed with green grass and spring rains and returned, whole again, to the Indian people. The dead returned from the North, driving before them great herds of game and buffalo, and all the people in the world thrived without death or illness. There would be great fellowship and brotherhood between all the tribes, and between man and animal. Unfortunately, this vision was shattered in the cold and bloody snow of Wounded Knee in December, 1890, and little progress seems to have been made toward reaching it again since then.

The belief that it will come some day, however, endures, and with it the vitality of Wovoka's image of all the people in the world joining hands and dancing together in a single harmonious circle: a peaceful world for all its creatures.