We Do Not Want the Gates Closed between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance : University of Oklahoma Press : 9780806186368 : 0806186364 : 30 Jan 2022 : In the 1860s and 1870s, the United States government forced most western Native Americans to settle on reservations. These ever-shrinking pieces of land were meant to relocate, contain, and separate these Native peoples, isolating them from one another and from the white populations coursing through the plains. We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us tells the story of how Native Americans resisted this effort by building vast intertribal networks of communication, threaded together by letter writing and off-reservation visiting. Faced with the consequences of U.S. colonialism?the constraints, population loss, and destitution?Native Americans, far from passively accepting their fate, mobilized to control their own sources of information, spread and reinforce ideas, and collectively discuss and mount resistance agai