Adrian C. Louis’s posthumous novel tells the story of Lyman “Bean” Wilson, the fictional grandson of the Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, and his relatives. Like the author himself, his character Wilson is a Paiute poet, journalist, and instructor with an Ivy League education who lives and teaches in the Oglala community at Pine Ridge; readers familiar with Louis’s life and work will recognize such autobiographical details incorporated throughout the novel. The third-person narrative perspective in The Ghost Dancers is shared among three characters: Wilson, his son, Quanah, and his stepson, Toby. As the narrative perspective rotates among these three characters, the action shifts back and forth between Pine Ridge in South Dakota and the Walker River Paiute reservation in northern Nevada. Louis makes the most of opportunities afforded by the novels’ two settings to incorporate Lakota and Paiute histories and cultural references. Although the action in the novel is confined to a brief period from fall 1988 to summer 1989, Louis repeatedly demonstrates how the events in the present—and the characters’ responses to them—are shaped in part by both Lakota and Paiute histories and cosmologies.