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 love 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 centring 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, epistemology, philosophy, and practice toward life-affirming futures.

This book is for one and all--for Indigenous families and future ancestors, for students and scholars, policymakers and poets, and every seeker of truth. Showcasing autoethnographic and narrative methodologies, it invites a global audience into a transformative journey—where Indigenous wisdom reshapes the academy, society, and the stories we choose to honor.