God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

Abstract

Well-known among scholars of Wild West shows for his 2005 publication Buffalo Bill’s America, Louis S. Warren here turns our attention to a phenomenon vividly tied to US history through the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, namely, the Ghost Dance. In God’s Red Son, Warren distinguishes Ghost Dancing from the Sun Dance, Medicine Dance, Grass Dance, and other ceremonial observances, and focuses on the charismatic, proselytizing, and spiritual longings of a religion not dissimilar in its workings from the religious revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Warren argues that the Ghost Dance is a religion, rather than merely a spiritual observance, because it traces back to an individual, a Paiute named Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson) from the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada, who was acknowledged as a powerful spiritual leader and a prophet of (G)od. While the Ghost Dance is best known today for its association with the Lakotas of South Dakota, the Ghost Dance religion was also observed on the Shoshone / Bannock Reservation at Fort Hall in Idaho, the Eastern Shoshone / Northern Arapaho Reservation in Wyoming, and on the Southern Cheyenne / Southern Arapaho Reservation near Darlington, Oklahoma. Warren cites these routes of dispersal in order to reconstruct pilgrimages to Wovoka that Indians made to learn his teachings and receive his blessings. These pilgrimages began in the 1870s, accelerated in the 1880s, and continued well past Wounded Knee and into the twentieth century (Jack Wilson died in 1932).Though initially ignored, the Ghost Dance came to be regarded by white officials, at least in Lakota Territory, as an attempt to resist white authority and foment rebellion. Warren argues that the Ghost Dance “helped many believers accept conquest while strengthening their resolve to resist assimilation” (145). Though hospitable to Jesus and Christianity, Wovoka / Jack Wilson was known among Paiutes for miracles like rainmaking, and for the promise of earthly renewal, as well as reunion with the dead through trance dreams. Millenarian visions forecast the disappearance of whites, the resurrection of ancestors, and the return of the buffalo, but Wovoka also taught his followers that, in their here and now, they should go to church, farm, send their children to school, and keep the peace. This mixture of old and new ways was regularized by Wovoka in 1891 into four nights of dancing (the last night until dawn), followed by a ritual bath and community dispersal. This sequence was to be repeated once every six weeks, and likely reflects the need to define and contain the Ghost Dance as a religion (not a political movement) in the aftermath of the massacre at Wounded Knee.The banning of the earlier Sun Dance in 1882 created a space in which the Ghost Dance could flower. Dances were never just for entertainment or devotion, but provided occasions for the redistribution of wealth, healing, electing chiefs, selecting camp marshals and police, and convening male ceremonial organizations. Any ban on dancing undermined the authority of holy men and disrupted social and cultural bonds. Warren traces the motives behind these ethnocidal bans to religious prejudice and competition among Christian missionaries, widespread Progressive Era attempts at social engineering, and the transfer of control over reservations to the Department of the Army in 1890 by President Benjamin Harrison. Above all, Warren cites the widespread land grab by whites, especially in the Dakotas, intended to force Indians onto shrinking reservations, where troublesome Chiefs could be replaced or jailed, gatherings such as dances curtailed, and church and school attendance mandated. That these measures fell most heavily upon the Lakota was due to their numbers. In 1890, there were some 18,000 Lakota, the most numerous of all Plains Indians, only 3,500 Southern Arapaho / Southern Cheyenne, the second-most vigorous Ghost Dance community.In addition to detailing Ghost Dance philosophy, leaders, migration, and practices, Warren provides biographies of Wovoka and his followers, including Porcupine (Cheyenne), Short Bull (Brulé), Kicking Bear (Lakota), and the Arapaho evangelist Sitting Bull. Warren also discusses the intersection of the religion with the massacre at Wounded Knee, the murder of Sitting Bull (Lakota), and with plains history in the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. Part of that history concerns how anthropology created the “Indian” subject via James Mooney and the gentlemen’s club that was the US Bureau of Ethnology, a division of the Smithsonian Institution ill-suited to Mooney, a high-school educated, Catholic son of Irish working-class immigrants. In 1894, when Mooney’s book The Ghost Dance Religion was published by the Smithsonian, the Bureau’s view of humanity was hierarchical, placing Christianity at the apex and “primitive religions,” such as Ghost Dancing, at the bottom. Though Mooney individualized, rather than hierarchized, the Indian cultures he studied, he ignored evidence that Indians were rapidly adopting and adapting material practices from the broader culture, while keeping their own culture very much alive.Perhaps no activity illustrates the flexibility of Indian cultures better than the utilization of the Wild West show by Ghost Dancers. Warren notes that a number of those arrested in 1891 were transported from the Dakotas to Fort Sheridan outside Chicago, where William F. Cody recruited most of them for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. They toured Europe, then returned to the US to play at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. There, Cody brought family members to join the company on show campgrounds, where Indians could live as they wanted to, exemplars of the pluralistic society they now inhabited. The Ghost Dance continued to enrich Indian lives, and it has been revived in this century. Thanks to Louis Warren’s exhaustive scholarship, our knowledge of Wovoka / Jack Wilson and the Ghost Dance has been enriched as well.