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

Abstract

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 is one of the best-known events in American history. It is an internationally recognized symbol of the violence of settler colonialism and of indigenous resistance to oppression. The massacre has long been a staple in textbooks and in classroom lectures as the last gasp of Native American military resistance to the United States. Historians and anthropologists have spilled more ink on the massacre than on nearly any other event in the history of the North American West. Although each of the works on the massacre includes a discussion of the Ghost Dance, the indigenous religion that precipitated the massacre, rarely has that movement in and of itself been taken as an object of scholarly inquiry. Louis S. Warren’s new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, demonstrates that the Ghost Dance readily rewards close scrutiny, and that when properly understood, it has implications that illuminate not only western but also American and global histories. Warren has previously shown how to take a well-worn western subject—William “Buffalo Bill” Cody—and transform it into a lens through which to understand a broader American story. Warren’s Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show (2005) won the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award in American History and the Western History Association’s Caughey Prize for the Best Book in Western History.