Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas: The Ghost Dance, Peyote, and Christianity

Abstract

In Religious Revitalization among the Kiowas, Benjamin R. Kracht has crafted an important contribution to Native American religious practice, one drawing on more than thirty years of extensive ethnography on the Kiowa reservation in Oklahoma and illuminated with detailed archival research. As a result, this book skillfully describes the religious responses of Kiowa people during the first half of the twentieth century to the harsh realities of reservation life and increasingly intensified Christian missionization. Kracht’s dedication to ethnohistorical detail shows in his intimate portrayal of how people, both Kiowa and non-Native, navigate the religious diversity of this reservation community and their own beliefs. Volumes have been written about the Ghost Dance and the Native American Church, but there is little recent scholarship about Native American Christianity, with important exceptions including Mark Clatterbuck’s Crow Jesus (2017) and Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George Tinker’s A Native American Theology (2020).Kracht takes on the difficult task of relating a holistic depiction of Kiowa religious change from the tumultuous early reservation era through the post–World War II period, drawing together Indigenous Kiowa religious practice, the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, and Christianity. In the final chapters, he brings his narrative up through current practice, documenting an incredible sweep of history. He has brought extensive archival materials to bear on his ethnographic research to build a complicated historical narrative, relating perspectives of both Kiowa people and of the government officials and missionaries working in these communities. He has crafted a rich ethnohistory that can only come from decades of work in one community. Such in-depth research allows him to illuminate the multiple perspectives of Kiowa people as they approached these new religious forms. Accounts of Native religion, and particularly the Ghost Dance, can present a monolithic perspective, but Kracht provides a nuanced account, demonstrating that Kiowa people held a multitude of opinions about religion depending on band, family history, personal experience, economic situation, and other social factors. By beginning the narrative in the early reservation period, Kracht sensitively depicts the challenging choices Kiowas made during a time when their religious practices were under threat from both government officials and missionization. As he continues the narrative to the present, he also relates how perceptions of religious practice have changed over time.In this book, Kracht provides lengthy quotes from his voluminous interviews, giving voice to Kiowa people, letting their perspectives and observations speak for themselves. He also relates with sincerity his own experiences, providing even more nuance to the reader. His analysis of shifting Kiowa religious practice leans a little heavily on revitalization-movement theory to explore the Ghost Dance and peyotism, an approach that can be essentializing. Regardless, he successfully reveals that Kiowa religious action throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has not simply been a response to deprivation. This book makes an important contribution to the literature by demonstrating that Christianity has not simply existed in opposition to peyotism or other Indigenous forms of Kiowa religion, but that Kiowa people themselves have actively shaped all of these religious practices in conversation with one another. Kracht builds a strong case for his argument that Kiowa people molded each new religious movement they encountered to their current circumstances, even indigenizing Christianity. Scholars of Plains Indian history, the Ghost Dance, the Native American Church, Native Christianity, and early reservation life on the Plains will find this book useful. I believe that scholars researching missionary activity in the United States, revitalization movements, syncretic religious change, and Indigenous responses to missionization and colonization would also find insight in this book.