The Native American Ghost Dance movement arose in the late 1800’s and featured large circle dances as well as teachings that became a part of American Indian belief systems. The movement was suppressed by the U.S. government after the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890. In his new book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, Apr.), historian and professor Louis S. Warren makes the case that the movement was, in fact, a modern religion.
What does the book’s title refer to?
The messiah of the Ghost Dance prophecy. According to many of the evangelists who carried the prophecy to Indian reservations around the West, the son of God would come to rescue his Indian children from their travail. In some of the teachings he was described as having come to Earth before as a white man, but the whites killed him, and he would return this time as an Indian. At the time, journalists and others referred to him as the Red Christ.
How is it that a “dance” could be considered a religion?
The term "Ghost Dance" can describe a dance, or the religion of which the dance is a part. It was a religion [in so far as it was] a system of worship that incorporated ceremonial practice and prescribed behavior to achieve spiritual well-being. It [also] acquired a broad, pan-Indian group of followers spread out across 30 different Indian reservations and in many non-reservation Indian communities, too.
Why was the Ghost Dance performed?
Ghost Dancers believed that doing this dance was essential to bringing about the return of the Indian messiah. [But the dance alone does not bring back the messiah. Dancers knew] they also had to love one another, keep the peace, and, critically, they had to go to work. Repeatedly the prophet tells his followers you must work for white men, which I take to mean you must work for dollars, and do wage work. The Ghost Dance taught a code for living in the modern era by allowing Native people to accept these new ways of living as not just something white people are telling them to do, but something that an Indian prophet has instructed them to do. [In this way,] wage work becomes an authentic Indian activity; it’s something Indians must do to preserve the Indian ways.
How did you become interested in this aspect of Native American history?
I grew up in Nevada, and the Ghost Dance is a signature [part of] the history of the American West and [the] conquest of Indian people. It’s often presented as the end of Indian resistance to white conquest. In my research I was drawn to stories about the Ghost Dance because it became increasingly clear that [the Ghost Dance religion] was [not] the end of Indian resistance; it was a religion that expressed a desire by the Indian people to resist assimilation while finding a way to live within the constraints of conquest and to prosper and to survive as Indians.
What do you hope readers take away from the book?
Usually when we read about the Ghost Dance we have to read about the Wounded Knee massacre, and that is a very important part of the story, but it’s easy to lose sight of the joy that this religion brought to people in a time that was very dismal. I hope [readers] will get a sense of how enduring Indian religion and ceremony truly is in the United States, how persistent and pragmatic Native people are in their efforts to accommodate their lives and their communities to the modern United States, and the importance of American ideas of tolerance to the making of America itself.
