Articles and Book Reviews by Fergus M. Bordewich
A Lost American Religion
An ecstatic religious uprising inspired hope in battered native tribes. It also led to the massacre at Wounded Knee.
[Book review] God’s Red Son by Louis S. Warren
Reviewed By Fergus Bordewich in The Wall Street Journal, April 2017. [Draft Version]
FOR CENTURIES, Native Americans have mostly been seen through one or another distorting lens of the Anglo-American imagination: first as archetypal savages, more recently as the hapless victims of the white man's barbarism or as avatars of ecological rectitude. Even the most sympathetic accounts of native history too often are burdened by facile romanticism that obscures the diversity of native peoples and the extraordinary complexity of their lived experience in the United States. In this original, compellingly written, and provocative book, however, Mr. Warren, a professor of western history at the University of California, has captured the vitality of native cultural transformation against the backdrop of Gilded Age America with extraordinary clarity and sensitivity.
Mr. Warren's narrative focuses on the Ghost Dance, an ecstatic religious movement that swept through western Indian reservations in 1889 and 1890. The Ghost Dance promoted an amalgam of traditional and newly invented devotional practices, some of them Christian-influenced, including belief in a redeeming savior, as well as a personal guide to peaceful moral action in a world dominated by alien Anglo-American power. In practice, it inspired countless men and women to new hope, and encouraged the renewal of entire native communities shattered by the onrush of Anglo-American civilization. It also led inadvertently to the infamous massacre of hundreds of helpless Sioux at Wounded Knee, in South Dakota.
Most historians long viewed the Ghost Dance as a tragic sideshow in the epic collapse of native societies during the settling of the West. Mr. Warren asserts that it was in fact a serious and profound religious movement whose influence extended for decades after its seeming disappearance in the aftermath of Wounded Knee. In the course of his mostly persuasive narrative, he also illuminates the proliferation of contemporary ecstatic religious revivals among white Americans, the birth of modern anthropology and its conflicting views of Indians, the struggle of native communities to adapt to the white man's market economy, and even the role of IBM's parent company in the tabulation of the 1890 census. (The result would be applied to the distribution of rations to the Sioux based on the number of people counted and, in effect, determine whether some bands would thrive or starve.)
The Ghost Dance originated with a Paiute ranch hand named Wovoka—known as Jack Wilson to his white employers—living near Yerington, Nevada. The son of a traditional healer, Wovoka experienced a revelatory vision in which he met with God and was enjoined by him to end his people's troubles and re-recreate the earth by means of a trance-inducing dance. Word of Wovoka's vision quickly spread at a time when the western tribes were in unprecedented crisis, as advancing white settlement destroyed traditional food sources and disrupted ancient lifeways: tribal leadership tottered, belief systems lost their power to explain the world and to sustain community cohesion, missionaries challenged traditional religion, and European diseases wrought havoc on once-healthy populations. Writes Mr. Warren, "Ghost Dancers were searching for a new dispensation, seeking to restore an intimacy with the Creator that seemed to have vanished," as well as to "worship in a form that reconstituted Indians as a community, and expressed their history, families and identity-in a word, their Indianness."
The crux of the Ghost Dance religion was just that: a communal dance that brought together men and women who danced for hours on end until they experienced visions of a future world in which the dead were resurrected, food was plentiful, whites no longer existed, and Indians were united with a new messiah, who appeared to some as an Indian and to others as Jesus. (One Cheyenne participant reported that Christ, "told me the earth was getting old and worn out, and the people getting bad, and that I was to renew everything as it used to be, and make it better.") Wovoka also admonished Ghost Dancers to embrace an earthly life of rigorous honesty, to cooperate with the Americans and other Indians, to send their children to school, and to work for wages or acquire farms. He did not discourage them from attending Christian churches if they wished to.
"Through the Ghost Dance, believers expressed an understandable sense of powerlessness," writes Mr. Warren. "But Ghost Dance teachings also helped them imagine solutions to their predicament. Schooling, wage work, and farming—the commandments of the Messiah—offered paths not only to survival but also to a kind of empowerment. Following the commandments would enable Indians to read and write their own legal documents, challenge land sessions, and assert greater control over their relations not only with Washington but with American generally, and even with one another."
Pilgrims from many tribes flocked to meet the Wovoka—usually traveling by the white man's railroad—and returned home to their far-flung communities as evangelists. The new religion spread with extraordinary speed from its point of origin on the Walker River Paiute reservation north to Idaho, eastward across Wyoming and the Dakotas, and southward to the Southern Cheyenne and Arapahoe in Oklahoma, to about thirty reservations in all. "All that fall [of 1890], Indians danced," writes Mr. Warren. "They danced from the deep Southwest to the Canadian border and into Alberta. They danced from the Sierra Nevada to eastern Oklahoma. They danced in southern Utah, and in Idaho. They danced in Arizona."
White officials on most reservations tolerated the Ghost Dance, and sometimes praised its message of peace, as well as its Christian overtones. Not so in the Dakotas. There Indian agents panicked, mistakenly believing that the impassioned dancing portended a mass "breakout" from the reservations, and a war of extermination against settlers. "The Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy," a panicky agent at Pine Ridge told his superiors. "Steps should be taken to stop it."
In the Sioux country, the real causes of unrest were the confiscation of Indian property, invasion by troops who believed they had been mobilized to quell an insurrection, and the threat of imminent starvation. Less than a year earlier, the federal government had forced a harshly unfair (and fraudulently approved) treaty upon the Sioux tribes, radically fragmenting the Great Sioux Reservation—it had previously encompassed most of western South Dakota -cruelly curtailing rations to recalcitrant bands, and pushing many to the brink of starvation as winter set in. Along with enthusiasm for the Ghost Dance, resentment among the Sioux was bitter and widespread, but there was no sign that the Sioux intended to revolt, except in the columns of the yellow press and the imaginations of panicky whites. The "battle" of Wounded Knee, as it was termed at the time, was pure butchery. A surrounded band of about four hundred bedraggled Hunkpapa Sioux—some Ghost Dancers and others not—was in the process of handing over their weapons to cavalry troopers who had them surrounded when a gun went off. The soldiers chased down all who tried to escape. "A few survivors managed to straggle out of the fight and flee, escaping the soldiers who stood watch and shot anything that moved, any body that breathed, twitched, or raised a hand to surrender," Mr. Warren writes, in his searing description of the massacre.
Wounded Knee was by no means the last gasp of the Ghost Dance, Mr. Warren shows. Wovoka lived on quietly in Nevada, meeting with pilgrims, performing seeming "miracles," such as rain-making, consulting on medical cases and, in 1924, even serving as an advisor to the makers of a Hollywood western, The Thundering Herd. He also continued working as a ranch hand whose work ethic and responsibility were praised by all who knew him. He died in 1932.
Although the wildfire spread of the Ghost Dance abated, it continued to be performed in some native communities well into the twentieth century, and exerted a lasting, if indirect, influence on subsequent generations of Native Americans Indians searching for a way to be American without ceasing to be Indian. Mr. Warren suggests, without belaboring the point, that Wovoka foreshadowed the world we live in today, in his vision of a "multicultural America" very different from nineteenth century whites' ideal of a monolithic, English-speaking Protestant country. "In a sense, modern Americans who espouse pluralism as a social virtue carry on their teachings," he says. Well, perhaps. But there is no evidence that Wovoka and his Ghost Dancing disciples actually envisioned anything much like the present-day United States, in which resurgent native traditions coexist alongside tribal casinos, tribal colleges, and reinvented tribal sovereignty. But they might have approved.