God's Red Son by Louis S. Warren

Author:Louis S. Warren
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

FOR THE POLICE, THE STRENGTH OF THE GHOST DANCE WAS astonishing because it marked a dramatic reversal. For the better part of a decade, they had suppressed the old religion, targeting holy men with violence and intimidation. Now the waxing of the Ghost Dance had restored the holy men to influence.

When Short Bull returned from Nevada with the new teachings, he and other holy men who took up the new religion were able to make themselves its leaders and define its practice, shaping it to fit Lakota culture and traditional ceremony. There had been little time for leaders outside the fraternity of the wicasa wakan to emerge, and apparently there were no prospective challenges to their authority as there were with Numu doctors and leaders of Southern Arapaho medicine lodges. Thus, in the hands of the holy men, the new ritual in South Dakota developed a strong resemblance to the Lakota Sun Dance.26

As in the Sun Dance, the Ghost Dance circle turned around a central tree that had been felled and re-erected, its trunk bristling with lengths of ribbon, plugs of tobacco, bits of calico, and other property sacrifices, the limbs festooned with banners of red, white, and blue (or the American flag, which neatly combined all three sacred colors). Holy men painted the dancers and attended them in the sweat lodge and in the dance, much as in the Sun Dance. We may interpret the Lakotas’ enthusiasm for the new religion, and their willingness to defend it, partly as a response to the crushing of the Sun Dance, a ritual destruction that had impoverished their spiritual lives. Similarities between the two ceremonies were so strong that despite the absence of piercing in the new religion, Mary Collins, a Congregationalist missionary at Sitting Bull’s settlement, proclaimed that the Ghost Dance was “nothing more than the old Sun Dance revived.”27

To a degree, the Ghost Dance reassured with its familiarity. It arrived as the reservation was reeling not just from economic collapse and political conflict but from physical and ritual hunger and a longing for communal gathering and a way to appeal to spirits. Feasting on cattle eased the hunger of believers, and the sense of Indian identity expressed in the Ghost Dance circle restored a powerful sense of belonging.

And yet, despite its familiarity, there were unfamiliar parts of the Ghost Dance ritual that urgently required adaptation. In the old religion, visions were mostly private. In the Sun Dance, for example, pledgers did not seek visions, and though they turned to holy men for help with interpreting the signs they received from spirits, pledgers did not announce those visions publicly. Normally, visions were sought only through a solitary vision quest. The Ghost Dance made visionary experience much more public and revelatory. The crowds massed, the circle turned, and dozens of people might collapse into trances as they met their ancestors, their recently deceased children, God, Jesus, Crow, or Eagle. The behavior of those in the grip of a vision—high-stepping, pawing at the

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