God's Red Son: the Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

by Louis S. Warren

In 1890, on Indian reservations across the West, followers of a new religion danced in circles until they collapsed into trances. In an attempt to suppress this new faith, the US Army killed over two hundred Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee Creek. Louis Warren's God's Red Son offers a startling new view of the religion known as the Ghost Dance, from its origins in the visions of a Northern Paiute named Wovoka to the tragedy in South Dakota. To this day, the Ghost Dance remains widely mischaracterized as a primitive and failed effort by Indian militants to resist American conquest and return to traditional ways. In fact, followers of the Ghost Dance sought to thrive in modern America by working for wages, farming the land, and educating their children, tenets that helped the religion endure for decades after Wounded Knee. God's Red Son powerfully reveals how Ghost Dance teachings helped Indians retain their identity and reshape the modern world.

Genres: History, Religion, Native American, American History, Nonfiction, Native Americans, Grad School

496 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2017

About the author

Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches the history of the American West, California history, environmental history, and U.S. history.

Reviews

[J. d'Merricksson · Rating 5 out of 5]

*This book was reviewed for San Francisco Book Review

God’s Red Son is a piercing, poignant look at one of the more shameful events of our country's infancy. Warren shines a light on the factors behind the infamous 'Ghost Dance’ of the Sioux and other indigenous peoples of North America during the end of the 19th century, and how its subsequent destruction shaped much of our policies on religious freedoms.

The Ghost Dance was a burgeoning religion that preached of a Messiah that would come and foster peace between the white men and the Indians,and that all of the deceased would return to life, and 'God’ would make the earth bigger, and return the vast buffalo herds. Participants would gather to dance in circles, sometimes to exhaustive frenzy. Some, but not all wore special Ghost Dance shirts, believed to be able to deflect bullets. One of the most horrific massacres occurred at Wounded Knee Creek.

I have to admit, I had a hard time reading this book, because of the emotions aroused. Like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this book elicited a visceral reaction regarding how Americans treated the indigenous peoples. Our European ancestors had no real claim to the Americas to begin with. What was done, all that was done, to the indigenous peoples was a horrific atrocity packaged as 'assimilation’.

We eradicated a baby religion. What might it have become if we had not done so. Religions develop in response to a need for succour. Who are we to say one is wrong, and the other right? Of course, it wasn't about that, was it? Not really. It was a political move to keep a defeated people dejected. To 'keep them in their place’.

Having Native American ancestry in my paternal lineage, this hits a bit closer to home. My grandmother, now deceased, would tell me stories of her half Cherokee grandmother. She felt the same call to the ancestors as I do, and fostered it in me. She gave me my copy of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a copy that had once been gifted to her by her sons, my uncle and my da. Today it is a treasured part of my vast library that I revisit every few years

📚📚📚📚📚 Highly recommended, especially if you enjoy Native American, or early American history.

[Robyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the origins and life of the Ghost Dance and its relationship to the Wounded Knee Massacre. Warren argues persuasively that the religion provided a way of reconciling traditional beliefs with modernity, and against the trope of disappearing Native Americans. Thoroughly researched and eloquently written.

[Dennis Gibb]

I have read a ton of books on native American history and I have spent a lot of time with tribes over the years. Mr. Warren in this books takes you on a journey to the creation of new system of belief that seemed to offer the hope of change to a decimated people. The fact that it was charismatic in origin give the reader a chance to meet a mysterious character of American history.
What is fascinating to me is the progress and underpinnings of this religion that included all of the attributes white reformers want the Indians to have yet the formation of the religion brought down the wrath of the authorities.
This is history as it should be written.

[Pete · Rating 4 out of 5]

i want an entire history that reads the magical thinking of manifest destiny/"rain follows the plow" as religion. warren surfaces that idea only briefly here, and it's not what this book is primarily about, but the idea that psychosis-level buy-in on the settler mindset is an unavoidable character in any history of america. this is good, carefully constructed history of the ghost dance religion, and of james mooney, a government ethnographer. the prose is slow going in places - not difficult exactly but dry. has the brainfeel of the kind of history that turns my crank: using an intense focus on one subject to cast light on the whole condition of being a living human soul trapped in meat

[T · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lots of mixed feelings. Need to write something about it.

[James Bechtel · Rating 5 out of 5]

We must all remember that in the study of history context is everything. Louis Warren's "God's Red Son" is a significant corrective to previous studies of Native American/Indigenous religion as well as a central element of the Wounded Knee massacre. Brilliant! Winner of the American Historical Association's Bancroft Prize.

[TS Allen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book. Warren provides a compelling account of how the Ghost Dance was originally a Paiute response to modernity and it is a remarkable tapestry which touches on the history of Indians, America write large, and anthropology among other topics. I am certain I will revisit it.

I am suspicious of this book, however, because Warren makes far too much of the peacefulness of the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance was practiced by many Indian tribes, but as a military historian I am most interested in how it was practiced by the Lakota Sioux, who were attacked by the Army in 1890 due to their Ghost Dancing, among other factors. Warren is right to say that the Ghost Dance prophecy as issued by the Paiute Wovoka in the late 1880s was peaceable. He is also right to discredit the account of William Selwyn, a Dakota postmaster whose 1890 claim that the Sioux Ghost Dancers intended to "kill at the white people" convinced the Army and Indian Agents that the Ghost Dance was a nascent Indian revolt that must be put down. He is also right that there was no great conspiracy among the Lakota Sioux to launch another war in 1890, and that the Ghost Dance certainly did not advocate they do so.

That being said, Warren tries too hard to make the Lakota appear placid. They were starving in the winter of 1890, and the Government had recently confiscated much of their land, reneging on their treaty agreements, while cutting their rations. Even the many former Lakota nomads who saw farming as a positively better way of life to following the buffalo herds--and this was many of them, including the great chief Sitting Bull--had reason to resent and distrust the government. The Ghost Dance was a key factor in their relations with the government at that time, but it was not the only one, and perhaps not even the main one. Warren gives it too much credit.

Moreover, Warren is willing to re-write history to support his argument. His account of the Wounded Knee massacre, for example, a remarkably brief nine paragraphs in four hundred pages of text, is revisionist. The shooting that day certainly began outside the Indian camp as soldiers demanded the assembled Lakota men turn in their rifles. Whereas Warren's own sources admit the possibility that the Lakota fired first, probably on a signal from a chief, Warren only allows the possibility that the soldiers fired first, on the pretext of a scuffle with a deaf man who did not want to give up his rifle because it was expensive. He then tells us only a handful of Indians fought back. This is false: by all accounts all the Indian men fought back, and they killed thirty soldiers. Warren does not mention the soldier's deaths, hiding the fact that a two-way battle did occur at Wounded Knee that day. After the soldiers pushed the men back into the village, they withdrew and pounded the men and their innocent wives and children with artillery, which is why the incident is rightly remembered as a "massacre." What happened at Wounded Knee was horrific and shameful for the Army, but the Indians were not passive victims, and it is hard to believe that they were more passive because a distant prophet had told them to be a peace with the white man. It was not ignoble for the Lakota men to fight that day--and would not have been ignoble for them to launch a preemptive attack on the Army, although I am not certain they did fire first.

Thus, this enjoyable book has earned one star from me. It is too thoughtful and interesting to not become the definitive history of the Ghost Dance, yet it also provides a revisionist, poorly considered, and I dare say teleological account of one of the key episodes of that history. This important book needed to incorporate a history of the events at Pine Ridge Reservation of 1890 that was as thoughtful and comprehensive as the other chapters. It failed to do so, and thus it fails as a work of history.

[Bryce Van Vleet · Rating 4 out of 5]

"By the spring, the rumors had reached the cities and the daily papers had begun to report something strange out west among the Cheyenne Indians of Montana, who, it was said, were 'greatly excited over the expected appearance of a Savior.'"

Warren takes us back to the late nineteenth century, a period I previously considered to be of little-to-no interest. His account begins with a bird's eye view of Wounded Knee, bodies littered across the ground. While I had heard of this massacre before, I had chocked it up to typical racism and colonization. But the cause, motivated by the same forces mentioned before, was more complicated than that. A new religion was sweeping across the Indian* Reservations. It was called the Ghost Dance and it was making traditional Christians (of course) increasingly nervous. A prophet named Hawthrone Wodziwob had had a vision of a replenished earth and a unification with the White Man's rule.

For some Ghost Dancers, the religion focused as a revitalization of Indian* Culture in the face of oppression. While for others, and as Warren argues, for us as 21st century readers, the movement exemplified a way for the Indians* to assimilate under American culture, while maintaining ties to their traditional ways of life. In many ways, the Ghost Dance movement paved the way for modernity to take its place in America.

I skipped over portions of this book due to a lack of interest in certain topics and repetitiveness in others, but overall I can truly say Warren's overview is engaging, fascinating, and offers a rare glimpse into the forgotten world. At a time of Standing Rock and the launching of an indigenous-focused MFA program, this chronicle stands as a necessary explanation of how we got to where we are, and how much farther we have to go.

*I use the term "Indian" in this review as opposed to the more modern term Native American or Indigenous because the author does as I consider him a better expert than I.

[Sara Kafka · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books on indigenous history Ive encountered. Important tensions and barriers that remain today.

[William Fuller · Rating 4 out of 5]

What drew my attention to Louis Warren's God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America? I might never have picked it up had it not been for a light blue shirt covered with off-white circles reposing in a glass case at a historical museum in South Dakota where I once served as a volunteer docent. It was identified as a Ghost Dance shirt although no one appeared to know its history or could guarantee its authenticity. Curiously, during a period of change in museum management, the shirt vanished, but my exposure to it left me wanting to learn more about the Ghost Dance.

Unfortunately, the little I had read about the Ghost Dance portrayed it as a religion of desperation, a last-ditch hope for success in the Indians' battle against the encroachment of white settlers on Indian land and the destruction of Indian culture and economy. The shirt, so I had been told, was believed to make its wearer impervious to U.S. Army bullets, leading to inevitably deadly conflicts.

Having now read Warren's meticulously researched book, I realize that I had been fed the pro-assimilation, anti-pluralistic—indeed, anti-Indian—propaganda fomented in the 19th century by some government agents in charge of reservations and bruited about by sensationalist newspapers until the false picture took on the appearance of truth in the mind of white America. According to Warren, the Ghost Dance religion was not only a religion in search of peace but was also far more widespread geographically and practiced by many more diverse tribes than I had realized, nor was the Ghost Shirt that had inspired my reading even worn by all the followers.

One may ask why bother devoting time to learning about a particular religion that appeared in the late 1800s among one segment of the population in the nation. Many aspects of the Ghost Dance religion are fascinating. First of all, it was a messianic belief with numerous notable parallels to Christianity. Even the ecstatic visions and trances experienced by some of the religion's practitioners have cognates in multiple charismatic Protestant sects. In fact, more or less every aspect of the Ghost Dance religion can be found in one church or another in 21st century America. The reader is not, therefore, learning only about a “dead” religion but rather about a widespread movement whose beliefs and practices can be seen in one group or another today.

The latter part of God's Red Son focuses the reader on James Mooney, Jr., a self-taught ethnologist employed (but not quite accepted) by the Smithsonian. Mooney was the first to study and document the Ghost Dance religion and ran afoul of the prevailing attitude of the country's “professional” social scientists (who believed in the inevitable assimilation of Indians into the white culture of the European immigrants who had settled the New World) by recognizing that the Ghost Dance religion was not a blind desire to resurrect past beliefs and practices but a modern belief that strove to reconcile contemporary realities such as reservation life and wage employment with Native spirituality. Inasmuch as Mooney was the son of Irish immigrants, the reader is also reminded of the bigotry against the Irish that existed in the United States and of the English desire to assimilate the Irish just as the white ethnologists in the United States desired to assimilate the Indian population. Some readers may feel that the chapters devote to Mooney are a diversion from the subject matter promised by the title, but I found them interesting and instructive, especially where political influence and preconceived notions of assimilation trumped objective science and silenced the one social scientist to perceive the truth of the matter.

Warren has written an excellent study of a religious movement in the late 19th century U.S. West which spread much more widely than I had conceived and remnants of which still exist in the 21st century. His observations transcend “Indian studies” to encompass white as well as Indian culture, the incredible damage done by biased government agents and self-serving Indian police, the rootless panic among white settlers over rumored but non-existent Indian “outbreaks,” and, of course, the unprovoked slaughter of Indian men, women and children by U.S. Army soldiers at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota.

God's Red Son includes several historical photographs, of which there are scarcely ever enough, a comprehensive Notes section, and an index for later reference. The lack of a bibliography is disappointing, but source publications can be found in the Notes. While I found the book to be exhaustively researched and laden with incredible historical detail, I also found parts of it to include perhaps too much analysis, making for a slow read. The pace picks up as one nears the end, but, while the writing is accurate and grammatically impeccable (something I cannot say for several other recently published histories by other authors), it becomes just a bit tedious at times. To profit from this book as one should, it is necessary to approach it with a desire to learn rather than to be entertained. For that reason alone, I feel that a four-star rating is more accurate than five. From the standpoint of content alone, however, this is a five-star history (although there is one gross inaccuracy on page 389 where the 20th Amendment to the Constitution is said to have banned alcohol; that should have read "18th Amendment," not 20th. For that, shame on the author and even more shame on the proofreaders!)

If one read Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee when it was published in 1970 (or even several years thereafter), it is certainly time to refresh and extend one's knowledge of the Ghost Dance religion and of the massacre associated with it by now reading Louis Warren's God's Red Son.

[Christopher Angulo · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating religion and a great telling of its development.

[Sam Sidders · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shoutout to this guy for talking about the ghost dance in 2020

[Sharon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure what to expect. I knew from what little I learned in school that the "Indians" were forced to go to attend "Indian school" where they learned to read and write, but were also taught Christian beliefs. Many took these teachings to heart, so when Porcupine announced to the Paiute that the Messiah was coming, the believers were excited. The "Messiah" is believed to be Jack Wilson aka Wovoka who somehow was able to predict/control the weather. He calmly taught his followers about the Ghost Dance and instructed them how often to dance, to farm, to work with the White people, and to send their children to school. In essence, assimilation was the way to peace. I couldn't help thinking how Porcupine was like John the Baptist and Wovoka like Jesus.
Unfortunately, some of the more influential government men at the time saw the Ghost Dance as a threat, maybe to their own fragile authority. Tensions built until it culminated into the massacre at Wounded Knee. Warren goes into great detail explaining how things escalated and climaxed due to the bigotry and fears of a few men in authority. He continues the saga after Wounded Knee illustrating how the massacre was an isolated incident, not a representation of what was happening throughout the rest of the country. What the government did to the Native Americans before the turn of the 20th century was wrong, but the Native American strength of character and perseverance prevail.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this illuminating account of the Ghost Dance, Louis S. Warren argues convincingly that the religious phenomenon that swept Plains Native American nations at the tail end of the 19th century was as much a forward-thinking movement as it was a heartfelt desire to return to a time when buffalo were plentiful and white people rare.

The Ghost Dance was an assertion of Native American spiritual and material autonomy in a time of rapid change: Ghost Dancers sought to keep alive Native American traditions while navigating their way through white-imposed systems. 'The Ghost Dance was a modern religion that offered believers a means to reconcile the seeming contradictions between Indian identity and twentieth-century survival,' Warren writes.

In reaching this conclusion, Warren recounts the life of the Paiute holy man Wovoka, whose teachings gave rise to the Ghost Dance. He provides an overview of Paiute society and how Paiute people adapted to the demands of the cash economy brought West by white settlers.

Reservation officials reacted in different ways to the Ghost Dance. By contrasting the more moderate approach adopted by agents at the shared Southern Arapaho and Southern Cheyenne reservation with the heavy-handed suppression of the religion carried out by agents in Lakota country, Warren lays bare how the events leading up to the tragedy of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee unfolded.

God's Red Son is one of the best works about the Ghost Dance I have read.

[Bull · Rating 5 out of 5]

An insightful and thought-provoking journey into both the struggles of Native Americans to adapt to the changing landscapes foisted upon them, and then the ongoing efforts of European-Americans to try to eviscerate their spirit through campaigns of misinformation and social-injustice. There’s a particularly profound few pages that describe the wrenching impact EA settlement had upon the Paiute environment and annual life rhythms that should be mandatory reading for those who deny human impact upon climate and the earth.

[Jifu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is definitely one of those books that sits on the to-reads list for a while, and then once you finally decide to give it a try you quickly become upset (and possibly a little mad) with yourself for not picking it up sooner. "God's Red Son" showed me that everything I thought I knew about the Ghost Dance and everything that surrounded it (including the Wounded Knee Massacre) left a lot to be desired, and I frankly was glad to be corrected by a work that does a fantastic job in going into the complexities of this faith, its history, and its surprisingly far-reaching influence.

[Ike Rakiecki · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intriguing and detailed look at the Ghost Dance religion and it's role in the lives of Native Americans and in their relationship with white settlers. The author presented the story through a variety of lenses, including anthropology, spirituality, ethnography, and sociology. One of the main figures in the book was a Paiute leader named Jack Wilson, also known as Wovoka. He must have been a pretty amazing man.

[Jonathan Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the finest pieces of history I've read in a long time. Careful, well-researched, thoughtful and oh so timely. Warren is especially effective at making connections between the Ghost Dance and the incipient explosion of Pentecostal approaches to Christianity. He convincingly argues for the Ghost Dance being a fundamentally modern construct.

[Lirazel · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

Thank God for a deeply researched reexamination/re-contextualization of the Ghost Dance. We needed this.

Only two complaints about this book:

1. It's a bit repetitive. Could have done with some firmer editing.

2. I am sososo sick of "and the making of modern _____" subtitles. But the author probably didn't choose that, so I won't hold it against him.

[Kim Cotton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible analysis of a widely misunderstood religious movement. I particularly appreciated the author connecting the individuals in the history with biographical attention when they are often portrayed in histories as nameless and disconnected. Through this action, Warren made arguments about the Ghost Dance and the tragedy of Wounded Knee, backed by insightful research.

[Frederick Heimbach]

Unfinished, unrated. An apparently decent treatment of a fascinating topic. I appreciated its fair treatment of a complex topic as it shunned a simplistic white-people-are-terrible, native-Americans-have-no-agency narrative. Unfortunately, it was wordy and not focused on my particular interests, so I'm not going to invest any more time into it.

[Rod Endacott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thick reading. The insights (there are some good ones) are there but the work is long and intense to get them. Covers the very sad story of the last days of the free native american. Makes me ponder what my ghost dance is, as I am forced to surrender.

[Chandra Powers Wersch · Rating 5 out of 5]

Warren writes very vividly and contextualizes the Ghost Dance, white Americans' fear of Native cultural resurgence, and Wounded Knee in a way that's detailed and well researched but interesting as well.

[Alexandro Guillen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting information regarding the religious activism of the late 1800's and their influence on indigenous culture. However, the writing style is not to my liking and it read a mid-draft rather than a finalized book.

[Nate Rabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve read recently. A wonderful story of an aspect of American social/cultural/spiritual history. So sensitively and respectfully told by Warren. History at its best.

[Noé Hernández · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essential read on the history of Native America(ns).

[Julie Greene · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautifully written book that reshapes our understanding of the 1890s and Native Americans' place in US history.

[Todd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, until page 389. On that page the author wrote, "Late in 1917, both houses of Congress passed the Twentieth Amendment...." (Prohibition) What I've learned is that the 18th Amendment, not the 20th, was ratified in January 1919 and became effective in January 1920 regarding the beginning of prohibition. Although I enjoyed this book, now I question the accuracy of the information in the previous 388 pages.

[Sara Laor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of the holocaust the Indians endured leading up to the Ghost Dance and the 20th century.

[Mills College Library]

299.78524 W289 2017