Well-known among scholars of Wild West shows for his 2005 publication Buffalo Bill’s America, Louis S. Warren here turns our attention to a phenomenon vividly tied to US history through the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, namely, the Ghost Dance. In God’s Red Son, Warren distinguishes Ghost Dancing from the Sun Dance, Medicine Dance, Grass Dance, and other ceremonial observances, and focuses on the charismatic, proselytizing, and spiritual longings of a religion not dissimilar in its workings from the religious revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Warren argues that the Ghost Dance is a religion, rather than merely a spiritual observance, because it traces back to an individual, a Paiute named Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson) from the Walker River Reservation in western Nevada, who was acknowledged as a powerful spiritual leader and a prophet of (G)od. While the Ghost Dance is best known today for its...
