Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022

Wovoka: The Life and Legacy of the Prophet of the Ghost Dance Movement / Charles Rivers Editors / 2022 

I first learned about Wovoka in Our History is Our Future by Nick Estes and was moved to learn of a Paiute prophet so central to Native American history, because the Paiute are particularly marginalized and humiliated in Native American history. Sold to the Spanish as slaves by both the Utes and Dine, they weren’t particularly renowned for their military skills. Their own original story pokes fun at this hierarchy, humbly and humorously claiming their people were brown because they were made out of shit. I’m drawn to Wovoka’s story because it gives Paiutes a pretty central role in US Native history. Charles Rivers Editors did an excellent job contextualizing Wovoka’s teachings within a global indigenous context, drawing parallels in Africa and the Pacific. Essentially, in the face of genocide and a dramatic change of lifestyle, there’s a strain of indigenous thought that conservatively retreats into tradition, claiming that if indigenous folks dig their heels into their spiritual practice, the gods will vanquish their colonizers for them. In Wovoka’s case, this is the spirit dance and ceremony. The spirit dance promised a decolonized future, where the relationship between humans and nature were restored and white men were wiped off the face of the earth. The stomps in the spirit dance were sometimes literally supposed to be stomping the white man under the earth. The spirit dance inspired Natives across North America facing genocide and gave them the hope to continue resisting, rather than dying and/or assimilating. This contribution changes the course of US Native history in two dramatic ways: 1) First, it inspires the resistance of the Lakota Sioux, one of the most resistant indigenous nations of North America, who interpreted Wovoka’s teachings in a way that inspired violent resistance. The book does an excellent job here delineating between Wovoka’s teachings and differing between varying Paiute, Lakota, and federal white man interpretations of them. The Lakota Sioux popularized the spirit dance the most and led a resistance movement to be crushed but not vanquished at Wounded Knee. 2) Because the dance was associated with anticolonial indigenous movements, the US government outlawed all Native dance, ceremonial, and religious practices. The US also anglicized the name as the Ghost Dance to give it a spookier, more terrorist edge. These are two pivotal moments of North American native history where Wovoka played a critical role! On top of all that, there is some speculation that Wovoka’s teachings were somewhat inspired by Mormonism. Wovoka incorporated Christian theology into his teachings in ways that aren’t entirely clear to me, but Wovoka clearly occupies a similar mystic and revelatory lineage of the era, which includes Joseph Smith. The LDS (Mormon) teaching that Jesus visited the Americas and that Natives are a Jewish, Biblical people was apparently sometimes interpreted by some Natives to mean Jesus was Native and some went as far to identify Wovoka with a reincarnation of Jesus. I wish I could talk about this history with my former students in Cedar City, as there’s a lot of layers here. If folks have recommendations on more reads relevant to Wovoka, please let me know. 5/5