Fugitive Religion

A sweeping look at the Ghost Dance, the first instance of modern, collective racial self-consciousness for Native peoples in the United States.

From the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) to the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), Indigenous religious practices—legally banned after 1883—took on new meanings as acts of defiance against colonialism and white supremacy. By reexamining the familiar story of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre and placing it into the context of resistance by Black and Native peoples during Reconstruction and Redemption, historian Tiffany M. Hale explains the Ghost Dance not just as a religious movement but also as a complex social phenomenon that enabled Indigenous people to maintain their identities and communities despite the pervasive force of colonialism and the challenges of modernity.

Chronicling how individual Native people, their families, and communities navigated the fraught post–Civil War conditions of the United States, Hale suggests that the Ghost Dances hold something in common with blues traditions of working-class African Americans. By giving Ghost Dance participants a chance to reflect on their lived experiences of warfare, deracination, and diplomacy, fugitive religion helped create modern racial self-consciousness in the United States.