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The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890
James Mooney
A landmark of American ethnography, James Mooney's The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 documents the messianic movement that swept Native communities of the West in the early 1890s and ended in the massacre at Wounded Knee. Sent by the Bureau of American Ethnology, Mooney traveled to Nevada to meet the Paiute prophet Wovoka, followed the dance from tribe to tribe, and recorded its rituals and songs in seven languages. Crucially, he set out to show that the Ghost Dance was a genuine religion, not an incitement to war, and he framed it within a broad survey of comparable millenarian movements. First published in 1896, it remains a primary source of extraordinary richness. It speaks to readers interested in Native American history, religion, and the tragic close of the Plains wars, though its late-nineteenth-century framing must be read with a modern eye.
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The author
James Mooney (1861-1921) was an ethnographer at the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology, largely self-taught, and unusually sympathetic to the peoples he studied. His fieldwork among the Cherokee, Kiowa, and others, and his willingness to take Native religion seriously on its own terms, made him a respected and, among Native communities, a trusted figure.
The subject
The Ghost Dance arose from visions of the Paiute prophet Wovoka, who preached that ritual dancing would renew the earth, restore the dead, and end white domination without violence. It spread rapidly; among the Lakota it alarmed authorities and helped precipitate the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre of some 250 to 300 people, many women and children, at Wounded Knee in December 1890.
How it has aged
The book is a monument, still mined by historians for its firsthand reporting, transcribed songs, and comparative sweep, and notable for insisting the movement was a legitimate faith rather than a war plot. It is also a document of its era: the terminology, the word "outbreak," and some anthropological assumptions reflect 1890s attitudes, and later scholars have supplemented and corrected it with Lakota perspectives. Read it as an invaluable, sympathetic primary source, alongside more recent Native-centered histories.
For more context
Pair it with Raymond DeMallie's scholarship and with Native accounts of Wounded Knee such as those in Black Elk Speaks.
Sources - Project Gutenberg edition - University of Nebraska Press
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- James Mooney
- Publisher
- Government Printing Office (Bureau of American Ethnology)
- Place of publication
- Washington, D.C.
- Year
- 1896
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- History
- Location
- Colorado