GOD’S RED SON - LOUIS WARREN

I’ve always been fascinated by the Ghost Dance. It’s one of those historical episodes that you never really learn much about, outside of the Wounded Knee massacre, which you, frankly, also don’t really learn much about either. At least in the public schools I’ve attended. But it’s always seemed like there was more there, and I’d always meant to learn more about it. Well, I spotted this book in the library and got my chance. And, boy did it deliver. This thing is very thorough. I don’t think I even really knew that the Ghost Dance did not originate with the Lakota, who were the group massacred at Wounded Knee, but was instead started by a Holy Man named Wovoka, a Paiute who lived in Nevada. Warren does a great job tracing the history of the dance and how it spread but he distinguishes himself when he speculates as to why this movement was popular when it was. To simplify, he points out that it shows up towards the beginning of the reservation system (at least in the West) and helped NDNs navigate how to both live in an Amerika that wanted to assimilate or destroy them while keeping some essential “indianess.” He contrasts it with other religious movements at the time and even points out how contemporary YT reports would point out that the dances resembled a Black church meeting or an evangelical camp-revival. He does a good job taking the Dance and it’s worldview seriously and places it in a larger story about religion in America.  I was particularly interested in Warren’s discussion of how policing was handled on the reservations, and how local, NDN police were used by the Amerikan authorities to bend these native nations to their liking. He even talks about how policing in Native communities was handled in earlier, more autonomous eras, which I found really interesting. I think it’s really important to remember that Indians faced some of the earliest iterations of counter-insurgency tactics that later get refined and rolled out for the rest of us. From this era all the way down to the Standing Rock protests, Indians and Indian lands are laboratories and guinea pigs for the people in charge. If I had any complaint with the book it would be that it’s too thorough. There’s a lot of digressions and asides. Some are interesting, at least to me, like the role of the Irish in Indian history and racism in America, while others are less interesting, like long accounts of dozens of trips different Native leaders took to Nevada to see Wovoka, or the geology of the Great Basin. But, that might be because I was distracted while reading this (life stuff) and if I read it on a vacation or something, I would have liked every part. Either way, if you care about the Ghost Dance, or Native history or American religious history, I’d highly recommend.