Christ at Wounded Knee

Having mentioned Black Elk this week, discussing the First Nations Version of the New Testament and Psalms, I was put in mind of my 2022 series "Christ and the Ghost Dance." Selections of that series are reshared here.

You might not know this, but Black Elk, well known for his reflections in Black Elk Speaks, encountered Jesus in the Ghost Dance, converted to Catholicism, and is now being considered as a saint. As Black Elk's grandson put it, Black Elk was a man comfortable praying with both his pipe and his rosary.

It might be surprising to some that Black Elk encountered Christ in the Ghost Dance given its association with the tragedy of Wounded Knee, the 1890 massacre of almost 300 Sioux Indians, many woman and children, near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. 

Prior to the tragedy, a variety of tensions had been building on the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. Most significantly, in 1889 Congress approved the statehood of North and South Dakota. This prompted the government to take even more land from the Sioux, almost half of the Great Sioux Reservation. In addition, when the new, smaller reservations were created, a bureaucratic bungling slightly changed the border between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations. This displaced a group of Wazhazhas Brules from their settlements on Pass Creek. This band of Wazhazhas became the most disaffected among the Sioux in the lead up to Wounded Knee and they were among the very last holdouts. 

Beyond land disputes, the US government had also significantly cut the rations to the reservations. This caused widespread illness and malnutrition in the face of a measles and influenza outbreak in the two years leading up to Wounded Knee. 

Needless to say, the Sioux reservations were under considerable strain. Discontent was widespread, with rumors about uprisings breaking out. Tensions were high.

And into this volatile situation entered a new religious movement, the Ghost Dance. A religious movement that had surprising Christian aspects.

The Ghost Dance emerged among the the Northern Paiute (territories in Nevada and California) with the spiritual leader, rainmaker, and prophet Wovoka (also named Jack Wilson). The prophecies of Wovoka foretold a future restoration of Native American life, a future of peace and prosperity that would be inaugurated by the coming of the Messiah. To usher in this age, the Indians were to live at peace among the whites, to work, and to send their children to school. And they were supposed to dance. 

The Ghost Dance was a traditional circle dance, with some key changes. The dancers held hands and rotated in a clockwise direction. Men, women, and children participated, an egalitarian change from some male-dominated traditional dances. Even some whites were welcomed into the circle. As the circle turned many dancers fell and entered into a trance, which often lasted hours. Upon awakening, dancers shared visions of going to heaven where they encountered their dead loved ones. Given the amount of loss and grief experienced by Native Americans, these encounters with lost loved ones fueled the eastward spread of the Ghost Dance, eventually making its way to the plains reservations. Soon after Wovoka's first prophecies in 1889, the circles began to turn among the Sioux in South Dakota.

Given the tensions and rumors of uprisings, the federal authorities could only look upon the Ghost Dance with suspicion. While different in key respects, the circle of the Ghost Dance was rooted in traditional native practice. This represented a "reversion" in the eyes of the authorities to "non-progressive" and "primitive" native practices, a return to traditional culture and lifeways. This wasn't the direction the federal government wanted the Sioux to go. 

Plus, it was feared that the dance was stirring up revolutionary fervor. To suspicious and nervous reservation agents, hundreds of Sioux dancing and singing in a traditional circle dance was an ominous sign. And so, on November 15 the federal agent of the Pine Ridge reservation sent a fateful telegram, asking for federal troops to invade the Sioux reservations: "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection and we need it now."

The troops came. Tensions rose ever further. Events cascaded out of control. And on December 29 federal troops opened fire on unarmed men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

Thanks to the popularity of the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this is a sad and well known tragedy in American history. And yet, many don't know that the Ghost Dance was, for many Native Americans, a Christian movement. Many participants of the Ghost Dance identified the coming Messiah with Jesus Christ. Black Elk was one of these. As Louis Warren writes in God's Red Son, "Christ was everywhere in Ghost Dance visions as Christian teachings became embedded in or engulfed by the new religion." Many Native Americans even reserved the Ghost Dances for Sunday as a form of Christian worship. Many Ghost Dancers connected Wovoka's prophecies of a coming Messiah, as did Wovoka himself, with Jesus. As Warren observes, "most Ghost Dancers believed that they were seeing the same spirit presence evoked in the New Testament." 

Thus, the Ghost Dance "was effectively a new religion that incorporated a Messiah figure--for some, Christ himself--alongside older spirit powers." Warren summarizes the fusion and the desire to create a uniquely textured faith:

By 1890, missionaries counted nearly 5,000 Lakotas as Christian; thus, they were taken aback that growing church attendance in an "Indian country dotted over with chapels and schools" was followed by a surge in Ghost Dancers. Their only explanation was that many of their Christian converts had not yet understood Christian teachings. But the simultaneous enthusiasm of church attendance and the Ghost Dance was a paradox only if believers had to choose one or the other--Christianity or the old spirits. The Ghost Dance expressed not only the belief that the two religions could be combined but also their longings to do just that...

...[The Ghost Dance] elevated Eagle, Buffalo, and Bear to the same plane as Christ and made him a "friend" to Indians, like one of the guardian spirits of old...The Ghost Dance combined old spirits and a new redeemer...To believers, it was exhilarating...To authorities and most missionaries, it was terrifying.

That terror, we know, led to the massacre at Wounded Knee. But some observers, even some missionaries, were able to look upon the Ghost Dance with a more generous cultural perspective, as an attempt to fit Christianity into Native American culture. True, this process was messy and uneven. Not every Ghost Dancer was Christian. And theologians would be rightly worried if Christ became, for Ghost Dancers, just one among many spirit guides and guardians. If it hadn't been violently suppressed by the US government on the reservations, how the Ghost Dance would have evolved as it interacted with Christianity remains a tantalizing mystery. Regardless, what the Ghost Dance clearly showed was a desire for a uniquely Native American expression of Christianity, something that the Christian missionaries just were not providing. 

In short, a part of the tragedy of Wounded Knee was a failure of missiological imagination. Christianity for far too many reservation missionaries was culturally European in both content and practice. The goal was to get Native Americans to sit in wooden pews in a church building, pray from a pulpit, and sing out of a hymnal. Christian worship wasn't imagined as involving a traditional Native American circle dance. But at Wounded Knee it was.