Thurman argues that what the oppressed find in Jesus is that God is for them, that God stands with them as they stand with their backs against the wall.
This was the Jesus of the Ghost Dance. As the Native Americans stood with their backs against the wall the Jesus they encountered in the circle stood for and with them. As Louis Warren writes in God's Red Son, "The Christ of Ghost Dance visions seemed to represent a friendly, protective, and encouraging figure who greeted believers, not with the solemnity befitting the Son of Man, but with the warmth and intimacy of a personal friend in heaven, much like the old spirit protectors who functioned as personal friends and guardians for individual Lakotas." Warren goes on to describe one vision a Lakota woman had in the Ghost Dance as she was taken to Christ by Eagle:
A young woman said when she fell an eagle hovered over her and picked her up carrying her to a house, the door being open eagle went in first and she followed, and saw Christ and shook hands with him three times and said He was glad to see her as she had been there before.
Intimacy with Jesus also embodied a political critique. As Warren writes, "By idealizing the Messiah's love and pity toward Indians, believers could implicitly critique the distant, powerful, and often callous congressmen and officials who left them on the verge of starvation."
Thus, beyond spiritual comfort, for many Ghost Dance prophets "the new religion seemed to fulfill the prophecy extolled by the Americans that Christ would return to redeem the poor and the dispossessed--meaning Indians." In this, the Ghost Dance was an early expression of what would later be called "liberation theology," God's preferential concern for the poor and oppressed. The Christ of the Ghost Dance was on the side of the Native Americans and not with their white oppressors. Because of this, some Ghost Dancers saw white opposition to the dance as an attempt to delay the coming of the Messiah and his judgment upon whites. As one army officer wrote to his superiors in Washington:
They believe that the "Messiah" dance is a prayer to the "Messiah" to come and bless them, and they want to know why the whites object to their dance (prayer), and will naturally soon think that they (the whites) are afraid of his coming, and are trying to prevent it by preventing the Indians dancing, i.e., praying for him to come.
The ancient Christian prayer "Maranatha!" ("Come, O Lord!") is a cry for liberation and justice in the mouths of the oppressed. The Ghost Dance was just such a prayer. But Judgment Day would hold terror for others.
Which brings us to the most controversial aspect of the Ghost Dance religion, the status of whites in the coming new world. According to the teachings of Wovoka, the coming age would be a world of peace and harmony. But as the new religion spread among the Lakota, the Ghost Dance prophecies came to foretell a world that would be inhabited only by Indians. In this Lakota vision, it wasn't clear what would happen to the whites upon the return of the Messiah. Were they left behind? Sent to hell? Destroyed? Or taken to their own sort of heaven? In some imaginations, the whites would become Indians.
That whites would become Indians seems fitting given how US policy was bent upon "killing the Indian" in the souls of Native Americans in an effort to "civilize" them.
The American government wanted to make the Indians white. The Messiah of the Ghost Dance, by contrast, would transform the white man into an Indian.
