Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [187]
But the economic forms of deprivation which help motivate these movements are not the only kind of deficiency which the movements address. In the case of the Senecas, economic troubles were only part of a whole set of evils: powerlessness, illness, social deviance and immorality, decline of cultural integrity, meaninglessness. Every aspect of the social structure and culture of the Native American society was weakened and threatened with destruction by the steady deprivations of white culture. The deprivation (if deprivation can be used to cover a variety of anomic situations) was brought on by white settlement that started in the eastern frontier and soon spread, with the westward movement of the whites, to the Great Plains and beyond.
In this situation there emerged yet another Messianic leader, a Paiute from western Nevada, to preach what became known among the whites as the Ghost Dance religion. Wovoka lived all his life in a rather small geographical area, the Mason Valley of western Nevada, about forty miles northwest of the Walker Lake Indian reservation but his influence was felt a great deal further. As was the custom in those days, he also took an “Anglo” name, John. Since he occasionally worked at the ranch of David Wilson, he was known by the name Jack Wilson. Wovoka was a classic apocalyptic prophet preaching nativism to culturally deprived people. He experienced his first revelation about 1887, after which he began to teach new dances and rituals to his people.
Wovoka’s principal vision came on January 1, 1889, during a solar eclipse. He was taken up into the spirit world where he was given a message for his people. He taught that the whites would be supernaturally destroyed and dead Native Americans would return to earth. So too, the buffalo and other game, then in grave danger of extinction as were the Indians themselves, would return and the old way of life would flourish on a reconstituted earth where sickness and old age would disappear. (This looks like a great many Jewish apocalypses too.) Thus, Wovoka promised not only an end to the tribes’ worldly troubles but a complete restoration here on earth of the Indians’ traditional life as it was before the white settlers and the soldiers came. Such a promise meant, as well, the elimination of the whites. The whites, learning of these promises and seeing a threat in the recommended dances and rituals, began a campaign against him. They called the transcendent spirit in whose name the Messianic leader claimed to speak by the denigrating name of “ghost.” Since the principal ritual of the believing community was dancing, the movement became known to the whites as the “Ghost Dance Religion.”
The Ghost Dance movement was an expression of an unrealistic hope, a fantasy for the Indians. Yet that is but one side of the drama. It always takes opposition to galvanize the movement. The whites took the prophecy as a potentially violent attack on them but they did not wait for further provocation or to find out whether the movement might turn out to call for nonviolent confrontation. They killed those they thought believed in it, a response that culminated in the massacre of Chief Big Foot and his entire band at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890, about a year after Wovoka’s revelation. As a movement, the Ghost Dance Religion probably would have had a stabilizing effect on the endangered society of the tribes, helping them to adjust to their miserable and deteriorating situation. And it is far from clear that it had an activist military aspect until the whites attacked. But it is almost impossible for this dominant group not to feel threatened by