Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Indigenous Resistance After the U.S. Civil War

A bird’s-eye look at the Ghost Dance, the first instance of modern, collective racial self-consciousness for Native peoples in the United States

From the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) to the Massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), Indigenous religious practices—legally banned after 1883—took on new meanings as acts of defiance against colonialism and white supremacy. By reexamining the familiar story of the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee Massacre and placing it into the context of resistance by Black an...