American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION The 1890 Ghost Dance originated among the Tovusidokado, a food-named band or multifamily group of Northern Paiute (Numu) living in Smith and Mason valleys, Nevada. James Mooney wrote the monumental study of this religious movement. Privileged to interview its prophet, Jack Wilson, or Wovoka (”The Wood Cutter”), Mooney nonetheless focused on the spread of the 1890 Ghost Dance to the Plains and its relation to the Wounded Knee massacre. In the century that has passed, Ghost Dance has joined totem pole, potlatch, tipi, counting coup, and powwow in our common fund of recognizable Native American cultural terms. Yet Wovoka’s religious innovation typically is viewed through the form and meaning it assumed on the Plains, when on theoretical grounds alone-diffusion-this short-lived phenomenon should have been expected to differ “on the road.” And still no reconstruction of the 1890 Ghost Dance in its homeland exists. This paper attempts to redress that situation. In reconstructing the sitz im leben of the 1890 Ghost Dance, I argue that, following a series of visions, its Numu prophet achieved initial local fame as a weather-control shaman during a regional drought; that Wovoka’s doctrine was not only otherworldly and pacific but Presbyterian-influenced; that he demonstrated additional culturally compatible”powers”at Round Dance-like social gatherings we call the 1890 Ghost Dance in Nevada, and might as well have been attempting to emulate Protestant camp-revival type meetings; and, finally, that 1890 Ghost Dance ceremonies might have altered following the arrival of Lakota, Cheyenne, and others, soon after Wovoka’s Great Revelation, a process aborted by Wounded Knee.