ABEL GOMEZ: When we look at Native cosmologies, ceremonial practices, it offers us a different lens to think about what is most fundamental about religion.

In many of these traditions, it is about one's relationship to this web of beings – human, non-human, spiritual beings, land, animals, plants – and understanding that everything in the universe is related to you and you are related to everything.

HEATHER FREEMAN: This is Dr. Abel Gomez an Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous spiritual traditions at Texas Christian University. He's speaking to me from Fort Worth, which is located on the homelands of the Wichita and affiliated tribes, and neighbored by the Caddo, Comanche, and other Native nations.

ABEL: And with those relations come responsibilities. Not only are you responsible for everything that exists, but similarly, everything that exists is also responsible for you.

HEATHER: A cosmology describes cultural ideas about the world’s origin, history, and continuing evolution. And Native cosmologies are much richer and more nuanced than the word ‘religion’ usually implies.

And Abel's giving me a crash course in what is sometimes called Native spiritualities.

ABEL: What is most fundamental is not individual illumination, salvation, Nirvana, but ensuring the continuity of life, ensuring that life continues on to those next generations because that is the responsibility that the Ancestors have granted, and the responsibility that the individual has to the generations that follow.

So in some ways, it might invite us to think about how it is that we are meant to live properly in relation to the lands and waters on which we reside.

And that offers a very different model of religion than perhaps most people are used to thinking about.

HEATHER: I'm starting with this attempt at defining Native spiritualities to address the elephant in the room: That is, how do I talk about Native and Indigenous religious experiences in a podcast literally called ‘Magic in the United States?’

Some of the episodes in the series are about self-avowed magical practitioners. But many others are not. They are about practices that have been called ‘magic’ by outsiders, often as a pejorative.

So every episode has included a contemporary practitioner to speak to their own personal practice – as one star in the skies of that particular form of magic, religion, spirituality, or folk practice. And the use of the word “magic” as a pejorative is particularly true for indigenous practices.

We're not interviewing a Native practitioner of any Tribal affiliation. No one is going to talk about their personal religious or spiritual practices.

We asked a lot of people who were Tribal members if we could talk with them about their personal experiences living in a balance with both Native ceremony and also their own religious and spiritual identities. But there's a history of outsiders or settlers like me who extracted sacred knowledge from Native communities, and then misrepresented or exploited that knowledge to other outsiders and settlers.

And that's a history I can't undo.

But we can make new histories by better understanding the past.

And so this episode is about a sacred Paiute dance that started in the late 1800s and became a symbol of spiritual and political resistance. It’s called the Ghost Dance although it's more properly called Nanigukwa which is ‘dance in a circle.’

Since referring to any traditional Native practice as magic is so deeply hurtful, I’ll underline it: the Ghost Dance is not magic. But the history of this dance illuminates a lot about why the language settlers and outsiders use is so important.

Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa is an Assistant Professor at UCLA in the Department of World Arts, Cultures, and Dance, which is located on the Tongva lands.

HEATHER: How is the Ghost Dance a religious experience for those dancers?

TRIA: Yes, so that's a good question, and also a question I'll choose not to answer. And the reason for that, is that Native dance is often a sacred practice, it contains sacred knowledge. And there have been long histories of U. S. colonizers banning Native dance practices, as well as non-Native people appropriating Native dance.

And so, I use this opportunity to introduce people to the concept of ethnographic refusal. Ethnographic refusal is Native peoples resistance or refusal to provide information that they don't wish to share.

HEATHER: On this podcast, the stories shared by practitioners are gifts to all of us who listen on. Sharing these very personal stories requires incredible vulnerability and generosity.

And silence is also a vulnerable and generous gift.

Welcome to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman. In this episode, Renewal Dance, we'll learn about the Ghost Dance, a sacred Paiute dance that was both a beacon of hope and a political resistance. The Ghost Dance promised to restore the world and liberate it from white colonization, and we'll also learn how federal policies targeting Native religious freedoms were tied to their political sovereignty.

We'll be right back.

 (BREAK)

HEATHER: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

The great basin area of Nevada, just west of the Walker River Paiute Reservation is high desert. Dry with cold, snowy winters.

Yet, this is a rich landscape too. And when we go back to the 1800s, the Pinyon trees and winding rivers provide pine nuts and trout for the Northern Paiute who are more correctly called the Numu: "the people."

But in the mid-1800s, American settlements spread in the region and increasingly disrupted the balanced ways of life practiced by the Paiute and other Tribes in the Basin.

Dr. Jennifer Graber is a Professor of Religious Studies and the Associate Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies program at the University of Texas at Austin. She spoke to me from the ancestral lands of the Tonkawa and several other Native peoples.

JENNIFER GRABER: With the arrival of American settlers came not just to explore, or perhaps take some resources, but to truly settle and displace Native people. That process began in the 1840s and accelerated as gold was discovered in nearby California, which brought many, many more people. And then also as new kinds of extraction industries began in Nevada itself, including silver mining. So there were all kinds of disruptions to Paiute life, including displacement from their ability to live on the land as they traditionally did.

HEATHER: The United States government eventually established reservations in the region. While some Paiute lived on these reservations, others did not.

And this is where we'll start the story of the Paiute spiritual leader, Wovoka, who was likely born around 1856. What we know of his childhood reflects this rapidly transformed world of the Paiute people.

JENNIFER: It seems that at a certain point he was either orphaned or he didn't have stable family relations, and went to both live and work with an American rancher family named the Wilsons.

He was growing up and working in this really transformed Paiute world, a world where now there were ranchers everywhere, where there were mines everywhere.

HEATHER: Wovoka was also sometimes called Jack Wilson, and he grew up in an environment that was very different from his Paiute ancestors.

This rapidly changing landscape was created by colonial policies that directly targeted Indigenous peoples. And the origin of these policies go back centuries.

In 1493, Pope Alexander the 6th, issued a papal bull describing the Doctrine of Discovery, sometimes called the Doctrine of Christian Discovery. This bull supported Spain's exclusive rights to lands “discovered” – in air quotes – by Christopher Columbus and later colonists.

Dr. Abel Gomez again.

ABEL: When the Spanish entered into lands not owned by Christians, they would describe to them that they were on those lands as a representative of the king and queen who has jurisdiction based on the Pope who has jurisdiction over the entire world.

And they would tell the people they encountered that they were to convert to Christianity and to surrender their land. And of course they were told this in Spanish, and the understanding was that by the power of the Holy Spirit, the words would be translated into their language and they would understand.

This is part of this, again, larger framework that assumes inherent superiority of both European people and of Christianity.

HEATHER: This legal and religious framework has echoed down through the centuries to European, and later, American policies impacting Native peoples.

ABEL: And so, while earlier interactions were peaceful, settlers wanted Native lands and resources. But following American independence, the newly established U. S. set on a campaign to acquire more land, and Native people were in the way.

Because land is central to Native identities and cultures, we see these ongoing policies of separating people from land.

HEATHER: This list of U.S. policies that Abel's talking about? It's really long. And just one was the Removal Act of 1830. This act forced many tribes off of their ancestral lands and onto reservations.

Then, the Dawes Act of 1887 divided these ancestral lands into individual plots, but also sold off 90 million acres to white settlers.

Around the same time, Native children were forcibly removed from their homes, and placed in government run boarding schools.

These policies were designed to assimilate Native peoples and undermine their sovereignty. And they did incredible harm.

ABEL: In these schools, Native children couldn't speak their language, couldn't practice their traditions, couldn't eat their traditional foods. The school system sought to remake Native people into white people. Native children in these schools experienced all manner of physical, sexual, and psychological abuse. Many of the children never returned home. Others retained deep psychological wounds from being part of a system that drilled into them a level of shame for being Native.

HEATHER: Wovoka came into adulthood living in a world increasingly pressured by these U.S. policies designed to suppress his very identity.

Dr. Jennifer Graber.

JENNIFER: In this really difficult situation in which they're displaced from the land, their food resources were devastated in many ways, and they're really kind of trying to survive as people, they drew on traditions, including the traditions around visionary knowledge, visionary gifts, visionary powers.

HEATHER: Wovoka was well-known and respected by the Paiute as a weather worker and spiritual leader. He was also exceptionally gifted as a visionary.

JENNIFER: One thing to understand about Wovoka is that he was drawing on long traditions in which people, through their visionary experiences, were understood to be given power to manipulate the weather. This is a long, long tradition in Paiute life.

This is a desert landscape, where water really matters for life. And so a person who has the power over water is a powerful person. And Wovoka had songs that he used to manipulate the weather. There's lots of stories about how Wovoka invoked rainstorms or stopped rainstorms.

HEATHER: We mostly know about Wovoka's life from settler Americans, who wrote his history from a settler perspective.

JENNIFER: One of the earliest people to write about Wovoka, wrote a piece about him called Wizardry. This American observer kind of catalogs all of this and says ‘This is wizardry and it's fake and he's just duping people.’

And so I think it's a great opportunity to think about why is it that particular kinds of claims to either interact with the dead, or be able to engage with animals, or weather, or a mountain – why does that draw out a sense of disdain, if not a sense that anyone who claims to be able to do such a thing is a tricker, a manipulator, a bad person, a charlatan?

I think it's a real challenge to people who would – their knee jerk reaction might be that simply can't be real.

HEATHER: But this was the settler perspective on what Wovoka was doing.

When practices don't fit into either the dominant religious narrative or the dominant secular one, that word ‘magic?’ It's a weapon.

JENNIFER: Magic is often a word we use because we think something is really not real, right? It's magic. It doesn't have real substance.

Watching the way that these traditions emerge out of peoples’ hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of years relationship with the landscape has told me to kind of have some humility about these claims and to take these traditions very seriously.

HEATHER: Based on what we know, sometime around 1889, Wovoka had a profound vision in which he received instructions on how to create a renewed world through a form of dance.

In this vision, Wovoka learned that if the Paiute people followed a set of moral instructions and practiced this dance, then the dead and ancestors would return to the world remade as it was before the white settlers arrived and disrupted it.

And Wovoka was tasked with spreading this message.

Now, despite federal efforts to suppress Native cultural practices, the Paiute people still came together to pursue traditional ways of being, like harvesting pine nuts, fishing, and performing traditional Ceremony.

JENNIFER: Wovoka shows up at those gatherings, at which the people are procuring food but also celebrating various dance traditions. And he introduces his visionary message in this environment and basically folds his kind of visionary message into a traditional form of dance practice called the round dance.

HEATHER: After the break, we'll learn more about this particular round dance, today called the Ghost Dance; and we'll learn how the visionary experience of one Paiute man, became a profound religious expression for thousands.

HEATHER: We'll be right back.

 (BREAK)

HEATHER: Welcome back to Magic in the United States. I'm Heather Freeman.

The Paiute, like many Native peoples, were under extreme stress due to U.S. policies designed to excise them from the landscape.

Many Paiute were grieving the loss of their land, their children, and their ways of Being.

But there was solace and strength found in community, so the Paiute continued their traditional gatherings, where they would harvest pine nuts, and give thanks through Ceremony and dance.

Dr. Jennifer Graber.

JENNIFER: And so people would work all day, do this labor related to food, and then in the evening, one of the things they would do is celebrate by round dancing. This would usually begin with some sort of established leader offering both prayers and petitions, being thankful for the pine nuts, asking for good weather so that good pine nut crops can come in the future. There were particular songs to encourage growth and to offer thanks for the harvest they had just received.

HEATHER: These round dances were social, but they were also sacred and done in community.  Today, we know what these looked like in part because of settler writings.

JENNIFER: People would make a big, big circle, join hands, and usually they moved clockwise, accompanied by singing of songs. And it's a kind of shuffle step, not too dramatic.

The sense was that the pounding of the feet stimulated plant growth, below the earth. And it was a way to celebrate socially, but also to acknowledge the larger forces necessary for having a good crop and therefore good health as a people.

HEATHER: Wovoka went to these gatherings and shared the story of his profound visionary message.

JENNIFER: So he basically said that he had an experience of basically losing consciousness, being taken up into the air, seeing the land of the dead and seeing more-than-human beings, very powerful beings who spoke to him, gave him songs, gave him powers to manipulate the weather, and gave him a message basically saying, ‘You need to go back to your people, tell them to do this dance.’

The message also prescribed how often they should do it, how long it should take, but also prescribing certain ways to live, telling them to be at peace with one another, telling them to be honest in their dealings with others.

And if they would do all of these things – if they would dance, if they would ritually bathe after the dance, if they would follow these moral prescriptions – they would hasten the bringing about of a renewed world, and in that renewed world, the ancestors would return, the game animals would return, the land would be restored.

HEATHER: This message of renewal, of hope in a time of despair, and of a practice grounded in dance and community – struck a chord.

Wovoka’s message spread rapidly among the Paiute, and then spread to other tribes as well.

JENNIFER: It began to draw interest and long distance visitors very quickly. Not only did Paiutes who were living in other places make the trek out to the Mason Valley or to the Walker River Reservation, but non-Paiute people started to make their way –  Shoshone people, Ute people – something about that message in which the ancestors would return, the game animals would return – that found purchase really very quick.

And so Native people send letters to each other to different reservations, telling them about this message. People get on trains and are able to travel very quickly, either to go tell someone at another reservation about the movement or to travel from that reservation to Nevada to come see Wovoka and participate themselves.

HEATHER: This promise of a renewed land was attractive, because across the United States, Native peoples had been pushed to the edge.

Dr. Abel Gomez explains.

ABEL: So this was a time of profound crisis. It was the end of the world, a time of apocalypse. And so in this moment of absolute devastation, word spreads of this prophet, Wovoka, and his dance. If they do this dance, sing these songs, live moral lives, the world would be renewed. The buffalo would return, the ancestors from before would come back. This was a message of profound hope, and healing, and transformation.

HEATHER: This message of hope and transformation found purchase with mothers and fathers in particular.

Dr. Jennifer Graber.

JENNIFER: We know that, especially on the plains, there were many women who participated. Many of these women were people who had experienced child loss in some way, either through the death of their children, or separation from their children because of schooling regimes.

And they attested to entering visionary states and seeing their children. It seemed to have a very particular pull for women who had lost their children. We also have stories about men who came to Wovoka and came to the movement wanting to be reunited with their deceased children.

There are stories from women who emerge from their vision state, and say that they saw their children, they played a game with their child in this visionary state.

And you can see then what might pull people toward a movement with that kind of promise, right? Like, not only will you see them in that visionary state, but the claim is that they will be resurrected and they'll return with all the Ancestors.

HEATHER: The Ghost Dance was a political movement as well. Remember that long list of U.S. policies that deliberately targeted Native life? Well, the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses, not only banned traditional Native ceremonies, but banned dances as well.

And it used the language of ‘magic’ to justify this, targeting “medicine men” (in quotes) who were traditional healers and spiritual leaders – like Wovoka. And the Code accused them of using (more quotes) “conjures’ arts” to trick others.

And that was its justification.

Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa.

TRIA: In response to that, Indigenous people took their dances underground, and they also utilized creative tactics to maintain their practices.

The Ghost Dance could be considered an expression of political resistance through its perpetuation and innovation of Native movement despite the bans on Native dance at the time.

Another way that the Ghost Dance can be considered an act of political resistance is through Wovoka's vision, which restores indigenous humans and  animals and plants who had died or been otherwise detrimentally impacted by colonization. And it's envisioning of native liberation and a native future.

And so this is a often marginalized but important history that I think it's important for people to know.

HEATHER: So the Ghost Dance promised to renew the land and return to the pre-colonial Turtle Island, that would wash away the effects of 400 years of colonial invasion. Turtle Island is the name used by some Native peoples to describe North America, which is based on the creation stories of several Tribes.

So the dance spread. The Lakota learned about the dance by word of mouth and letters sent by a delegation to visit Wovoka. Several became enthusiastic followers of the movement and brought the practices back to the Lakota reservation in South Dakota.

In Spring 1890 interest spread, but only a few dances were held by the Lakota. But by summer, things had changed rapidly.

JENNIFER: There's major food insecurity that summer. It's a year of terrible weather conditions. And the United States Congress took action to reduce rations to Lakota people, even though Lakota leaders at the time were advocating that, by treaty, these were rations that were guaranteed to them.

HEATHER: And this is just one of many examples of the U.S. government breaking treaties with Native tribes. As the dance spread, American settlers and government officials grew increasingly nervous.

JENNIFER: Americans, as well as some of the reservation agents, are really concerned. There are rumors spreading among American settlers that this is an act of aggression, they're getting ready to go to war, they're going to attack the Americans around them.

The reservation agents and nearby settlers get very nervous about Ghost Dancing and they call in what is eventually the largest deployment of the United States military since the Civil War to suppress the movement and to stop it.

HEATHER: This huge military presence arrived in November as a show of force, hoping the optics would stop the movement.

JENNIFER: And so there are all kinds of Ghost Dancers who quit at that point, right? Like, it's very dangerous to be a Ghost Dancer once you get that kind of massive military deployment surrounding you. But a bunch of people refused to stop dancing and they were willing to flee the reservations to evade that kind of control and suppression.

HEATHER: One band of dancers flees the reservation. It's led by Miniconjou Lakota chief Sitanka, sometimes known as Big Foot. Although he was not a Ghost Dancer, himself, many of his band were.

They were pursued by the army and eventually surrounded at Wounded Knee. Sitanka agrees to surrender and return to the reservation.

But during the surrender, a shot is fired, and a massacre ensued.

JENNIFER: Historians have tried to account for what happened there. There have been arguments about who fired the first shot, who were the American soldiers aiming at.

But I want to be really clear. No matter who fired the first shot, soldiers very, very quickly transferred their sites to Lakota women and children and elderly people and chased them down across the frozen countryside and gunned them down mercilessly over the course of several hours, right? This was a massacre. This was a genocide.

HEATHER: On December 29th, 1890, roughly 300 men, women, children, and the elderly were brutally killed by the United States Army.

Twenty soldiers received Medals of Honor for that day. Despite several bills in Congress, they have never been rescinded.

After the Massacre at Wounded Knee, there was a crackdown on dancers and the movement was suppressed.

It's commonly said that the movement died out. But this couldn't be further from the truth. Like most cultural practices, the Ghost Dance did change over time. But it did not die out.

JENNIFER: Historians have found actually evidence of people doing the Ghost Dance in 1891, in 1892, in 1894. So there's actually Lakota practitioners who try to bring the movement back even after the massacre at Wounded Knee. So, dancing, I would say, remains a constant, an important and powerful part of Native life and within Native communities through this whole period. So even though this particular movement was suppressed, it actually was not eradicated, and neither were other kinds of Native dancing.

HEATHER: This continued to be true for the next hundred years. And today, in the 21st century, Native dances are still evolving, still resisting, and still innovating.

Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa.

TRIA: I identify decolonial possibilities of Native dance, which are, an expression of spirituality, resistance, sovereignty – dances can also be important for relationship building, dances can be a way of creating healing and hope.

HEATHER: These dances and ceremonies aren't just recreations from the past. They're looking forward.

TRIA: Native dances can communicate Indigenous presence, even on lands that people often problematically don't associate with Native people, such as urban areas.

HEATHER: In secular American society today, we often don't think about the transformative power of dance, of moving your body with others to music.

Dance can be a celebration, a lamentation, storytelling, and much more.

And in many religious, as well as secular practices around the world, dance can be a profound experience of connection and community.

Jennifer Graber again.

JENNIFER: I often hear Native folks talk about dances as either religious or social. A religious dance is something that you have to prepare for in a certain way and it is understood to kind of do a particular kind of work or express something particular.

HEATHER: And there isn't a clear split between social and religious dances. It's a spectrum. Even a social dance has its moments of the sacred.  Settlers and outsiders might even experience this if they visit a Native dance event that’s open to the public.

JENNIFER:  A social dance is something that is there for pleasure. It's there for joy. It brings people together. It's a way to celebrate all kinds of things.

However, there are moments during those celebrations, especially when particular songs are being sung, there's a certain sort of shift in the round dance practice. So for instance, the MC might say, ‘Everyone turn off your cameras,’ or now all the lights will be lowered, or now, people need to move in this way. So even the same dance can also kind of shift with just a few changes into something that we might call religious.

HEATHER: Jennifer, Tria, and Abel all spoke to me of the challenge of using the word ‘religion’ to describe Native practices and traditions.

Abel Gomez explains.

ABEL: Religion is a very sensitive topic to discuss with outsiders of Native communities. It's a term that can bring up histories of white anthropologists and other scholars entering into communities and publishing materials or content that's meant to be private.

This is important because ceremonial knowledge in a Native context is not meant for public consumption. It's transmitted through culturally specific protocols, often from elders or traditional knowledge keepers.

Other challenges with this category of religion is that there aren't often words in Native languages that can easily translate into what mainstream America understands as religion.

So I often tell my students that the term ‘Native American Religions’ is at best a partial translation, and this translation speaks to culturally specific values, narratives, ceremonies, and protocols, or practices, that come from direct relations to specific lands and waters.

HEATHER: I'm recording this podcast from Charlotte, North Carolina, an American city which was established upon the colonized lands of the Catawba, Cheraw, Sugaree, Wateree, and Waxhaw peoples – they have stewarded this land for generations and continue to do so. Their histories, languages, and traditional practices are as culturally diverse as any other community in Charlotte.

And traditional practice doesn't mean unchanging practice.

All cultural practices change and evolve over time, from dance to religious identity.

ABEL: It sometimes surprises people to learn that the majority of Native people in the Americas today are Christian. But Native peoples also practice a diversity of religious traditions. There are Native Buddhists and Muslims and almost anything else you can think of. And this is important to think about, because Native peoples are as complex and diverse as any other religious community and cultural group.

HEATHER: Dr. Tria Blu Wakpa bridges her research in dance with community. She's collaborated with Lakota and California tribal peoples on exhibitions and performances designed to educate and inform. 

TRIA: I think learning about Native dance could be an entryway for some of your listeners to start thinking about Native people if they're not already doing so.

You know, whose land are they on? And what are some of the challenges that Native people are grappling with? And are there ways that they might help support those causes? And so I would encourage people listening to continue to learn about Native people and to support those challenges and successes.

HEATHER: Next week on Magic in the United States, we'll look at a pop culture controversy over Satanic sneakers, and then drill down into the history of religious Satanism, both theistic and atheistic.

Would you like to leave us a comment or thought on one of our episodes? Give us a ring. 980-277-4402. Or leave a message or voicemail at magicintheunitedstates@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Magic in the United States is written and hosted by me, Heather Freeman. The show is produced by Amber Walker and edited by Lucy Perkins. Our associate producer is Noor Gill. And the show is mixed by Jennie Cataldo. Fact-checking by Dania Solomon. The executive producer for PRX productions is Jocelyn Gonzalez. The show's music is from APM music and epidemic sound. Our project managers are Edwin Ochoa and Morgan Church. Thanks to advisors. Danielle Boaz, Abel Gomez, Daniel Harms and Meg Whalen. Thanks to guests Abel Gomez, Jennifer Graber, and Tria Blu Wakpa. Additional thanks to Jason Black. This production was funded by a grant from the national endowment for the humanities and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Wherever you go in the United States — the East, the West, the North or the South — remember, that magic is everywhere. I'm Heather Freeman. And I'll see you at the crossroads.