Wovoka
Jack
Wilson
(c.1856-1932)
Known as the messiah to his followers, Wovoka was the Paiute mystic whose religious pronouncements spread the Ghost Dance among many tribes across the American West.
Wovoka was born in Western Nevada, in what is now Esmeralda County, in about 1856. Little is known about his early life, but at about age fourteen his father died, leaving Wovoka to be raised by the family of David Wilson, a nearby white rancher. Wovoka soon took the name Jack Wilson, by which he was broadly known among both neighboring whites and Indians, and worked on Wilson's ranch well into adulthood. He learned to speak English and apparently had a fair amount of contact with Christianity.
At around age thirty, Wovoka began to weave together various cultural strains into the Ghost Dance religion. He had a rich tradition of religious mysticism upon which to draw. Around 1870, a northern Paiute named Tävibo had prophesied that while all whites would be swallowed up by the earth, all dead Indians would emerge to enjoy a world free of their conquerors. He urged his followers to dance in circles, already a tradition in the Great Basin area, while singing religious songs. Tävibo's movement spread to parts of Nevada, California and Oregon.
Whether or not Tävibo was Wovoka's father, as many at the time assumed, in the late 1880's Wovoka began to make similar prophecies. His pronouncements heralded the dawning of a new age, in which whites would vanish, leaving Indians to live in a land of material abundance, spiritual renewal and immortal life. Like many millenarian visions, Wovoka's prophecies stressed the link between righteous behavior and imminent salvation. Salvation was not to be passively awaited but welcomed by a regime of ritual dancing and upright moral conduct. Despite the later association of the Ghost Dance with the Wounded Knee Massacre and unrest on the Lakota reservations, Wovoka charged his followers to "not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always... Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them."
"When the Sun died, I went up to Heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people."
With these words, spoken by a Paiute rancher named Wovoka to describe a dream he experienced during a full eclipse on New Year's Day of 1889, the Native American Ghost Dance religion came into being. Few people, either Native or white, could have imagined the tragedy which would arise from this new faith within two years of this jolting statement. But while the brief and bloody history of the Ghost Dance has been well documented, the story of its creator remains curiously elusive. Few people have had a more profound effect on Native American history as Wovoka, yet his story has nearly been lost to time.
By
the morning of January 1, 1889, Wovoka was clearly a man torn apart by the conflicts
of his past. His father's failure to be taken seriously as a prophet, the suffering
of the Native peoples and his own religious concepts (both tribal and Christian)
weighed heavily on him. On that day, Wovoka claimed to have dreamed a vision
of a new and glorious world for the Native peoples. But was it really a new
world?
In
his dream, Wovoka conversed with God, who promised a new world set aside for
the Native peoples. The wildlife of the region which was nearly depleted by
white settlers (buffalo, elk, deer) would be replenished. The white settlers
would vanish en mass and the Native dead would be resurrected and reunited with
their living ancestors. Suffering, starvation, pain and disease would be wiped
away forever. From a theological viewpoint and the safety of hindsight, however,
one can detect prophecies which were not tribal in origin.
Even the most casual churchgoer would recognize the visions of the Book of Revelation in Wovoka's prophecies. Yet Wovoka's audience— the Paiute people and, later, other tribal nations— did not recognize it simply because Christianity did not take root among the Native peoples. White missionaries, for all of their efforts, did not put their faith into the hearts of most Native peoples. Wovoka, obviously recognizing this, refashioned the Revelation warning to his world. He claimed the Native peoples would receive God's favor since it was the white man who rejected Christ. And unlike the New Testament, which was vague concerning the time and place of God's new world, Wovoka spelled out the immediacy of what he said. "Jesus is now upon the Earth," he stated. But again, there is historic contradiction here— Wovoka is quoted as saying he was Christ and he wasn't Christ. It would seem that either he excelled at playing to different audiences or was damned to being preserved by faulty historians.
Blame
for Ghost Dance was placed on two people. Wovoka was traced as the father of
the Ghost Dance and was interviewed by James Mooney, an ethnologist and anthropologist
with the Smithsonian Institute. Wovoka passed a message to Mooney that he would
control any militaristic uprising among the Native peoples in return for financial
and food compensation from Washington. The offer was ignored. And blame was
also put on Sitting Bull, the chief medicine man of the Lakota people. Ironically,
Sitting Bull was apathetic to Ghost Dance and only allowed its introduction
at Pine Ridge with great caution. His initial qualms were realized: government
agents considered Sitting Bull responsible solely due to his leadership role
among the Lakota. Tribal police were dispatched to arrest him, but his apprehension
resulted in conflict when several Lakota fought to protect him. Sitting Bull
was killed in the crossfire on December 15, 1890.
Fourteen
days after Sitting Bull's fatal shooting, the U.S. Army sought to relocate and
disarm the Lakota people, who failed to stop their Ghost Dance. On the frozen
plains at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation, government troops opened
fire on the overwhelmingly unarmed Lakota people, killing 290 in a matter of
minutes. Thirty-three soldiers died, most from friendly fire; 20 Medals of Honor
were presented to surviving soldiers.
As news of Wounded Knee spread throughout the Native nations, Ghost Dance died quickly. Wovoka's prophecies were hollow; the land would not be returned from the white man through divine intervention. With the suddenness of its birth, Ghost Dance disappeared.
Wovoka himself virtually vanished into obscurity. In his later years, he exhibited himself at sideshows in county fairs and worked as an extra in silent movie Westerns. (The one surviving photograph of Wovoka was taken on the set of a film.) By the time of his death on September 20, 1932, he was virtually forgotten by both white and Native peoples. It would not be until the 1970s and the birth of Native American activism that the story of the Ghost Dance was told again— even if its father's life was reduced to footnote status.