Gregory Smoak

And that's essentially the end goal here.

It is a vision of resurrection.

It's also the one of, you know, it's kind of, it's always off-putting to use the terms that social scientists might use.

But, you know, you can think of the movements as transformative or redemptive.

The 1870 ghost dance was more transformative.

The message was more of an immediate transformation of conditions.

And a radical change, like just reshaping the earth.

By 1890, Wovoka, the 1890 Ghost Dance Prophets message, social scientists might say is more redemptive.

It incorporates more elements of Christianity, but it also is a more forward-looking religion in the sense that it gives people the wherewithal to survive in a colonized world.

And I mean, that's worth talking about too, is what are conditions like on reservations for native people.

Well, that is not necessarily true.

So, again, if we look at the 1890 ghost dance...

which is the more redemptive supposedly of the two if we use those phrases.

The only written Doctrine of the Ghost Dance that we have recorded by a native person is a so-called Messiah letter.

And this was given to James Mooney, that anthropologist I just mentioned.

It was written down by a young Arapaho man named Casper Edson.

And Edson had

attended Carlisle.

He wrote this down as the prophet spoke in a very broken English.

That was rewritten by a young Cheyenne woman when he returned to his home in Oklahoma, and then that letter was given to Mooney.