Gregory Smoak

People survived through often wage labor.

Woodcutting is one of those occupations.

But also, you know, people who were alive at the time, white and Indian, often simply called him Jack Wilson.

That might be the way that they understood it, but it's really difficult to say how an individual Native person understood that.

But certainly that is the promise.

Okay.

Right.

And I think one way to think about it, though, is that this is not, when people hear ghost dance, they think about raising the dead.

as if it's some horror movie.

Think of it more in terms of a millennium, the return of a golden age, but being reunited with your lost loved ones in their full prime, in a world in which you can live with your own traditions, your own religion,

and be prosperous and happy.

That's the message.

Well, sir, I mean, the way that Wovoka described it here, it's certainly a pacifist message.

Do always right, right?

Do not hurt anyone.

In the literature, the scholarly literature on the ghost dance, there was this idea that came about that the Lakota people

misinterpreted or perverted the ghost dance into a violent message.

And this is a factor leading to Wounded Knees.

More recently, scholars have really pushed back against that.

But in that early book in the early 1960s, Last Days of Sunation, that's certainly the idea that this is a peaceful message that the Lakotas, because of their culture and because of the conditions they were suffering, turned this into a militant anti-white religion.