Louis S. Warren - God’s Red Son: the Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America

With Gods Red Son, Louis Warren has written yet another book that is going to rearrange the mental furniture in our heads. His wonderfully clear prose pulls us effortlessly through a story that has western Indians emerge as entirely modern, and their nineteenth-century Ghost Dance religion as an endeavor many readers will find not just freshly understandable, but spiritually familiar. As was the case with his biography of Buffalo Bill, this book is Warren at the absolute top of his game.

Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

I cant remember the last book I read that so persuasively rewrites what I thought I knew about a much studied topic. Louis Warrens book does that for the Ghost Dance, and, more than that, it allows readers to see anew the history of the era and of all American religions. Gods Red Son is truly a revelation.

Stephen Aron, professor of history, UCLA

This eye-opening book is rich with empathy-stirring insights into the Indian Ghost Dancers dilemmas, hopes, ecstatic experiences, and practical precepts for survival in the modern United States. Importantly, it shows us Indians who reacted to the jarring consequences of US expansion and industrialization much as many other Americans didwith a mix of hope-inspiring religious fervor and pragmatic economic adjustments. This is American Indian history at its very best, vividly illuminating not only its distinctiveness and captivating complexity but also its inseparability from the larger story of Americans at a time of rapid, wrenching changes. With an abundance of compelling evidence woven into an accessible, absorbing narrative, Warren convincingly refutes the all-too-common assumption that the Ghost Dancers, and most American Indians in the 1880s, were irrational dreamers, futilely resisting their cultures inevitable demise.

Alexandra Harmon, author of Indians in the Making and Rich Indians

Louis Warrens Gods Red Son is a truly powerful re-envisioned (not revisionistic!), trenchant analysis of the Northern Paiutes revitalization movement by a leading American historian, whose keen understanding of those pulverizing industrializing engines of the late-nineteenth-century American West, compellingly forces our shift from romantic notions about the dying Indian race resulting from the Wounded Knee Massacre that followed Wovokas teaching into this undying religions twentieth- and twenty-first-century legacy: its spiritual and political semiotics in the Great Basin, as well as where it formerly spread. From Nevada to the northern and southern Plains, its descendants today face late-capitalistic environmental crises staining our late nightsthe Dakota Access Pipeline the most recent of these, and unhappily surely not the last.

Michael Hittman, author of Wovoka and the Ghost Dance

In Gods Red Son, Louis Warren tells a wonderfully compelling and justly insightful story about the Ghost Dance religion, a tradition that is close to the hearts of so many Native peoples. Staying true to the moving perspectives of the faithful, he weaves a tapestry of multi-situational complexity that sharpens our understandings of how this important indigenous religion contributes to the making of modern America, as well as demonstrating his vision of the possibility of a pluralistic society that values and affirms Indian autonomy.

Ines Hernandez-Avila, professor of Native American studies, University of California, Davis

Many people consider the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre as an end of American Indian history. In Gods Red Son, an engagingly written and meticulously researched book, Louis Warren tells of a Ghost Dance that endured Wounded Knee. Warren makes readers understand the origins of the Ghost Dance in Gilded Age Nevada, its attraction among Plains Indians, and its influence on the development of the social sciences. After consulting this book, readers will no longer consider the Ghost Dance a backward-looking effort to regain a primitive past, but a forward-looking religious movement that engaged with the modern United States.

William Bauer, Wailacki and Concow of the Round Valley Indian Tribes, Associate Professor, University of Nevada

For my parents, Claude N. Warren Sr. and Elizabeth Warren,

who taught me the Great Basin, the Mojave, and Snake River Canyon.

Great teachers, great classrooms.

And in memory of my sister, Susan Elizabeth Warren Kunkler, 19612015.

Still she rides, across the sagebrush sea.