Mooney left Washington by train on December 22, 1890, for Indian
Territory to begin his study among the Cheyennes and Arapahoes.
Only one week later, on December 29, the Ghost Dance among the
Sioux at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota culminated in the
tragic massacre by soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry of some three
hundred men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek. Those
needless deaths symbolize the failure of whites to understand the
Ghost Dance as a religious movement.

Spending twenty-two months in the field during the next four years,
Mooney had the opportunity to witness the effects of the Ghost Dance
on tribes throughout the Plains. Some rejected it altogether, while
others embraced it wholeheartedly. When Mooney completed his field
study in 1894 he could report that Ghost Dance beliefs had become
incorporated into the religious fabric of many tribal cultures, "al-
though the feverish expectation of a few years ago has now settled
down into something closely approaching the Christian hope of a
reunion with departed friends in a happier world at some time in the
unknown future" (p. 927 ). Both the Sioux and the Kiowas, after first
fervently embracing the Ghost Dance and then rejecting it, reinsti-
tuted the religion with decreasing emphasis on dancing and increas-
ing focus on religious and social rituals that combined native and
Christian beliefs. Among the Kiowas, the revamped Ghost Dance
lasted until 1917; among the Sioux of Canada, under the name of
New Tidings, it was still practiced by a few believers as late as the
1960s. ¹

From the beginning, Mooney understood the Ghost Dance as a
religious movement and saw it in broad crosscultural perspective. He
characterized it as follows: "The Indian messiah religion is the in-
spiration of a dream. Its ritual is the dance, the ecstasy, and the
trance. Its priests are hypnotics and cataleptics. All these have formed
a part of every great religious development of which we have knowl-
edge from the beginning of history" (p. 928 ). This was at odds with
the perceptions of most non-Indian observers. Frontier settlers as-
sociated all Indian dancing with impending warfare; Christian mis-
sionaries believed that dancing encouraged immorality, rekindling
heathen practices; and Indian agents knew that the gatherings in the
Ghost Dance camps disrupted the civilized rhythm of rural life that
the reservation system was attempting to foster. Thus the Ghost Dance
was seen as atavistic, the antithesis of progress in civilization, and
a potential breeding ground for discontent and rebellion.

But where others saw heathen backsliding, James Mooney saw a
positive social movement, a religious means to revitalizing native
cultures. That his perception differed from those of his contemporaries
may be attributed to his own ethnic and social background, his in-
terests as an anthropologist, and his experiences in Indian commu-
nities. Firmly grounded in the perspectives and prejudices of his time,

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