Wovoka

• Born: c. 1858
• Birthplace: Mason Valley, Nevada
• Died: September 20, 1932
• Place of death: Schurz, Nevada

Tribal affiliation: Northern Paiute

Significance: Wovoka originated the messianic Ghost Dance religion, which was embraced by nearly sixty thousand Indians from 1889 to 1890

Wovoka was born near Walker Lake in western Nevada’s Mason Valley. “The Cutter”—the meaning of the name Wovoka—would spend almost his entire life in this isolated valley.

His father was Tavibo, a Northern Paiute shaman and medicine man. His mother’s identity is unknown. Orphaned at fourteen, Wovoka was taken in by the family of David and Mary Wilson, white ranchers who had settled in the valley. Devout Christians, the Wilsons introduced Wovoka to their theology. The works and words of the Christian messiah—especially Jesus’ teachings about peace, love, and everlasting life in heaven—made an indelible impression upon the Indian teenager.

As a young man, Wovoka spent two years as a migrant worker in Oregon and Washington. In the Northwest, he met numerous Shaker Indians, disciples of a Squaxin religious leader named Squ-sacht-un (known to the whites as John Slocum). The Shakers told Wovoka that Squ-sacht-un, like Jesus, had experienced death and resurrection. He had returned from the spirit world with the message that God would exalt the Indians if they practiced righteousness and abandoned white vices. The testimony of these zealots had a profound effect upon the young Paiute.

Upon returning to his valley home, Wovoka began to identify himself more closely with his own people. When he was twenty, he left the Wilson ranch, moved back into an Indian wickiup, and wed a Paiute woman whom he called Mary. He then cultivated a reputation as a miracle-working religious leader. Using some shamanic techniques learned from Tavibo, he convinced many Paiutes that he had the power to heal the sick and control natural forces.

His reputation as a wonder-worker was further enhanced by a mystical experience he underwent in 1887. One night, he lapsed into unconsciousness and remained in a deathlike state for two days. When he regained consciousness, he claimed that he had been taken up into heaven and had seen God. Angels had urged him to instruct Indians that Jesus was again among them, working miracles and teaching them to love one another and to live at peace with whites.

Wovoka mocked death a second time when he was about thirty. In late 1888, he fell ill with the dreaded scarlet fever and appeared to have died. Then, on January 1, 1889, he suddenly revived. The dramatic effect of his recovery was magnified by the fact that it had coincided precisely with a solar eclipse. Wovoka again asserted that he had seen God, who told him that within two years the earth would be regenerated and returned to the Indians, that the whites would disappear, that buffalo herds would re-appear, and that all Indians—including their dead ancestors—would live forever in paradise. In the meantime, Indians must practice pacifism and testify to their faith in Wovoka’s prophecy by participating in a sacred ritual, the so-called Ghost Dance, which he taught them.

As a result of this second mystical experience, Wovoka was held in even greater esteem by the Nevada Paiutes. They regarded him as invulnerable to death. His people now called him “Our Father” and revered him as the messiah sent by the Great Spirit to liberate Indians from white bondage.

The Paiutes of Mason Valley danced and soon went out as missionaries to spread Wovoka’s gospel to other tribes. Many Great Basin and Plains tribes—including the Arapahos, Cheyennes, Utes, Shoshones, and Sioux—sent emissaries to talk to the Paiute prophet. They returned enthusiastic to start the dance among their own people. Beleaguered tribespeople who had lost hope now found it again in a ritual that promised to usher in a Native American millennium free of white people. By the summer of 1889, the messianic faith had spread beyond the Rockies eastward to the Mississippi.

The phenomenal expansion of the Ghost Dance among the Plains Indians alarmed the white authorities, who feared that militant Sioux chieftains might transform Wovoka’s pacifistic religion into a massive Indian resistance movement. In an attempt to suppress the burgeoning revival, the army began to round up many of its promoters, including Big Foot, the leader of a small group of Hunkpapa Sioux. On December 29, 1890, the commander of the Seventh Cavalry started to disarm Big Foot’s band of Ghost Dancers near Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota; someone fired a rifle, and a bloodbath ensued. Trigger-happy soldiers mowed down at least 150 Indians, many of them women and children.

When the report of the massacre reached Wovoka, he was stunned and saddened. He felt partly responsible for the tragedy, because the Sioux had embraced his teachings. After Wounded Knee, the appeal of his religion plummeted. The slaughter of the Sioux Ghost Dancers shattered the faith of tens of thousands in Wovoka’s vision of an imminent Indian millennium.

The discredited prophet lived out his remaining forty-two years in Mason Valley as “Jack Wilson.” Storekeeper Ed Dyer befriended him, and Wovoka eked out a living by selling ceremonial objects. By 1900, he could no longer find enough disciples to form a Ghost Dance circle; few people continued to call him “Our Father.” Nevertheless, Wovoka never abandoned his conviction that he had visited heaven and talked to God. In 1932, at the age of seventy-four, he died at Shurz, on the Walker River Reservation in Nevada.

Bibliography

Andrist, Ralph K. The Long Death: The Last Days of the Plains Indians. New York: Macmillan, 1964.

Bailey, Paul. Wovoka: The Indian Messiah. Los Angeles: Westernlore Press, 1957.

Marty, Martin E. Pilgrims in Their Own Land. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.

Mooney, James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. 1896. Reprint. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Porter, C. Fayne. Our Indian Heritage. Philadelphia: Chilton Books, 1964.

Sherer, Joel. “Wovoka.” In Twentieth-Century Shapers of American Popular Religion, edited by Charles H. Lippy. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1989.