Kiowa artist Silverhorn’s (b. 1861) ledger drawing of Kiowa Ghost Dancers, wearing single feathers as a sign of their commitment to the movement. Source: Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO. Courtesy of Dr. Jennifer Graber.
by Chloe Landen
On October 29th, the University of Texas at Austin’s NAIS Program commenced a new lecture series highlighting the work and research of NAIS-affiliated faculty by inviting Dr. Jennifer Graber to present a chapter of her forthcoming book. Dr. Graber has been on research leave since 2023 after receiving prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her research has thereafter focused on the Ghost Dance of 1890, emphasizing Native actors, sources, and epistemologies—with the overall aim of decolonizing prevailing narratives in Native scholarship.
The presentation, titled “Wovoka’s Gifts: The Material Culture of the 1890 Ghost Dance,” was Dr. Graber’s first effort to illustrate an overarching view of her forthcoming book, The World Renewed: Ghost Dancing Across Native North America. It began with the powerful message of nineteenth-century Paiute religious leader Wovoka: The world would soon be changed, the deceased would return, and threats would disappear; to hasten this event, the people needed to dance. Scholarship of the 1890 Ghost Dance, Dr. Graber lamented, has often operated within harmful binaries and wrongly attributed ‘revivalistic’ and ‘messianic’ characteristics to the movement. Motivated to intervene and decolonize the narrative, Dr. Graber’s research was ignited by the question: Is there a way to write a history of the Ghost Dance movement that prioritizes not only native voices but native ways of being?
Her research thus began by examining Native voices and sources. She then turned to exploring the objects used during the dances, the paint worn, and the songs they sang. Lastly, she made connections with communities who still practice dancing today and participated in some of the dances herself. This culmination of primary source material was helpfully contextualized by other NAIS scholarship, such as that of Tsim Schneider, Michelene Pesantubbee, and Christopher Pexa. In the initial stages of her research, Dr. Graber described feeling drawn to one initial hunch: that the 1890 Ghost Dance was and remains about participants’ concerns regarding their relatives, which include not only people but also lands, waterways, and animals. In other words, dancing is about nurturing relationships negatively affected by colonization.
In one of Wovoka’s early visions, Dr. Graber narrated to the audience, a powerful force swept him into the sky where he was taken to the land of the dead. There, he saw his ancestors eating well, a landscape abundant with plants, and a felt sense of control over the weather. Wovoka’s vision, coupled with her research, made Dr. Graber wonder: Why did ghost dancers have significant moments with food? Why did food appear in visionary experiences? Why is food important to understanding the movement as a whole? The answer, she contended, had to do with colonization. Wovoka’s vision described ways of being that had been taken from Natives. In the mid-nineteenth century, settlers destroyed grasses, participated in wide deforestation, and dispersed and killed animals. With the seasonal, traditional way of eating eradicated, Paiutes were forced to work for white settlers in order to eat. Food had become a weapon; Wovoka’s vision and the Ghost Dance movement sought to reclaim it.
Wovoka not only had a vision of a coming changed world, but he also regularly gave gifts to those who crossed his path, such as rich red paint, delicately woven rabbit skin blankets, game sticks, magpie feathers, and pine nuts. The chapter Dr. Graber presented focused on the gift of the pine nut and the role of food. The World Renewed will feature respective chapters for each of the remaining gifts, and while they differ in nature, will persistently focus on centering Native epistemologies in their analysis.
“Wovoka’s Gifts: The Material Culture of the 1890 Ghost Dance” was well attended and engaged, concluding with a fruitful dialogue between audience members and Dr. Graber. It was clear there was an enthusiasm for Dr. Graber’s forthcoming work—one that is certainly shared by those engaged with NAIS and beyond. The World Renewed is sure to be an indispensable contribution to the field of Native American religions.
Dr. Jennifer Graber is a Gwyn Shive, Anita Nordan Lindsay, and Joe & Cherry Gray Professor of Religious Studies at UT Austin and an active member of the NAIS-affiliated faculty, previously serving as NAIS’s Associate Director, Undergraduate Certificate Faculty Advisor, and NAIS Advisory Council member. Dr. Graber’s research focuses on Native American religions, religion and violence, and the intersection of power. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is currently on research leave during the 2024-2025 academic year, working on her forthcoming book The World Renewed: Ghost Dancing Across Native North America. Other notable publications include The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West (2018) and The Furnace of Affliction: Prisons and Religion in Antebellum America (2011).
Chloe Landen is a PhD student in the Religion of the Americas concentration within UT’s Department of Religious Studies. Her work specializes in U.S. Protestantism within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with particular interests in the social gospel movement and religious nationalism.
