1 ‘Introduction’, Mallie, De and Parks, , eds., Sioux Indian religion, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987, p. 14Google Scholar. I want to thank Catherine Wessinger, Katie Benton-Cohen, Philip J. Deloria and the reviewers for the Journal of Global History for their perceptive and helpful readings of earlier versions of this paper.

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7 Macgregor, Gordon, Warriors without weapons, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946, p. 93.Google Scholar

8 Vecsey, Christopher, ‘A century of Lakota Sioux Catholicism at Pine Ridge’, in Conser, Walter H., Jr., and Twiss, Sumner B., eds., Religious diversity and American religious history, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1997, p. 267.Google Scholar

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11 Gibbon, The Sioux, pp. 2–3; Paul B. Steinmetz, S.J., Pipe, Bible and Peyote among the Oglala Lakota, Dissertation, University of Stockholm, 1980, pp. 9–10; De Mallie and Parks, ‘Introduction’, pp. 6–7. The latter claim that there is no historical evidence for Nakota being a separate dialect, but that Santee and Yankton are both Dakota.

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13 James, Mooney, The Ghost-Dance religion and the Sioux outbreak of 1890, reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965, p. 200.Google Scholar For a more recent view, see Kehoe, Alice Beck, The Ghost Dance: ethnohistory and revitalization, Belmont, CA: The Wadsworth Group, 2002.Google Scholar

14 The dissonance is emphasized by Porter, Andrew, Religion vs. empire? British Protestant missionaries and overseas expansion, 1700–1914, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 12–13, 323.Google Scholar On Grant’s peace policy, see Pierce Beaver, R., Church, State, and the American Indians, St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1966, ch. 4.Google Scholar

15 Quoted in Anderson, Gary Clayton, Kinsmen of another kind. Dakota–white relations in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1650–1862, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 178.Google Scholar On Riggs and the other early missionaries, see Stahl, Robert, ‘Carrying the word to the Sioux. The Williamson and Riggs families’, in Hoover, Herbert T. and Zimmerman, Larry J., eds., South Dakota leaders, Vermillion, SD: University of South Dakota Press, 1989, pp. 65–79.Google Scholar

16 Quoted in Fenelon, James V., Culturicide, resistance, and survival of the Lakota (‘Sioux Nation’), New York: Garland Publishing, 1998, p. 46.Google Scholar

17 See Tinker, George E., Missionary conquest. The Gospel and Native American cultural genocide, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993Google Scholar; Craig, Robert, ‘Christianity and empire: a case study of American Protestant colonialism and Native Americans’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 21, 2, 1999, pp. 1–41.Google Scholar

18 Examples include Mails, Fools Crow; Mary Crow Dog and Richard Erdoes, Lakota Woman, New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990; Fire, John/Deer, Lame and Erdoes, Richard, Lame Deer: seeker of visions, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972.Google Scholar The best-known example, John G. Neihardt’s Black Elk speaks, will be discussed below.

19 Angela Wilson, Waziyatawin, Remember this! Dakota decolonization and the Eli Taylor narratives, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2005, pp. 24–25, 47–48. Wilson’s text is bilingual.Google Scholar

20 Warrior, Robert, The people and the word. Reading Native nonfiction, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005, esp. pp. xiii–xxxi.Google Scholar

21 White, Richard, The middle ground, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. ix–x, 330–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an application of this theory to two Sioux missionaries in Canada, see Mclaren, Darcee, ‘Living the middle ground: two Dakota missionaries, 1887–1912’, Ethnohistory 43, 1996, pp. 277–305.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

22 Even Sitting Bull adopted a lost Euro-American mail carrier as his brother. See Adams, Alexander B., Sitting Bull. An epic of the Plains, New York: Putnam, 1976, pp. 200–1.Google Scholar

23 Anderson, Kinsmen of another kind, p. xi. On the same arrangements among the Algonquins, see White, Middle ground, p. 15.

24 Anderson, Kinsmen of another kind, pp. 168–9; Craig, ‘Christianity and empire’, p. 10; Vecsey, ‘Century of Lakota Sioux Catholicism’, pp. 265, 268.

25 Anderson, Kinsmen of another kind, pp. 203, 256. White paints a similar picture of sudden change for the Western Sioux in his article, ‘The winning of the West: the expansion of the Western Sioux in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Journal of American History, 65, 1978, pp. 319–43.

26 Tinker, Missionary conquest, p. 3.

27 Warrior, People and the word, pp. 119, 121; Macgregor, Warriors without weapons, chs. 8–14.

28 Weaver, ‘I-hermeneutics to we-hermeneutics’, p. 2.

29 Powers, William K., Beyond the vision. Essays on American Indian culture, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987, p. 102.Google Scholar See also Riggs, Stephen R., Tah-koo Wah-kan; or, the Gospel among the Dakotas (1869), reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1972, chs. xx–xxiGoogle Scholar; Meyer, Roy W., History of the Santee Sioux, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1967, chs. 6–7Google Scholar. Cf. McLoughlin, William G., The Cherokees and Christianity, 1794–1870, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994, p. 101 for a comparable case.Google Scholar

30 Tinker, Missionary conquest, p. 14; Stahl, ‘Carrying the word’, pp. 70–1.

31 Powers, Marla N., Oglala women. Myth, ritual, and reality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. p. 192CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ostler, Jeffrey, The Plains Sioux and U.S. colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 188.Google Scholar

32 Wassel, ‘Religion of the Sioux’, p. 233; Riggs, , Mary and I. Forty years with the Sioux, 1880, reprint, Williamstown, MA: Corner House, 1971, p. 254Google Scholar; Deloria, Ella, Speaking of Indians, 1944, reprint, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 99.Google Scholar

33 Deloria, Vine, Jr., Singing for a spirit. A portrait of the Dakota Sioux, Santa Fe, NM: Clear Light Publishers, 2000, p. 70.Google Scholar

34 Warrior, People and the word, p. 101.

35 Vecsey, ‘Century of Lakota Sioux Catholicism’, pp. 276–80; Enochs, Ross Alexander, The Jesuit mission to the Lakota Sioux. Pastoral theology and ministry, 1886–1945, Kansas City, KS: Sheed and Ward, 1996, p. 125.Google Scholar

36 Ibid., pp. vii–x, ch. 6.

37 Riggs, Tah-koo Wah-kan, p. 343.

38 Stahl, ‘Carrying the word’, p. 77.

39 Kerstetter, Todd, ‘Spin doctors at Santee: missionaries and the Dakota-language reporting of the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee’, Western Historical Quarterly, 28, 1997, pp. 46–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The paper split into separate English and Dakota papers, substantially different in content, in 1884.

40 On the Episcopalian paper, see Hawk Sneve, Virginia Driving, That they may have life. The Episcopal Church in South Dakota, 1859–1976, New York: Seabury Press, 1977, p. 63.Google Scholar On the Catholic, see Enochs, Jesuit mission, pp. 89–90.

41 On China, see Diamond, Norma, ‘Christianity and the Hua Miao: writing and power’, in Bays, Daniel H., ed., Christianity in China, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996, pp. 138–57.Google Scholar On Africa, Hastings, Adrian, The construction of nationhood: ethnicity, religion, and nationalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, ch. 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

42 Stahl, ‘Carrying the word’, p. 75.

43 Kerstetter, ‘Spin doctors at Santee’, p. 51.

44 Enochs, Jesuit mission, pp. 22–3; William Powers, Beyond the vision, pp. 113–14. Cf. Frykenberg, Robert Eric, ‘Christian missions and the Raj’, in Etherington, Norman, ed., Missions and empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 127, for a similar situation in India.Google Scholar

45 Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, pp. 112–13.

46 Medicine, Beatrice, Learning to be an anthropologist and remaining ‘Native’, ed. with Jacobs, Sue-Ellen, Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2001, p. 22.Google Scholar

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50 William Powers, Beyond the vision, pp. 109–12; DeMallie, , ed., The sixth grandfather. Black Elk’s teachings given to John G. Neihardt, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 15.Google Scholar On Sioux societies, see Sarah Olden, ‘The people of Tipi Sapa’, in Vine Deloria, Jr., Singing for a spirit, pp. 153–72.

51 Macgregor, Warriors without weapons, pp. 40, 44, chs. 12, 13.

52 Markowitz, Harvey, ‘The Catholic mission and the Sioux. A crisis in the early paradigm’, in DeMallie, and Parks, , eds., Sioux Indian religion, pp. 125–7Google Scholar; Cash, Joseph H. and Hoover, Herbert T., eds., To be an Indian. An oral history, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 108–9.Google Scholar

53 Robin Horton, ‘African conversion’, Africa, 41, 1971, pp. 85–108, esp. 101–5; ‘The rationality of conversion’, Africa, 45, 1975, pp. 219–35, 373–99.

54 Ibid., pp. 222, 234.

55 Horton, , Patterns of thought in Africa and the West. Essays on magic, religion and science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, esp. pp. 161–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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57 Rice, Julian, Before the Great Spirit. The many faces of Sioux spirituality, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1998, p. 153Google Scholar. Ch. 10 gives an overview of the controversy.

58 Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote, p. 42; Howard, Scott J., ‘Incommensurability and Nicholas Black Elk: an exploration’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 23, 1999, p. 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also DeMallie, ‘Lakota belief and ritual in the nineteenth century’, in DeMallie and Parks, eds., Sioux Indian religion, pp. 28–32. Contrast these with the ‘as told to’ version of Thomas E. Mails, Fools Crow, where Wakan Tanka speaks to Fool’s Crow (p. 110) and is manifest as a trinity (p. 120). For a critical demolition of this view, see Tinker, , Spirit and resistance. Political theology and American Indian liberation, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004, ch. 5.Google Scholar

59 James L. West, ‘Indian spirituality. Another vision’, in Treat, ed., Native and Christian, p. 32; for a comparative study of European notions that resemble these, see Cordova, Viola F., ‘The European concept of Usen’, in Weaver, ed., Native American religious identity, pp. 26–32.Google Scholar

60 Morrison, Kenneth M., ‘Beyond the supernatural: language and religious action’, Religion, 22, 1992, p. 204.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Irwin, Lee, ‘Introduction’, in Irwin, ed., Native American spirituality. A critical reader, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, p. 3Google Scholar; Andrea Smith, ‘Walking in balance. The spirituality-liberation praxis of Native women’, in Weaver, ed., Native American religious identity, p. 181.

61 Quoted in Utley, Robert M., The last days of the Sioux Nation, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963, p. 34.Google Scholar Cf. Holler, Black Elk’s religion, p. 213. On the notion of spirituality as power in West Africa, see Lindenfeld, David, ‘Indigenous encounters with Christian missionaries in China and West Africa, 1800–1920: a comparative study’, Journal of World History, 16, 2005, pp. 356–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the case of the Pacific Islands, see Barker, John, ‘Where the missionary frontier ran ahead of empire’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and empire, p. 96.Google Scholar

62 Ostler, Plains Sioux, pp. 230–1.

63 William Powers, Beyond the vision, p. 120.

64 Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, p. 101; Macgregor, Warriors without weapons, p. 92.

65 Elk, Black, The sacred pipe, ed. Joseph Epes Brown, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, pp. 3–9, esp. n. 12.Google Scholar Also Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote, pp. 52–4; DeMallie, ‘Lakota belief and ritual’, p. 31.

66 Vecsey, ‘Century of Lakota Sioux Catholicism’, p. 266.

67 Steltenkamp, Michael F., Black Elk. Holy man of the Oglala, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993, pp. 37–8Google Scholar; Enochs, Jesuit mission, p. 103.

68 Comaroff, Jean and Comaroff, John, Of revelation and revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991, 1997, vol. 1, pp. 24, 199, vol. 2, pp. 24–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

69 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 218. The Tswana term was badimo. At the same time, the singular form of the same word, modimo, became the word for ‘God’. See Paul Landau, ‘Language’, in Etherington, ed., Missions and empire, p. 211.

70 Ella Deloria, Speaking of Indians, p. 103.

71 Wilson, Remember this!, p. 53.

72 Elbourne, Elizabeth, ‘Word made flesh: Christianity, modernity, and cultural colonialism in the work of Jean and John Comaroff’, American Historical Review, 108, 2003, p. 451CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Blood ground. Colonialism, missions, and the contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002, pp. 18–20; Landau, , The realm of the word. Language, gender, and Christianity in a South African kingdom, Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 1995, pp. xxi–xxii.Google Scholar

73 Berkhofer, Robert F., Jr., The white man’s Indian, New York: Knopf, 1978, pp. 27–8.Google Scholar

74 For example, Deloria, Philip J., Playing Indian, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998Google Scholar; Huhndorf, Going Native, ch. 1.

75 They thus anticipated Edward Said’s definition of the intellectual as a spokesperson for the less powerful. Said, Edward W., Representations of the intellectual, New York: Pantheon Books, 1994, pp. 11, 22.Google Scholar

76 Quoted in Heflin, Ruth J., ‘I remain alive’ The Sioux literary renaissance, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000, p. 36.Google Scholar This generation has received much attention in recent scholarship, e.g. Warrior, , Tribal secrets. Recovering American Indian intellectual traditions, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995, pp. 5–14Google Scholar; Maddox, Lucy, Citizen Indians. Native American intellectuals, race and reform, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005.Google Scholar

77 Comaroff and Comaroff, Revelation and revolution, vol. 2, pp. 85–6, 108–15; William Powers, Beyond the vision, ch. 5; DeMallie and Parks, ‘Introduction’, p. 14; Vecsey, ‘Century of Lakota Sioux Catholicism’, pp. 273, 285. Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote, p. 163, calls this ‘ecumenicism 1’, to be distinguished from a simultaneous practice that is part of a coherent belief system (‘ecumenicism 2’). He maintains that a majority of Lakota subscribe to ecumenicism 1.

78 Marla Powers, Oglala women, pp. 185–8.

79 Ibid., p. 189. See also Spider, Emerson, Sr. ‘The Native American Church of Jesus Christ’, in DeMallie, and Parks, , eds., Sioux Indian Religion, pp. 189–209Google Scholar; Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote, ch. 2.

80 See Steinmetz, Pipe, Bible, and Peyote, pp. 37–8, 87–8. William Powers, Beyond the vision, p. 99, disputes the term ‘syncretism’ as applied here; he sees it rather as a strategy by the Catholic Church to gain new converts.

81 See Holler, ed., The Black Elk reader, Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000, for selections from these different points of view.Google Scholar

82 According to William Powers, the Lakota who remembered Black Elk did not regard him as an exceptional figure, but one of a number of Native catechists. See ‘When Black Elk speaks, everybody listens’, in Vecsey, Christopher ed., Religion in Native North America, Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1990, pp. 140–7.Google Scholar

83 De Mallie’s introduction constitutes the fullest biographical source for Black Elk. See The sixth grandfather, pp. 1–74.

84 Ibid., p. 294; cf. pp. 123, 214.

85 DeMallie, ed., The sixth grandfather., p. 47; on Black Elk’s first marriage and sons, see pp. 3–14; on the school, p. 23. See also William Powers, ‘When Black Elk speaks’, pp. 140–1.

86 Ibid., p. 141; De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, p. 14; Steltenkamp, Black Elk, p. 34.

87 De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, pp. 14, 135–7.

88 Steltenkamp, Black Elk, pp. 62–7, 88.

89 De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, p. 21.

90 On his sharing knowledge with Jesuits, see Bucko, Raymond A., The Lakota ritual of the Sweat Lodge, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998, p. 118.Google Scholar On his relationship to Fools Crow, see Mails, Fools Crow, p. 88.

91 The outside study in the 1940s led by Gordon Macgregor concluded that young people on the reservation did not look to priests or ministers for leadership or guidance. Macgregor, Warriors without weapons, pp. 201–2.

92 De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, p. 60; Steltenkamp, Black Elk, ch. 6.

93 De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, p. 64.

94 Elk, Black, ‘Foreword’, in Brown, Joseph Epes, The sacred pipe, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, pp. xix–xx.Google Scholar

95 William Powers, ‘When Black Elk speaks’, pp. 147–8.

96 Black Elk had steadfastly refused to perform it for Neihardt, despite the latter’s repeated requests. See De Mallie, Sixth grandfather, p. 15n.

97 Ibid., p. 91.

98 Bucko, Lakota ritual, pp. 83, 171; Marla Powers, Oglala women, p. 191; Waziyatawin Wilson, Remember this!, p. 117.

99 Some literature since the 1980s suggests this may be changing, e.g. Warrior, Robert Allen, ‘Canaanites, cowboys, and Indians: deliverance, conquest, and liberation theology today’, in Treat, ed., Native and Christian, pp. 93–100Google Scholar; Steve Charleston, ‘The Old Testament of Native America’, ibid., pp. 68–80.

100 McLoughlin, Cherokees and Christianity, p. 19. The Choctaw minister Steve Charleston described eastern Oklahoma as a ‘cultural patchwork quilt’ consisting of ‘dozens of tribes to go along with dozens of churches’, in Treat, ed., Native and Christian, p. 69. On the Navajo, see Cooper, Guy H., ‘Individualism and integration in Navajo religion’, in Vecsey, ed., Religion in Native North America, p. 79Google Scholar, and Vogt, Evan Z., ‘Navajo’, in Spicer, Edward H., ed., Perspectives on American Indian cultural change, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961, pp. 320, 324Google Scholar; Cochran, Dakota Cross-Bearer, p. 199.

101 E.g. Dale Stover, ‘A post-colonial reading of Black Elk’, in Holler, ed., Black Elk reader, pp. 127–47.