This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Wodziwob was a Northern Paiute prophet of the Walker Lake, Nevada community who around 1869 to 1870 originated a renewal movement the anthropologist Cora Du Bois later documented and named the 1870 Ghost Dance, a distinct and earlier movement from the far better known 1890 Ghost Dance associated with Wovoka two decades afterward.
Wodziwob taught that world renewal ceremonies and dancing would bring about the return of the dead and a restoration of the world as it had existed before white settlement, a teaching that shares its central themes with the later 1890 movement without being its direct source in any documented, unbroken line of transmission.
That two decades separate Wodziwob's 1870 teaching from Wovoka's 1889 vision, both originating among Northern Paiute communities in the same Nevada region, means the historical relationship between the two movements is one of independent parallel emergence within the same cultural and religious tradition rather than of one man simply continuing another's work.
It also means the 1890 Ghost Dance, the movement most widely remembered today because of its entanglement with the events at Wounded Knee, was not a first attempt. A Northern Paiute prophet at the same Walker Lake community had already taught a closely related renewal message two decades earlier, and it was Cora Du Bois's later ethnographic documentation that recovered and separated that earlier movement from the one that followed it.