Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (Hittman)

Michael Hittman's biography of Wovoka, the Northern Paiute prophet of the 1890 Ghost Dance, first published in 1990 and expanded in 1997 by the University of Nebraska Press. Drawing on interviews with Wovoka's own Yerington Paiute community and on primary period records, Hittman reconstructs Wovoka's 1889 visionary experience, the doctrine of world renewal and reunion with the dead he preached, and how the message spread to and was transformed by other Plains nations, including its role in the events leading to the 1890 Wounded Knee massacre. Its strength is direct community-sourced oral history alongside archival record. Its limit is that, as a single biography, its focus on Wovoka himself gives comparatively less independent depth to how each receiving nation reshaped the doctrine.