Please join the Faculty Diversity and Development Committee in welcoming Tiffany Hale, Assistant Professor of Religion, as she presents Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Indigenous Resistance After the US Civil War.
Hale's new book presents a history of the United States from the Civil War through the early twentieth century that places Indigenous peoples and their ways of seeing the world at the center. It considers how individual leaders, their families, and communities navigated dangerous post-war conditions and suggests that Ghost Dances hold something in common with blues traditions of working-class African Americans. The Ghost Dance was born on the heels of Reconstruction, but following it-during the era of Redemption-Ghost Dancing intensified with Native groups asserting new kinds of spiritual and political borders. Together, these decades produced what Hale calls fugitive religion: A reservoir of traditional knowledge that Indigenous people drew from and replenished as a way of retaining a sense of freedom despite federal plans to eliminate or absorb them. Hale argues that by giving participants a chance to reflect on their experiences of warfare, deracination, and diplomacy, fugitive religion constituted a mode of interpretation and exchange that was central to the production of modern collective racial self-consciousness for Native peoples in the United States.