Fugitive Religion

Tiffany M. Hale is assistant professor in the Department of Religion at Barnard College of Columbia University.

“In this rigorous, well-researched book, Tiffany M. Hale reintroduces the reader to the postbellum Indigenous practice of the Ghost Dance. By underscoring how this fugitive religious movement shaped a kind of racial consciousness among Indigenous communities in response to settler violence, Hale connects the Ghost Dance to the blues impulse within African American culture.”—Joseph Winters, Rutgers University“This wonderfully original and generative book completely revises and transforms understanding of racism’s centrality to past and present political structures and cultural imaginaries in the United States. With extraordinary erudition, insight, and eloquence, Tiffany M. Hale shows how the Ghost Dance challenged white supremacism at a time when Indigenous dispossession and Jim Crow segregation were responsible for reorganizing and reconsolidating the nation-state. In the face of a settler colonialism that threatened to eliminate or absorb them, Native peoples deployed religious traditions and practices that allowed them to maintain spiritual composure and a sense of freedom in the midst of deadly conflict.”—George Lipsitz, author of Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads“By listening carefully to Indigenous voices, Tiffany Hale has given us a brilliant and beautiful book. Fugitive Religion bursts with new insights about Ghost Dances, white supremacy, the Blues, and Indigenous lives at the crossroads of empire.”—Jeffrey Ostler, author of Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas“Fugitive Religion is an outstanding contribution to the study of race and religion in America grounded in impressive archival research and offering sophisticated theoretical frames. Hale’s compelling account of the Ghost Dance foregrounds the lived experiences of Native peoples to show how they produced fugitive religion and forged a new ‘racial self-consciousness’ in the post–Civil War United States.”—Judith Weisenfeld, author of Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake“Placing Black and Native ways of knowing in a revelatory dialogue, Fugitive Religion reimagines the nineteenth century as an entangled and prophetic world, a reservoir of spiritual possibilities easily misread or ignored. Tiffany Hale reveals a series of Ghost Dances, distinct in location and practice but kin in impetus and import, and so transports readers from the painful terrain of Wounded Knee to a history longer, wider, and deeper.”—Philip J. Deloria, Harvard University