The Shaping of a World Religion Vol 1 by Cynthia Chung

The year of 1890 would mark an eerie scene. It was the year of the Sioux Outbreak and the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee, what has been widely considered the last major engagement of the American-Indian Wars. The number of Indians massacred that day are estimated to be close to 400 men, women and children, if not more. Many of the bodies of the women and children who had fled the scene were found up to two miles away from where the mayhem had began, shot in their backs by the American soldiers as they attempted to flee from the bloody carnage.

One of the Sioux woman survivors found alive stricken by a bullet was told as she lay in the church for medical treatment that she must let them remove her ghost shirt in order to get at her wound, she replied: “Yes; take it off. They told me a bullet would not go through. Now I don't want it anymore.” The ghost shirt, which had been promoted by adherents of the Ghost Dance religion, was believed to be impenetrable to bullets or weapons of any sort. Every Sioux who had been killed that day at Wounded Knee had been wearing such a shirt.

James Mooney, under the auspices of the Bureau of Ethnology began research that fall of 1890 on the Cherokee in correlation to gaining a better understanding of this new religion that had spread to almost all of the Indian tribes called the Ghost Dance. His investigations were permitted to expand to the Cheyenne and Arapaho, the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Caddo and Wichita, who were all living near together in the western part of what was then Indian Territory. These tribes were all more or less under the influence of the new religion, the Ghost Dance, which had come onto the scene just the year before at Walker Lake, Nevada.

The massacre at Wounded Knee would occur just a few months after Mooney began his study, and what had intended to be only a few weeks extended to a period of more than three years of research on the Ghost Dance phenomenon.

In this book Cynthia Chung pieces together the events that led up to the Ghost Dance which exposes a much darker and sinister account of this history than has ever been recorded before leading us down a deep rabbit hole that will reveal the role that the Jesuits, the Scottish Rite, the Mormons and the Smithsonian’s anthropologists played in cultural warfare against the native bands that would result in the genocide of the Native American people.