"On March 30, 1891 - less than four months after the military suppression of the Lakota Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee, South Dakota - twenty-three Lakota Sioux imprisoned at Fort Sheridan, Illinois, were released into the custody of William F. Cody. "Buffalo Bill," as both Americans and Europeans knew him, then hired the prisoners, along with forty-six other Lakota Indians, to perform in his Wild West show. Labeled "hostiles" by the federal government, in 1891-1892 the Lakota would learn to play hostiles for Cody before British audiences as part of the Wild West's second tour of Britain."

"In Hostiles? Sam A. Maddra relates an ironic tale of Indian accommodation - and preservation of what the Lakota continued to believe was a principled, restorative religion. Their alleged crime was their participation in the Ghost Dance. To the U.S. Army, their religion was a rebellion to be suppressed. To the Indians, is offered hope in a time of great transition. To Cody, it became a means to attract British audiences. With these "hostile indians," the showman could offer dramatic reenactments of the army's conquest, starring none other than the very "hostiles" who had staged what British audiences knew from their newspapers to have been an uprising."

"Cody's narrative of conquest is generally rejected as simplistic, but few people even today question whether the Lakota had twisted the original teachings of the Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka into a violent resistance movement. Maddra shows the fallacy of this view. The notion that Lakotas corrupted Wovoka's teachings arose from the testimony of Indians active in the Ghost Dance's suppression. Using other sources, such as interviews with Ghost Dancer and later Wild West performer Short Bull, Maddra finds that the Lakota Ghost Dance was an essentially peaceful religion with numerous Christian elements. Included in this volume are five of Short Bull's narratives, including a new translation by Raymond DeMallie of Eugene Buechel's 1915 interview of the Lakota leader."

"In agreeing to play "hostile Indians" for show in England, the Lakota prisoners adapted themselves to the white power structure even as they turned the tour to their advantage, earning money as performers and for a time avoiding the dependency of reservation life. More lasting, however, was their belief in the regenerative powers of the Ghost Dance, a faith sustained long after they stopped being Wild West "hostiles" for Cody's British audiences."--Jacket.