Native American ethnography and religion

James Mooney

1861 – 1921

James Mooney was an American ethnographer at the Bureau of American Ethnology who spent decades documenting the sacred traditions of North American tribes, most notably producing the foundational study The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), which documented a pan-tribal nativist religious movement with extraordinary ethnographic immediacy. His work on the Cherokee produced landmark texts including Myths of the Cherokee (1900) and The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees (1891), which preserved magical incantations and ceremonial knowledge that would otherwise have been entirely lost. His fieldwork stands as an irreplaceable primary record of living indigenous religious and magical traditions.