Like the first Wounded Knee, the second Wounded Knee is very much about religion. Leonard, the spiritual leader, brings back the outlawed Ghost Dance.

Leonard performs ceremonies, negotiates, fixes machinery and, using traditional medicine, even tends to gunshot victims. White medics praise his work, and he teaches them his ways. He doesn’t fight, however, as “[h]is being a medicine man forbade it” (148).

Crow Dog describes how in 1889, Short Bull, “a famous warrior who had fought Custer,” told Leonard’s great-grandfather Crow Dog that “[a] new power will strip off like a blanket this world which the wasičun [non-Indian] has spoiled, and underneath will be the new world, undefiled and green” (148). The buffalo will be restored, and dead ancestors will return. This Ghost Dance religion had been passed to Short Bull and his friends by a holy man who’d received it “in a dream on the day the sun had died”; he’d made Short Bull and his friends die, “walk on the new world that was coming” (149) and be reborn, and then had given them dances and prayers.

Leonard’s great-grandfather Crow Dog and his friends brought the religion to their people. The people embraced the religion, which revived “the old world of the Indians” and “brought them hope” (150).