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Hi listeners. Exciting news Crime House plus and Murder True Crime Stories are celebrating America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th. Or or you can listen to all of them right now with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, tap, try free at the top of this show's page.
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This is crime house.
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Imagine a group of strangers shows up in your neighborhood. They don't speak your language, they don't share your values, but they do have something you're interested in. Technology so advanced it looks like magic. Foods you've never tasted, machines you've never seen. Materials you can't even begin to explain. It sounds like science fiction, but it actually happened right here on Earth. For hundreds of thousands of villagers across Oceania. Those outsiders weren't aliens, but they were foreign traders, missionaries and soldiers. They arrived in waves and dazzled the locals with their endless supplies. Then they vanished just as suddenly and took everything with them. The villages were left stunned, but they were determined to figure out where all those goods came from and how to bring. From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild and I to hear what you think at the end of each episode, please leave a comment. Wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Today I'm diving into the world of so called cargo cults. These movements took hold across Oceania between the late 1800s and World War II when missionaries and foreign militaries arrived with what seemed like endless supplies. When these outsiders eventually left and took the supplies with them, some some communities built elaborate rituals to bring the cargo back. In some cases, those rituals went from hopeful to something that could be perceived as a cult. Certain movements faded after a few years. Others are still going today. From the outside, the whole thing might seem bizarre. But once you understand what these communities had actually lived through, you start to wonder if they were so irrational after all. All that and more coming up.
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Okay, picture this. Dozens of bare chested men march in tight formation through a rainforest. Rifles slung over their shoulders, they march toward a clearing, stopping and starting when their leader tells them to. Eventually they reach their destination, a long landing strip. The outlines of a control tower and a radio dish stand on either side. A few men light torches and space them out along the edges of the strip. One by one, every set of eyes turns up to the sky. They wait and wait, but nothing comes because those rifles. They're carved bamboo. The radio dish is sticks and mud. There's even a wooden replica of an airplane sitting near the strip, and the whole setup is supposed to mimic a military airfield without any of the actual technology to make it work. This scene took place in Melanesia, a part of Oceania that includes Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. And it reflects a powerful belief that took hold in some villages there that material wealth could be summoned through ritual. But the real story is more complicated than people hoping riches would fall from the sky. And it didn't start with those bamboo airstri trips either. To understand how they ever got carved in the first place, we have to rewind almost a century and shift about a thousand Miles west. That story begins in the Gulf of Papua, off the southern coast of New Guinea. Because of how remote it was, the region developed for centuries without much outside influence. Villages were tight knit. Land wasn't owned by individuals. It belonged to the community. And leaders earned their status by what they gave back to the group. One of those communities was the Elema people, who'd lived in relative isolation for generations. That started to change in 1879, when an Australian merchant named Andrew Goldie sailed in looking to trade. He wanted the Alema's intricate ceremonial masks. In exchange, he offered things they'd never seen before. Glass beads, tobacco, hoop iron, metal hatchets. In a region where every tool was made from wood or stone, those materials were a huge deal. Hatchets cut through trees in a fraction of the time. Hoop iron could be reshaped into knives, fish hooks and ceremonial items. Glass beads became prized for decoration. And tobacco. The Elema got hooked. Within a few decades, it had gone from a curiosity to a daily essential. Around the same time, James Chalmers of the London Missionary Society arrived in the capital of Port Moresby. He was there with a different goal, converting the locals to Christianity. Chalmers did really well. He and the missionaries who followed him established a network of teachers up and down the coast, baptized hundreds of converts, and helped translate parts of the Bible into local languages. By the early 1900s, much of the Gulf was Christian on paper. There were Sunday services, hymns and sermons against polygamy and traditional dancing. But the conversion was never total. Many villagers folded Christian ideas into their existing belief systems rather than replacing them completely. Still, Goldie and Chalmers were just the first wave. More traders and missionaries followed, many of them stamping out traditional practices with one hand while handing out irresistible new goods with the other. Pretty soon the were stuck at a crossroads and they had to decide should they honor their past or chase the future. By the 1910s, the Gulf of Papua was overrun with British and Australian influence and the locals were paying the price. Indigenous men were getting recruited, often through coercion or outright kidnapping, into a brutal labor system known as blackbirding. European planters needed cheap manpower for their plantations and steamships, so they'd send agents into villages, sometimes offering token payments, sometimes just rounding people up. The men would sign contracts or have contracts signed for them, commitments committing them to three years of work far from home. They lived in barracks. They were paid almost nothing, and if they broke their contract or even if a manager said they had, they could be jailed or beaten. Many never came home at all. The ones who did came home older, harder and Quieter and carrying memories of a world they couldn't begin to explain. Matches that sparked fire instantly. Pocket watches. Canned meat that never spoiled. Giant boilers powering machinery. Iron winches that could lift what 20 men couldn't. But what really stood out wasn't the technology. It was how it all just appeared. Nobody hunted, grew, or built any of it. It arrived unloaded off ships and out of storerooms in endless supply. Now think about this from the elements perspective. In their world, wealth came from labor, shared land, and what you gave to the community. The idea that goods could exist without visible effort. It seemed impossible, almost magical. When the men finally went home, they brought those stories with them. But they'd never actually seen how the cargo was made. So they were left to fill in the gaps themselves. In 1919, an Alema elder named Ivara was struggling. Trade with Australian merchants had slowed, and the tools and tobacco his community had come to rely on were suddenly gone. Meanwhile, English missionaries were still around, pushing Christianity and trying to stamp out the Elema's old traditions. Younger men were coming home from indentured labor with stories of riches just out of reach. Things they'd seen but were never allowed to touch. On top of all that, Ivara had just lost his father and his younger brother. Under all that pressure, something snapped. Ivara experienced what onlookers describe as a fit of madness. He trembled. He foamed at the mouth. He spoke in tongues. When he came out of it, he said he'd been talking with ancestral spirits. They'd told him his dead family members would soon return. They wouldn't come empty handed either. They'd arrive on massive ships, carrying the same cargo Europeans seemed to have in endless supply. When Ivara shared his vision, something remarkable happened. Other villages started reporting the same thing. The same shaking, the same trances, the same message. The Europeans had taken cargo that was meant for the Elema. Their ancestors were coming back to deliver it. And when they did, they'd drive the colonizers off the island for good. For people who just spent decades watching their world get dismantled, that promise was hard to resist. And they were willing to do whatever it took to make it come true. But how? Here's the basic logic. If you want something back, you start by recreating the conditions that produced it in the first place. Like if you're trying to nail your sister's chocolate chip cookies, you start with her recipe. That was the strategy. In the Gulf of Papua. People had seen Europeans arrive on massive steamships and figured their ancestors would too. So they prepared. Villagers built makeshift Docks. They put together platforms that mirrored the loading and unloading systems they'd seen in colonial shipping yards. And they fashioned tables and benches like the ones from the plantations. The whole idea was to copy the colonial routines and reverse the flow of goods back to the Elema instead of away from them. Under Ivara's guidance, they also started practices meant to connect with the dead. Because at the heart of all this wasn't just stuff. It was reunion. They built ceremonial hothouses, spaces where people could sit and wait for inspiration. And they watched for the physical signs of another trance episode coming on. The trembling, the racing heartbeat, the disorientation that had taken hold of Ivara when his ancestors first reached out to him. And this was just the start. As more villagers had their own episodes, the movement spread fast, eventually reaching most of the Elema people. But they ran into the same problem almost every culture eventually hits. The promise didn't pan out. The ships didn't arrive. The cargo didn't show up. So they looked for an explanation. And the one they landed on was simple. They must be doing it wrong. Something in the mimicry had to be off. At that point, they doubled down. They held mock tea ceremonies. Copying English missionaries, they enforced curfews like the ones forced on them during indentured laboratory. Some marched in formation, imitating the soldiers they'd seen at the steamships. Even the language shifted. The Elema started barking out commands they'd heard abroad. Hurry up and come on, boy. When that still didn't work, Ivara introduced a more radical idea. He said they needed to abandon their own traditions entirely and become as European as possible. So that's what they did. Groups gathered to destroy native homes and ceremonial objects. Traditional foods were left to rot. Ceremonies were cancelled. The old system of community leadership got replaced with strict new rules. And if you broke them, you could be cast out. And the ripple effects spread way beyond the villages. Villagers started referring to refusing to work on the plantations. Mission converts were abandoning Christianity for these new visions. Whole communities were destroying the food sources their colonial overseers depended on for trade. For the colonial authorities, the situation had gotten too big to ignore, especially because the heart of the movement, that ancestors would return to drive the Europeans out, sounded a lot like the opening notes of a rebellion. By 1922, Australian colonial officials had been getting reports about the Elemma for years. So they finally sent in an expert. That year, an Australian anthropologist named F.E. williams traveled to the Gulf of Papua to document the phenomenon firsthand. By the time he arrived, it had spread to more than 20 villages along the southern coast of New guinea, with one of the strongest concentration concentrations around a village called Vailala. Williams wasn't there out of pure academic curiosity. He was the territory's assistant government anthropologist, which meant his field work doubled as official intelligence for the colonial administration. He spent months interviewing Elema participants, sitting in on ceremonies and watching the dances. In 1923, he turned in his report port. By then, the movement already had a name, Vai Lala Madness, and it was already dying out. A lot of that came from outside pressure. Australian patrols moved through the villages and broke up gatherings. Elders who had led the rituals were jailed. Some were even sent to forced labor camps. Native police officers, indigenous men working under colonial command, or were dispatched to suppress the very ceremonies their relatives were attending. But a lot of the decline came from within, too. The cargo never came, and eventually people stopped believing it would. To go back to the cookie analogy, if you keep following your sister's recipe and it never works, eventually you give up and stop baking. I would just find a different recipe. But I digress. Between the crackdown and the doubt, Vailala Madness lost momentum almost as fast as it had gained it. By the mid-1920s, it had already run its course. But even after Vai Lala Madness ended, the impact didn't. A lot of the damage was already done. People had become reliant on tools that were later taken away. Men coming home from indentured labor often struggled to readjust to village life. And the movement. Movement left scars of its own. In trying to mirror the colonists, villagers had destroyed parts of their own communities. But this wouldn't be the last time colonial forces turned a Melanesian island upside down. In the early 1900s, Indigenous communities in the Gulf of Papua watched their world get reshaped by outsiders. Traders and missionaries brought in cargo that seemed to materialize from nowhere. Men returning from indentured labor came home with stories of wealth they couldn't explain. In response, the Elema people tried to recreate what they'd seen. They built imitation docks, copied foreign routines, and even abandoned their own traditions in hopes that the cargo would come back. The movement called Vailalla Madness took off fast. When nothing arrived, it fell apart just as quickly. But less than a decade later, on another Melanesian island, a similar story was about to begin. And this one wouldn't end so abruptly. About 1500 miles east of Papua New guinea sits another nation, smaller, more remote, and even more cut off from the outside world. Vanuatu. It's made up of more than 80 islands, many dotted with active volcanoes, that rugged landscape and isolation kept Vanuatu sheltered from colonial influence longer than Papua. It dodged Vailala madness entirely. One of those islands is Tana. It sits on Vanuatu's southern edge. Tannese culture developed almost completely on its own and produced some traditions that were hard for outsiders to wrap their heads around. Warriors practiced ritual cannibalism and villages revered sacred stones. And then there was kava. As long as anyone could remember, kava had been part of daily life on Tanna. It's made from the roots of a local pepper plant, chewed into a pulp and ends up as something that's half anesthetic, half narcotic. If Europe had wine and the Americas had tobacco, Melanesia had kava. But Tanna's traditions wouldn't stay untouched forever. At the turn of the 20th century, Scottish Christian missionaries arrived on Tanna. They were horrified by what they found, and they didn't waste any time trying to shut it all down. They banned kava outright. Then they banned anything else they considered immoral. Polygamy, swearing, idol worship, and even dancing. And these weren't suggestions. These were strictly informed forced changes. The missionaries set up their own courts and sentenced anyone who held onto traditional practices to brutal forced labor. For decades, missionary law dominated parts of Tana, though plenty of tenes people refused to live by it. And soon enough, a savior appeared. On a windy night in the late 1930s, a group of elders gathered in the Tanis village of La Makara. They were drinking shell after shell of band cava and singing and dancing. At one point, the chief stood up and said he'd had a vision. He'd seen a man, someone who would free the tenes from the missionary's grip. He'd live inside Yasur, the island's sacred volcano, and he'd be light skinned, like a white ally joining their fight. So they gave him the most urgent European name they could think of. John. And for a last name they chose from. Years later, one British official offered up a theory about the name he said from was the Tanny's pronunciation of broom. And John was the man who'd sweep the missionaries off the island. Either way, something about John Frum struck a chord with the whole village. People started killing livestock to prepare massive feasts for his arrival. Others took all the money they'd earned working for missionaries and threw it into the ocean. They figured they wouldn't need it once John showed up. Unsurprisingly, the missionaries weren't fans of John Fromm. In 1941, they had the chief and several of his top leaders arrested and shipped to a prison more than 100 miles away in the capital, port vila. But the that didn't shut the movement down. It actually did the opposite. The people of lamacara saw the imprisoned leaders as martyrs. To them, it was proof that John Frum was real. And just as that belief was hardening, something even bigger was about to happen. Something that would make John Frum feel more real than ever. By 1942, World War II was reshaping the globe in ways the isolated people of British tana couldn't have imagined. Then, almost overnight, the war showed up at their door. Tanna became a recruiting ground for the American labor corps. More than a thousand tannes men shipped out for ifate and Espiritu santo, where the US had built massive military bases to help construct airstrips, hospitals, roads and barracks. And unlike the situation in Papua, where locals often resembled resented foreign troops, Many people on tana actually admired the soldiers. They watched in amazement as Americans threw up massive buildings in days, flew planes through the sky, and powered huge ships across the ocean, all seemingly out of nothing. And then there were the goodies. The u. S. Forces brought an endless supply of chocolate, cigarettes and soft drinks. Local men were paid a quarter a day for their work, plus handfuls of treats. Treats their villages quickly fell in love with. The tenes were so impressed by the Americans that they decided John Frum must be american from then on. They started depicting him in an all white navy uniform with the American flag draped over his shoulders. Then the war ended. And she. Just as fast as the troops had arrived, they were gone. So was the cargo, the tools, the treats, all of it. What was left was confusion. Where did it all go? In lamarcara, people turned back to John Fromm for answers. By now, the original vision had evolved. It wasn't just about driving out missionaries anymore. Now the prophecy said john would return with planeloads of American cargo. Radios, trucks, watches, medicine, soda. All of it could be theirs again if they showed enough faith. Like the alema decades earlier, they started preparing for the arrival of their savior. They cleared dense jungle to build a landing strip. They raised bamboo watchtowers. They shaped mud into makeshift radio dishes. The idea was the same as before. Before, if they recreated what they'd seen the soldiers do, the planes and their cargo would come back. And this time, once they started, they never stopped. But that's not because the authorities didn't try to make them stop. At the time, Vanuatu was a joint British French colony called the new hebrides, and through the 1940s and into the 1950s, administrators from both both countries repeatedly cracked down on the John from movement. Followers were arrested. Gatherings were broken up. Prophets and elders were exiled to other islands. There were fines, beatings, forced labor. But here's the thing. Every crackdown only seemed to harden the movement. To believers, every arrest was proof that John Frum's enemies were running scared. The colonial response wasn't ending the John from movement. It was feeding it. And John from wasn't the only cargo style movement taking shape on Tanna at the time. In the nearby villages of Yakel and Yonanen, another story was unfolding. One that would eventually involve a real life member of the British royal family. For generations, those communities had told a legend about a mountain spirit who'd one day have a picture pale skinned son. In the story, the son leaves the island, travels across the sea, marries a powerful and wealthy woman, and eventually comes back home. By the time World War II reached Tanna, Yakel and Yaunanan were just as frustrated with missionary rule as La Makara. But when British and American troops arrived, it wasn't the cargo that caught their attention. It was the portraits hanging in the British Soldiers Corps hoarders. Over time, the villagers learned the woman in those portraits was Queen Elizabeth ii, a rich, powerful woman who seemed to match the figure in their legend exactly. And when they found out she was married to a pale skinned man, it clicked to them. Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was the mountain spirit's son. They came to believe he was one of their own, sent out into the bridge British Empire on a kind of cultural mission before eventually returning home. And just like the John from followers, they believed he'd come back one day bringing the same cargo the soldiers had taken with them. So as Lamarcara prepared for John from Yaakel and Yonanen prepared for the Duke of Edinburgh. And eventually the Duke actually showed up. In 1974, Prince Philip sailed through the New Hebrides with Queen Elizabeth II on the royal yacht. They didn't stop on Tana, but one village leader paddled out into the harbor at Port Villa just to glimpse the prince in his naval whites. A few years later, after a British official told Philip about the movement on Tanna, the two sides exchanged gifts. The prince sent the village villagers a signed portrait of himself, and they sent him back a traditional tannis club. The chief still guards that portrait in the village's holiest place. And every June, the villagers bring it out for the prince's birthday, marking the day with feasts and ceremonies. There's an irony here, of course. Prince Philip would later become known for making racially offensive remarks, including some aiming at indigenous people. The man being worshiped on Tana had a habit of dismissing the very kind of communities who'd raised him to messiah status. But in Yakel and Yonanan, he stayed a messiah. So when he died in 2021, the villages were devastated. They held a traditional farewell ceremony, with dancing parading through the streets and displaying items connected to him. But in their eyes, even death can't keep them from their leader. Many are sure that one day the prince's spirit will return to Tanna, completing the journey their legend always promised. That's the view from Tanna. But for most of the 20th century, the rest of the world had a very different way of describing what was happening there. They called it a cargo cult, but before long, that label itself would come under fire.
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Hi listeners, it's Carter Roy, host of True Crime Stories. I wanted to let you know that Crime House plus and True Crime Stories are celebrating America America's 250th by dropping a four part limited series on the crimes that built America. These are the crimes and cases that gave us Miranda rights, sparked criminal profiling, and a murder that built America's missing children movement. Follow Murder True Crime Stories for a new episode every Monday leading up to July 4th, where you can binge all of them right now ad free with Crime House Plus. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com or if you're listening on Apple Podcasts. Tap try free at the top of this show's page.
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In the early 1900s, communities across Melanesia struggled to make sense of wealth that kept appearing and disappearing, seemingly out of thin air. In the Gulf of Papua, that confusion sparked Vailala Madness, a movement that rose fast and fell just as quickly. But on Vanuatu, things played out differently. In the village of Lamarcara, people built a religion around John Fromm. When American troops arrived During World War II, their reverence for him only grew. Even after the soldiers left, the rituals continued. In the nearby villages of Yakel and Yaoninen, a similar story unfolded around Prince Philip, blending an old Tannese legend with the modern world in unexpected ways. But as more of these movements emerged, people started asking a harder question. What actually makes a cargo cult? And was that even the right name for what was happening? By 1979, more than 185 so called cargo cults had been documented. There was the Taro cult of New guinea, the Naked cult of Espiritu Santo, the Tuka cult in Fiji. On paper, they all shared the same DNA. Each one popped up in a community that had been disrupted by some combination of English missionaries, Australian traders and British or American troops. For most of these villagers, it was their first real culture contact with manufactured goods. They watched as cargo dropped from planes or got unloaded from massive ships, almost like magic. Pretty quickly, those goods became part of everyday life. But when the war ended or the trading posts shut down, the flow stopped just as suddenly as it had started. What followed was a kind of collective whiplash. New religious leaders emerged with their own explanations and most importantly, their own promises that the cargo would come back. Some groups developed rituals that echoed what they'd seen outsiders do. By 1945, the phenomenon was so widespread that observers felt the need to label it. One of them, a journalist named Norris Mervyn Byrd, wrote an article in Pacific Islands Monthly expressing disgust disgust over what he called a native disorder among the Melanesian villagers. Then he gave it a name. He called it a cargo cult. Bird's argument was straightforward. These movements had revered leaders, grand prophecies and elaborate rituals, sometimes with destructive outcomes. On the surface, sounds like a textbook cult. But the real question is, was Bird actually right? For decades, anthropologists treated cargo cult as a neat, convenient label. Of course, a lot of those anthropologists were from places like Australia, England and the US the same countries that had colonized the islands in the first place. Still, the term stuck. It spread through academic circles like wildfire. But by the 1970s, some scholars were starting to put push back. Anti colonial researchers began asking whether cargo really captured what these movements were about. Because they weren't just about access to stuff. At their core, they were about something deeper reconnecting with ancestral traditions, rebuilding communities, and reclaiming control over land that had been taken. Think about Ivara back in the Gulf of Papua. He wasn't just chasing tobacco and metal tools. He was grieving his father and brother. He was watching his people get traumatized by indentured labor. He wanted to put things back together. Same thing on Tana. The villagers were fighting for freedom from the missionaries who'd imprisoned their leaders and outlawed their ceremonies. In 2006, a journalist asked a Tannis chief what he wanted most from John. From the chief's answer, a motor for the village's single boat. With it, he could catch more fish, feed his people, and make life a little easier. That's really the point. Calling these movements cargo cults reduces them to a fixation on goods. But what was actually happening was much more human people trying to heal, take care of their communities, and build something better. The cult half of the phrase came under just as much fire. Over time, scholars realized how dismissive, even insulting, it was to describe indigenous belief systems that way. The word cult carries a lot of baggage. It implies irrationality, maybe even stupidity. And what was happening in Melanesia was neither. For centuries, these communities had lived without industrial goods when those goods suddenly appeared and then vanished. Assuming there was a spiritual force behind it wasn't crazy. It was the natural way to make sense of something completely unfamiliar, using the knowledge they already had. Sure, some of what followed looks cult like. The mimicry, the reverence for unexpected figures, the destruction of property. But rituals, dances, and reverence for spirits had been seen central to these communities long before any outsider showed up. What changed wasn't the presence of those traditions. It was the pressure surrounding them. In 1995, an anthropologist named Martha Kaplan went at this head on in a book she called Neither Cargo nor Cult. Her argument was that the label completely missed what these movements actually were. Thoughtful, completely flex indigenous responses to colonial rule. Kaplan's work landed at a pivotal moment. Across the region, Melanesian nations were finally gaining independence. Fiji in 1970, Papua New guinea in 1975, the Solomon Islands in 1978, and Vanuatu in 1980. Together, those two forces, the Academic pushback and the political shift, drove cargo cult out of favor in mainstream anthropology. The same rethinking happened with Vai Lala Madness. Critics pointed out that calling it a madness framed the movement like an illness, something that needed to be cured. And the anthropologist who studied the movement, FE Williams, hadn't been neutral about what he was describing. He framed it as a kind of collective hysteria. And scholars revisiting his report have pointed out that his framing assumed indigenous people were more prone to irrational behavior than Europeans. Once that became clear, the language shifted. Today, it's more commonly called the Vaila movement, a name that takes the beliefs seriously instead of writing them off. And here's maybe the strongest argument that these movements deserve to be taken seriously. They aren't relics. They're still very much alive today. Every Friday afternoon on Tana, hundreds of villagers gather at the base of Yasur, the volcano where John Frum is believed to live. As night falls and the kava starts flowing, they play homemade ukuleles and sing songs about John's promises and the hardships their community has lived through. The gathering runs straight, straight through till sunrise. And every February, there's an even bigger celebration on John. From day, men gather in makeshift US army uniforms. One reverently carries an American flag left behind from the war. It's raised onto a bamboo pole while hundreds of villagers clap and cheer. These aren't dying movements. They're living traditions born in trauma, sustained by faith, and still very much a part of life on Tana today. That said, in some contexts, the old terms have stuck around in unexpected ways. Outside of anthropology, cargo cult is sometimes used as a metaphor for copying a process without understanding how it actually works. You'll even hear it in tech circles. Cargo cult programming is when a coder pay pastes in chunks of code that make the computer run without really understanding why. But that comparison doesn't quite hold up. A programmer, at least in theory, has the tools to learn what their code is doing. The communities we've been talking about didn't have that option. They were trying to make sense of a world that had been completely reshaped around them, using the knowledge systems they already had. And the car cargo cult story isn't the only one of its kind. Across the world, indigenous communities have responded to colonial disruption in their own ways. Time and time again, those responses got dismissed as cults or crazes, sometimes with even more devastating consequences than what we saw in Melanesia. In Cult Watch this week, I'm highlighting the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement that swept across Native American communities in the late 80s 1800s. By 1890, most organized resistance to white settlement had been crushed. The frontier was closing in, and indigenous people across the west were running out of options like the movements we've been talking about in Melanesia. The response was led by a respectful spiritual figure, in this case a Northern Paiute man named Wovoka. During a solar eclipse on New year's Day Day 1889, he had a vision in which he said he met God and was given a message. If native peoples lived honestly, kept the peace, and performed a specific circle dance, their ancestors would return, the buffalo would come back, and the land would be restored. That was the Ghost Dance, and it spread across the Plains tribes incredibly fast. The but where indigenous people saw hope, colonial authorities saw a threat. They labeled it a cult, or worse, a craze. US Agents on reservations grew increasingly nervous, especially as the Lakota took up the dance with intensity. Tensions kept climbing and In December of 1890 they boiled over at Wounded Knee Creek, where US troops opened fire on a group of Lakota who'd been forced to surrender. Between 150 and 300 people were killed, many of them women and children. It's still considered one of the darkest chapters in American history. And just like the so called cargo cults and madness in Melanesia, the Ghost Dance label has fallen out of favor. Today it's more widely understood for what it actually was, a final powerful attempt to hold onto cultural identity in the face of violent oppression. When you zoom out and look at it all, from Vailala to John from to the Ghost Dance, these movements start to look a lot less like cults and a lot more like people doing whatever they could to make sense of a world that had been turned upside down. Because at their core, poor, they weren't about blind belief. They were about survival, about identity, about the very human need to believe that somehow things could be made right again. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Vanessa Richardson and this is Conspiracy. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes. Come back next time. We'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies and criminal acts. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is a Crime House original Powered by Pave Studios Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, rimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review and follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes Wherever you get your podcasts, your feedback truly makes a difference. And to enhance your Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes listening experience, subscribe to Crime House plus you'll get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join go to crimehouseplus.com or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap try free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes is hosted by me, Vanessa Richardson and is a Crime House original. Powered by Pave Studios, this episode was brought to life by the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes team. Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benedon, Natalie Pertzovsky, Lori Marinelli, Alyssa Fox, Elena Johnson, Kaylee Pine and Michael Langsner. Thank you for listening.
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The critics have spoken. World War II with Tom Hanks is a must watch. It is on a scale no one's ever seen before. An enormous accomplishment.
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The world turned upside down.
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It's global history on the grandest scale.
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All wars changed the world, but none
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of them like the Second World War did. Unlike any World War II docu series
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before
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World War II with Tom Hanks new episode Monday at 8, only on History Next day on the Apple.