This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Smohalla was a Wanapum prophet of the Columbia Plateau who, from around 1850 near present-day Priest Rapids, Washington, preached what came to be called the Washani or Dreamer religion. He described recovering from what he experienced as a death and return to life carrying instruction from the spirit world, a documented origin story he himself gave for the teaching that followed rather than an account later observers constructed for him.
Smohalla taught that the dead would be restored and the land renewed if Native peoples rejected settler agriculture, which he held wounded the earth, and returned instead to traditional hunting, fishing and gathering, observing a cycle of drum accompanied dance and prayer as part of that return. Smohalla and his followers refused allotment of reservation land throughout his life, a documented practical stance reading land allotment as directly incompatible with his religious teaching rather than as a separate political position.
That a teaching originating in one man's own account of dying and returning produced a sustained religious movement whose followers refused reservation land allotment as a matter of religious conviction marks the Washani religion as a documented case where a personal experience of apparent death became the founding basis of organized resistance to settler land policy.