Ghost Dance

GHOST DANCE

GHOST DANCE. The name Ghost Dance applies to two waves of a nativistic or messianic movement. Both originated among the Paiute Indians of Nevada in the nineteenth century.

In 1869 a prophet named Wodziwob began to predict supernatural events, claiming that the worn-out world would end, thus eliminating white men, and that all dead Indians would then return to the renewed world. Wodziwob professed to be in communication with the dead, and he instructed his followers to dance a circle dance and sing certain divinely revealed songs. The movement spread to the Indians of southern Oregon and northern California, but it gradually subsided when the promised super-natural events did not occur.

In 1889 there was a resurgence of the Ghost Dance, this time led by another Paiute messiah named Wovoka, or Jack Wilson. Wovoka claimed to have visited the spirit world while in a trance and to have seen God, who directed him to return to announce to the Indians that they should love one another and live peacefully, returning to the old Indian ways. By dancing and singing certain songs, they would hasten the end of the world and the disappearance of the whites. In the aftermath of this event, Indians would be restored to their hunting grounds and reunite with departed friends.

The revitalized Ghost Dance gained its principal strength among the tribes east of the Rockies. The movement spread rapidly to some Plains tribes, including the Lakota (Sioux), Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche, who had recently been confined to reservations and were in the process of having their lands allotted. Enthusiasm for the dance, which included the wearing of "ghost shirts" that were supposedly impervious to bullets, led government officials to interpret the movement as a prelude to a militant revolt. Tensions mounted in late 1890 after Sitting Bull, a leader of the Ghost Dance at Standing Rock Reservation, was killed by Indian police attempting to arrest him. Two weeks later, more than two hundred Minniconjou Lakota Ghost Dancers who had fled the Cheyenne River Reservation after Sitting Bull's death were massacred by troops of the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

Despite the tragedy, the Ghost Dance did not completely disappear after Wounded Knee. Although officially banned, Wovoka's original pacific doctrine continued to be practiced on the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation into the early 1900s, and Ghost Dance congregations continued to function on Dakota reserves in Saskatchewan until the 1960s. Elements of the Ghost Dance were also incorporated into the revitalization of traditional cultural practices such as the Pawnee hand game and Kiowa war dance. Wovoka himself continued in his roles as shaman and healer at Walker River Reservation in Nevada until his death in 1932.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

De Mallie, Raymond. "The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account." Pacific Historical Review 51 (1982): 385–405.

Hittman, Michael. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. Edited by Don Lynch. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997.

Mooney, James. "The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Out-break of 1890." In 14th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1892–93, Part 2. 1896. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991. A classic account.

Frank Rzeczkowski

See also Paiute ; Wounded Knee Massacre ; and vol. 9: A Letter from Wovoka .