By
1870, the world of the American Indian had become intolerable. A typhoid epidemic, along with other diseases
of European origin to which the native Americans had no immunity, killed
approximately a tenth of the Indian population.
Following the Civil War, the United States focused on controlling Indian
life and assimilating native peoples into the dominant culture, essentially
erasing the indigenous culture, religion, beliefs, customs, and practices of
the various Indian tribes. Indians had
been forcibly herded onto reservations, often miles away from their hereditary
lands. There they were subjected to
starvation, exacerbated by the wholesale destruction of the buffalo herds on
which the Plains Indians in particular subsisted; diseases, with some of which
the Indian populations were even deliberately infected; and the devastation of
the white man’s whiskey. Treaties and
agreements were made and broken without compunction by the U.S. government,
backed by the army, particularly when mineral or other natural wealth was
detected beneath the Indians’ land. In
desperation, and on the edge of extinction, the American Indians of the Great Plains
turned to faith and shamans.
Sometime
around 1869, a Northern Paiute man named Hawthorne Wodziwob (“Gray Hair” or
“White Hair”) from the Walker Lake Reservation in Nevada had a vision. He told his people that he’d gone into a
trance and traveled to another world where the souls of the dead revealed that
an Indian renaissance was coming. “Our fathers are coming, our mothers are
coming, they are coming pretty soon,” other Paiutes quoted Wodziwob. “You
had better dance. Never stop for a long
time. Swim. Paint in white and black and red paint. Every morning wash and paint. Everybody be happy.” Wodziwob (d. 1872), who probably hadn’t been a
shaman before his visionary experience (his background, including his birth
date, is obscure), promised that if the Indians danced in a circle at night,
they could create an Indian paradise on Earth, with the disappearance of the
white man, the return of Indian dead, and the restoration of all the animals the Indians had traditionally hunted, most significantly the
buffalo.
The prophet conducted the first Ghost Dance
ceremony in 1870 and what the Dictionary of Native American Mythology
called a “religious revitalization
movement” soon spread to other tribes in the Plains beyond the Paiute,
even as far as California and Oregon. After
a few years the Northern Paiute Ghost Dancers became disillusioned when
Wodziwob’s prophecies didn’t come true.
They gave up the practice around 1872, though other tribes continued to
perform the dance.
One of Wodziwob’s disciples was a Paiute named Tavibo (“Sun Man” or “White
Man”), a shaman who may have been the father of Wovoka (“Wood Cutter,” c. 1856-1932), the prophet of the reappearance of
the Ghost Dance religion in the 1890s.
By the 1880s, the U.S. government, through the power of the army, had
rounded up most Indians on reservations, largely unwanted land on which eking
out a living was difficult. (It’s
ironic—and not really pertinent to this history—that these lands sometimes
yielded great oil wealth in the early 20th century, and that in more recent
times, became the sites of hugely profitable casinos because the laws governing
tribal lands exempted them from state and federal restrictions on gambling.) Like the short-lived earlier incarnation of
the Ghost Dance religion, the 1890 resurgence was a response to the Indians’ fear and anger over the invasion by Euro-Americans, the brutality of the army,
and the legislative attacks on native peoples by Congress. A man of peace, Wovoka (known as Jack Wilson among whites) told his people after
a vision: “When the Sun died, I went up
to Heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people
they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal or lie. He gave me this dance to give to my people.”
Wovoka
was a complex man quite aside from his historical impact. Born near what is now Carson City, Nevada,
Wovoka might have been the son of Tavibo, a shaman who joined Wodziwob’s 1870
Ghost Dance movement and continued to teach many of the same ideas Wovoka
himself would teach. (The rumor that
Tavibo was Wovoka’s father is not provable, but it is certain that the younger
medicine man was influenced by many of his predecessor’s teachings.) But Wovoka, intelligent and temperate, had
medicine training of his own as well and grew into a tall man with a deep
voice, piercing eyes, and a stoic, dignified demeanor. When his father died around 1870, however, 14-year-old
Wovoka was taken in by David and Abigail Wilson, a rancher and his wife from
Yerington, Nevada. While working on the
ranch, the Native ranch hand used the name Jack Wilson and learned Christian
teachings and Bible stories from the rancher, who was a devout Presbyterian. (Yerington’s Lyon County, abutting Carson
City on the east, was also home to large Catholic and Mormon communities who
both proselytized the Native Americans and was a frequent stopping place for
itinerant preachers.) Wovoka began to
preach to his people in 1888 and among them gained a reputation as a powerful
medicine man, probably enhanced by his skill with magic tricks. He was known to perform apparent levitation,
for instance, and one of his most famous stunts was to withstand a shotgun
blast. It’s likely that this feat gave
credence to the Indians’ belief that the “ghost shirt,” a ceremonial garment
worn for the ritual, was bulletproof.
Adherents
also believed that Wovoka was able to control the weather and heavenly
events. He was reputed to have made a
block of ice fall from the sky on a summer day, to have brought rain or snow to end droughts, to have used the sun to light
his pipe, and to have formed icicles in his hands. His most astounding claim was that he’d had a
vision during a trance from which he recovered during a solar eclipse on 1
January 1889, after which he was credited with restoring the sun and saving the
universe. (Wovoka may have suffered from
scarlet fever in 1888 and had been in a coma for two days when this vision
occurred, according to a white observer who’d been a friend of Jack Wilson’s.) It was this vision that was the beginning of
the 1890 Ghost Dance movement. Wovoka proclaimed
that he had contacted God, who gave him explicit commands for living Indians
(in a translation by anthropologist James Mooney):
[W]hen
your friends die you must not cry. You
must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always. . . . Do not refuse to work for the whites and do
not make any trouble with them until you leave them. . . . [B]athe in the water [of the river]. . .
. Do not tell lies.
While
some, including both Indians and whites, saw the man as a huckster and a
charlatan, others believed he was a true spiritual leader and visionary. In the end, however, it really makes little
difference which view is true since Wovoka’s influence on the Indians of the
Great Plains and beyond was profound and lasting. Spurred by the demoralized state of the
American Indian, devastated by war, reservation life, poverty, and disease, his
teachings soon spread to other Plains tribes, including the Sioux, a militant people
some of whom, unwilling to wait for divine intercession, saw the Ghost Dance as
a path to revenge against the white intruders.
The Ghost Dance was practiced by Indian peoples as far from Nevada as the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. (This sweep was all the more remarkable
because Wovoka didn’t travel outside Paiute territory. At a time before any practicable mass
communications, emissaries of the far-flung tribes of the Plains made
pilgrimages to Wovoka to interview him about his teachings and learn the ritual
at his hands.)
The
Ghost Dance religion was founded on purging Indians of the evil ways learned
from whites. (All objects and materials introduced
to the New World by Europeans such as metal were excluded from use in the
ritual.) The ritual included frequent
ceremonial cleansing, meditation, prayer, singing, and of course
round-dancing. Each ceremony lasted five
successive days and the celebrants danced every night; dancing on the last
night continued until dawn and the ritual was repeated every six weeks. In its Lakota Sioux version, the Ghost Dancers
circled around a fir tree decorated with feathers and other symbolic ornaments
that served as offerings to the spirits. Starting with prayers and appeals, the participants
then joined hands in a circle and began a wild dance. Indians who were sick often took part hoping to
be healed and dancing continuously in a circle often resulted in a state of
religious frenzy or trance (similar, I’d guess, to that experienced by the
Dervishes in Turkey and the Middle East).
In the trance, many Indians reported that they saw visions of dead
ancestors on their ways to rejoin the living. Eventually the dancing stopped and the
participants sat in a circle, recounting their experiences and visions. Later the dance might be repeated.
In
June 1890, Mrs. Z. A. Parker, a reservation schoolteacher, watched a Lakota Ghost
Dance ceremony on the Pine Ridge
Reservation in the Dakota Territory. After interviewing several of the dancers,
she wrote a detailed eyewitness description of the rite:
We drove to this spot
about 10.30 oclock on a delightful October day. We came upon tents scattered here and there in
low, sheltered places long before reaching the dance ground. Presently we saw over three hundred tents placed
in a circle, with a large pine tree in the center, which was covered with
strips of cloth of various colors, eagle feathers, stuffed birds, claws, and
horns—all offerings to the Great Spirit. The ceremonies had just begun. In the center, around the tree, were gathered
their medicine-men; also those who had been so fortunate as to have had visions
and in them had seen and talked with friends who had died. A company of fifteen had started a chant and
were marching abreast, others coming in behind as they marched. After marching around the circle of tents they
turned to the center, where many had gathered and were seated on the ground.
. . . .
As the crowd gathered
about the tree the high priest, or master of ceremonies, began his address,
giving them directions as to the chant and other matters. After he had spoken for about fifteen minutes
they arose and formed in a circle. As
nearly as I could count, there were between three and four hundred persons. One stood directly behind another, each with
his hands on his neighbor’s shoulders. After
walking about a few times, chanting, “Father, I come,” they stopped marching,
but remained in the circle, and set up the most fearful, heart-piercing wails I
ever heard—crying, moaning, groaning, and shrieking out their grief, and naming
over their departed friends and relatives, at the same time taking up handfuls
of dust at their feet, washing their hands in it, and throwing it over their
heads. Finally, they raised their eyes
to heaven, their hands clasped high above their heads, and stood straight and
perfectly still, invoking the power of the Great Spirit to allow them to see
and talk with their people who had died. This ceremony lasted about fifteen minutes,
when they all sat down where they were and listened to another address, which I
did not understand, but which I afterwards learned were words of encouragement
and assurance of the coming messiah.
When they arose
again, they enlarged the circle by facing toward the center, taking hold of
hands, and moving around in the manner of school children in their play of “needle’s
eye” [a Victorian-era game much like Red Rover]. And now the most intense excitement began. They would go as fast as they could, their
hands moving from side to side, their bodies swaying, their arms, with hands
gripped tightly in their neighbors’, swinging back and forth with all their
might. If one, more weak and frail, came
near falling, he would be jerked up and into position until tired nature gave
way. The ground had been worked and worn
by many feet, until the fine, flour-like dust lay light and loose to the depth
of two or three inches. The wind, which
had increased, would sometimes take it up, enveloping the dancers and hiding
them from view. In the ring were men,
women, and children; the strong and the robust, the weak consumptive, and those
near to death’s door. They believed
those who were sick would be cured by joining in the dance and losing
consciousness. From the beginning they
chanted, to a monotonous tune, the words—
Father, I come;
Mother, I come;
Brother, I come;
Father, give us back our arrows.
Mother, I come;
Brother, I come;
Father, give us back our arrows.
All of which they
would repeat over and over again until first one and then another would break
from the ring and stagger away and fall down. One woman fell a few feet from me. She came toward us, her hair flying over her
face, which was purple, looking as if the blood would burst through; her hands
and arms moving wildly; every breath a pant and a groan; and she fell on her
back, and went down like a log. I stepped
up to her as she lay there motionless, but with every muscle twitching and
quivering. She seemed to be perfectly
unconscious. Some of the men and a few
of the women would run, stepping high and pawing the air in a frightful manner. Some told me afterwards that they had a
sensation as if the ground were rising toward them and would strike them in the
face. Others would drop where they
stood. One woman fell directly into the
ring, and her husband stepped out and stood over her to prevent them from trampling
upon her. No one ever disturbed those
who fell or took any notice of them except to keep the crowd away.
They kept up dancing
until fully 100 persons were lying unconscious. Then they stopped and seated themselves in a
circle, and as each recovered from his trance he was brought to the center of
the ring to relate his experience. Each
told his story to the medicine-man and he shouted it to the crowd. . . . I asked one Indian—a tall, strong fellow,
straight as an arrow—what his experience was. He said he saw an eagle coming toward him. It flew round and round, drawing nearer and
nearer until he put out his hand to take it, when it was gone. . . . After resting for a time they would go through
the same performance, perhaps three times a day. They practiced fasting, and every morning
those who joined in the dance were obliged to immerse themselves in the creek.
The
Plains Indians believed the Ghost Dance ritual would resurrect their dead
ancestors, as indicated in this Comanche incantation: “We shall live again, /
We shall live again.” (Each tribe had
its own chants and prayers to accompany the Ghost Dance, as recorded and
transcribed by Mooney in 1894. As each
participant expressed his or her trance experience as a song, there could be as
many as 20 or 30 new songs from one dance, to be sung in place of old ones at
the next ceremony. Mooney’s
transcriptions of the songs generally include repetitions of each line which, for
the sake of brevity, I’ll omit.) Along
with raising dead Indians, who would bring relief from illness and aging, the
practice was believed to have the power to annihilate by supernatural means the
intruding white people—and their insidious technological culture—as suggested
in this Arapaho song:
The yellow-hide, the white-skin (man).
I have now put him aside—
I have no more sympathy with him.
The
rite also could return the land to an aboriginal paradise free of disease,
misery, and deprivation, as expressed in this Kiowa verse:
The spirit host is advancing, they say.
They are coming with the buffalo, they say.
They are coming with the (new) earth, they
say.
Wovoka
preached that the Indians’ aboriginal paradise would arise only if the Indians danced
the round dance “every six weeks.” They
must also share power with the “President of the East,” Benjamin Harrison; coexist
peacefully with the dominant white population; and live a morally upright life. The prophet counselled passivism and patience
until God intervened in the Indians’ behalf.
He also promoted the revival of Indian customs abandoned under the
influence of the Europeans and cooperation among all Indians, even between
tribes that had been traditional enemies—the beginnings of a form of
pan-Indianism that would become a political force in the 1960s and ’70s with
the rise of the American Indian Movement (founded in 1968).
(Wovoka’s
concept of a supreme being was apparently borrowed from Christianity, as was
the notion of a messiah who comes to live on Earth to spread a message of peace
and mutual love with the white Americans.
The songs of the Ghost Dance frequently speak of “the father,” as you’ll
see, rather than the multiple deities of most Native American religious
practices. One Kiowa Ghost Dance song
explicitly references Jesus:
God has had pity on us.
Jesus has taken pity on us.
He teaches me a song.
My song is a good one.
(Some
detractors, especially among white Christians, referred to Wovoka derisively as
the “Indian who impersonated Christ!” and the man who “proclaimed himself an
aboriginal Jesus who was to redeem the Red Man” and fearfully characterized Wovoka’s
Ghost Dance movement as “the Messiah Craze.”)
According
to Mooney (1861-1921), who studied the Ghost Dance movement in 1892-93 and
observed and interviewed Wovoka, the Paiute shaman “earnestly repudiated any
idea of hostility toward the whites, asserting that his religion was one of
universal peace.” Mooney laid out
Wovoka’s fundamental philosophy in an 1897 report to the Bureau of American Ethnology (now
part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History):
The great underlying principle of the Ghost
Dance doctrine is that the time will come when the whole Indian race, living
and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal
happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery. . . . . The white race, being alien and secondary and
hardly real, has no part in this scheme of aboriginal regeneration, and will be
left behind with the other things of earth that have served their temporary
purpose, or else will cease entirely to exist.
All this is to be brought about by an
overruling spiritual power that needs no assistance from human creatures . . .
.
Plains
tribes such as the Caddo, Wichita, Arapaho, Kiowa, Cheyenne, Comanche, and
Lenape (an east-coast people who were moved to what is now Oklahoma in the
1860s) all agreed that the disappearance of the white people and their
civilization would be accomplished entirely by divine means when the earth was
returned to the way it had been before the Europeans came. (Some followers of Wovoka even thought that
the new existence would be race-less and that whites, too, would be enveloped
in the rapture, but that notion was not part of the medicine man’s epistemology.)
Only the Sioux, impatient to be rid of
the oppressors, preached armed resistance rather than waiting for God to
deliver the miracle—clearly in violation of Wovoka’s doctrine.
Nonetheless,
the potential power of the dance so threatened the U.S. government that it was
outlawed across the Plains and though the original Ghost Dance doctrine as
expressed by Wovoka repudiated both war and conflict with whites, many settlers
and missionaries, calling it “the Ghost Dance craze,” misconstrued the ritual
as a war dance. Further, because the Lakota
version of the Ghost Dance was being used to promote violence against whites,
the army was dispatched to suppress it. It
had been the Lakota who’d developed the ghost shirt, which they believed would
protect them from any harm, even bullets:
It is I who make these sacred things,
Says the father, says the father.
It is I who make the sacred shirt,
Says the father, says the father.
It is I who made the pipe,
Says the father, says the father,
Says the father, says the father.
It is I who make the sacred shirt,
Says the father, says the father.
It is I who made the pipe,
Says the father, says the father,
says
one Sioux song, and another specifies:
Verily, I have given you my strength,
Says the father, says the father.
The shirt will cause you to live,
Says the father, says the father.
Says the father, says the father.
The shirt will cause you to live,
Says the father, says the father.
The Ghost Dance gave to all Indians a sense of hope, but
it was especially enticing to the Lakota Sioux who were experiencing terrible
conditions on reservations. Lakota
leaders like Sitting Bull had resisted U.S. government policy toward Indians
and the assimilation of their people into the Euro-American culture. Indeed, Sitting Bull, the revered medicine man
of the Lakota Sioux, when asked why he remained destitute and cold in Canada
where he fled with his people after Little Bighorn (1876) rather than return
to the U.S. and live on a reservation under the care of the BIA (to which he
would surrender in 1881), answered:
Because I am a red man. If the
Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the
first place. He put in your heart
certain wishes and plans, in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in his sight. It is not necessary for Eagles to be Crows. We are poor . . . but we are free. No white man controls our footsteps. If we must die . . . we die defending our
rights.
The Lakota added the ghost shirt to the Ghost Dance ceremony,
believing the vestment could protect them from harm. Mrs. Parker described the shirt as made from
white cotton,
painted blue around the neck, and the whole garment was fantastically
sprinkled with figures of birds, bows and arrows, sun, moon, and stars, and
everything they saw in nature. Down the
outside of the sleeve were rows of feathers tied [by] the quill ends and left
to fly in the breeze, and also a row around the neck and up and down the
outside of the leggings. I noticed that
a number had stuffed birds, squirrel heads, etc., tied in their long hair. The
faces of all were painted red with a black half-moon on the forehead or on one
cheek.
The men also wore
cotton leggings painted red, some “in stripes running up and down, others
running around.” The ghost dress, fashioned for the women in a style similar to the men’s
shirt,
was cut like their
ordinary dress, a loose robe with wide, flowing sleeves, painted blue in the
neck, in the shape of a three-cornered handkerchief, with moon, stars, birds,
etc., interspersed with real feathers, painted on the waists, letting them fall
to within 3 inches of the ground, the fringe at the bottom. In the hair, near
the crown, a feather was tied.
White settlers and reservation officials saw the Ghost
Dance religion as a threat to U.S. Indian policy and the ceremony and ghost
shirts as indications that the Lakotas intended to go to war. BAI agents called on the federal government to
ban the ritual and in
1890, the Bureau of Indian Affairs outlawed the Ghost Dance and the government enhanced
its presence on the northern Plains, dispatching the army
to arrest key leaders like Sitting Bull, Kicking Bear, and Big Foot in an
attempt to halt the Ghost Dance movement. On 15 December 1890, tribal police killed Sitting
Bull while trying to arrest him under BIA orders, and two weeks later, a group of Sioux
Ghost Dancers retreated to a site in South Dakota where they were pursued by
the 7th Cavalry (the same regiment that was trapped and wiped out at the Little
Bighorn, “Custer’s Last Stand,” in 1876), ordered to “disarm the Lakota and
take control.” On 29 December, white
fear and ignorance led to the massacre of hundreds of mostly unarmed Lakota Sioux
(about 90 men, including Big Foot, and 200 women and
children) at Wounded Knee. This touched
off the Ghost Dance War of 1890-91 against the Sioux, perhaps the last of the
many Indian Wars in the West starting before the Civil War but gaining
frequency and fierceness in the Great Plains after 1860 until the closing of
the frontier in the early 1890s.
The
Ghost Dance religion among the Lakota died out after the Wounded Knee
Massacre. Because of the violent
misinterpretations of his teachings, plus the death threats from the BAI police
force, the U.S. Cavalry, and the white settlers, Wovoka abandoned his active
ministry. He remained involved in
religious affairs, traveling even to Washington to meet with presidents and
other government dignitaries, and was a respected figure in the Indian
community until his death in 1932. The
Ghost Dance movement faded when Wovoka’s prophecies, like those of his
predecessor Wodziwob 20 years earlier, failed to materialize and the ghost
shirt proved ineffective as protection against death and injury (a claim Wovoka
never made), but a few among the believers continued to practice the rite into
the 1960s and ’70s as a symbol of resistance to assimilation, the duplicitous
treatment of the federal government, and the destruction of Indian culture by
the white society. However short-lived
and despite the tragic consequences of its misapplication, the Ghost Dance has
had a permanent impact on American Indian life and culture.
·
Binnema,
Ted. “Chronology.” The Native North American Almanac. ed. Duane Champagne. Detroit: Gale
Research, 1994. 1-189.
·
Clarke,
Mary, and Clement Crisp. The History of Dance. New York: Crown Publishers, 1981.
·
Ghost Dance [website]. N.d. Http://www.ghostdance.us. 8 June 2014.
·
“Ghost
Dance.” United States History[website]. N.d. Http://www.u-s-history.com/pages/h3775.html. 8
June 2014.
·
“Ghost Dance.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia [website]. 2 Apr. 2014. Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Dance. 8
June 2014.
·
“The Ghost Dance – A Promise of Fulfillment.” Native American Legends [website]. N.d. Http://www.legendsofamerica.com/na-ghostdance.html.
8 June 2014.
·
Gill,
Sam D., and Irene F. Sullivan. Dictionary of
Native American Mythology. Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 1992. S.v. “Ghost Dance of 1870.”
·
Gill,
Sam D., and Irene F. Sullivan. Dictionary of
Native American Mythology. Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-CLIO, 1992. S.v. “Ghost Dance of 1890.”
·
Leach,
Maria, ed. Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology,
and Legend. Vol. 2. New York: Funk &
Wagnalls, 1950. S.v. “ghost dance” by Gertrude Prokosch Kurath.
·
Mooney,
James. The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux
Outbreak of 1890. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1965; reprint Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of
American Ethnology, 1892-1893. Part 2.
Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1896. 641-1110.
[Auxiliary
sources may also include links to cross references within some of the websites
cited. The passage describing the Ghost
Dance at Pine Ridge and the instructions Wovoka gave his followers (from a
document known as “The Messiah Letter”) were both originally published in
Mooney but are also on the Ghost Dance website. The transcribed Ghost
Dance songs are also in Mooney and some are posted on Ghost Dance.]
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