About the Ghost Dance Movement
Throughout the nineteenth century the native population of North America declined rapidly. In California alone the Indian population dropped from an estimated 260,000 in 1800 to just 18,797 in 1907 (according to Bureau of Indian Affairs figures). The indigenous peoples of North America had been decimated, subjugated and imprisoned on reservations. Their lands had been stolen from them and their lifestyles had been crushed by the expansionist bloodlust of the U.S. government.
Under this cloud of desperation and despair, the Ghost Dance emerged. Its first appearance in Nevada in 1870 was short-lived and limited in scope.
Then, in 1890, on the Walker River Indian reservation in Nevada, the Ghost Dance was revived by a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka. Wovoka, it is said, had a vision of the Ghost Dance when he fell into a trance during a solar eclipse in 1888. In that vision, the Great Spirit had shown him all the dead Indians happy and young again. The Great Spirit then showed Wovoka a dance that the people must perform to bring the dead brothers and sisters back to life again, for the dance generated energy that had the power to move the dead.
The dance spread quickly among the western and plains tribes. Tribes from all over the continent sent emissaries to Nevada to learn of this new prophet and this strange new medicine. Native leaders, desperate for hope, spread the dance among their people who would, upon performing the Ghost Dance, fall into a trance and have visions of their dead relatives and friends come to life.
Among the Arapahoe and Lakota, some returned from their trance-induced spirit journeys with visions of "ghost shirts" – garments painted with sacred symbols that would make the wearers invulnerable to the white man’s bullets.
It was not long before the U.S. government and military were in a full state of panic. Partly fueled by sensationalistic newspaper accounts from the frontier and, no doubt, in fear that the true scale of the atrocities committed against the natives would come to light, a sizable detachment of military might was dispatched to "prepare" for any possible uprising. This of course led directly to the massacre at Wounded Knee in December of 1890 where hundreds of Lakota men, women and children were ruthlessly hunted down by a panicked contingent of U.S. soldiers. As their corpses lay frozen in the snowy fields, it was clear that the "ghost shirts" worn by many were ineffective in warding off the white man’s bullets.
This is generally considered to be the last episode in the dark era of American history known as the "Indian Wars."
The Ghost Dance is reportedly still being performed in some isolated instances.
- Phil Bono 