The Lakota Ghost Dance: Ritualized Rebellion Against Colonial Rule

This is an essay I just completed this semester for my Dance 430, Dance History class at San Francisco State University.

Image from Walden3d

I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! my children — Uhi’yeye’heye’!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
I’yehe’! we have rendered them desolate — Eye’ăe’yuhe’yu!
The whites are crazy — Ahe’yuhe’yu!(1)

—

It was mid-day and Wovoka, the son of Tävibo, lies sick on his bed in his wickiup. Wovoka is considered a great weather man by his people (whom are apart of the Paiute tribe in Mason Valley, in western Nevada), just like his father, who had also been a prophet. As he is laying ill in his bed from a fever the sun is becoming darkened due to a solar eclipse. All over his tribal camp people became distressed and began shooting their guns at the object which was blocking the sun. As the sun darkened Wovoka slipped more and more from consciousness until, all of a sudden, he found himself being taken up into heaven where he spoke with God, who commanded him to preach a gospel of peace, to live justly in the world, and to bring a new dance to his people. The year was 1889 and the day was January 1st (this day would latter be called by the Paiute people “the day the sun died”(2)), this was the day that the Ghost Dance was born and the day that Wovoka stated that he became God’s prophet to the Native American peoples. Soon Native Americans (and whites) from all over the United States began to come to Mason Valley to hear Wovoka speak,(3) word also got out to the Dakotas, the tribal lands of the Lakota, and the Oglala Lakota of the Pine Ridge Reservation decided to send an elder, Good Thunder, as well as four or five others, to see this Wovoka themselves and to here his message. After being satisfied and returning to their reservation the Lakota decided to send more delegates, this time from three agencies instead of just Pine Ridge, back to western Nevada, among them was Good Thunder, Short Bull, Kicking Bear, and others.(4)

The simple message of Wovoka intrigued the Lakota (as it had others) especially because of their present day situation which was very much looking bleak (to say the least). The medicine man Short Bull, during a trip between Valentine in Nebraska and the Rosebud Reservation (east of the Pine Ridge Reservation), heard the words of Wovoka through the reading of a letter that Wovoka had wrote:

I, Jack Wilson [Wovoka’s white name], love you all...When you get home you must make a dance to continue for five days...You must all dance in the same way...Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here; maybe this fall or in the spring...Do not refuse to work for the whites, and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them.(5)

Soon, Short Bull would became one of the Lakota leaders of the new religion preached by Wovoka.(6)

The Ghost Dance religion’s underlying principles (with beliefs varying from tribe to tribe) was that one day every single Native American, living and dead, would become reunited with a regenerated earth and would live a life without disease, death, and sorrow.(7) Short Bull and Kicking Bear emerged as charismatic leaders of the new religion for the Lakota and spoke prophecies, based on the prophecies of Wovoka, that by the spring of 1891 the Native American messiah would come down and destroy the white man and bring the buffalo back to the earth. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight state that, “This would happen, it was believed, because whites had proven themselves a faithless race causing God to turn his wrath against them.” Due to the coming apocalypse (hastened by large dances, that would go on for days, as commanded by Wovoka) the Lakota decided to remove all of the trappings of white culture that had been thrust upon them by the white colonial powers (the government and the settlers), to be civil (even towards whites) and practice a life of good will (which Wovoka commanded), and to perform the dances, which would demonstrate their faith in their own inviolability.(8)

The dance in question was called “dance in a circle” by the Paiute, the Kiowa called it the “dance with clasped hands,” and the Lakota called it the “spirit dance.”(9) For the Lakota (and others) the Ghost Dance was danced in a circle by either small or very large groups of people for days. Ethnologist Warren K. Moorehead, who visited the Pine Ridge Reservation during the peak of the Ghost Dance “fever,” described one encounter with the dance:

The largest camp of dancers was located upon Wounded Knee Creek under the charge of Chiefs No Water, Short Bull and Little Wound...A pole or sapling some thirty-five feet in height was erected...built near the dance ground were several...sweat houses, separate structures being provided for women...A priest...called aloud to those who wished to participate...several hundred men and women crowed up and, grasping hands, formed a circle fully two hundred feet in diameter...the priests began a prayer to the Great Spirit...”Great Wakan Tanka: We are ready to begin the dance as you have commanded us...we beg that you give us back our old hinting grounds, and our game...transport such of the dancers...to the Spirit Land far away and let them see their dead relatives...the priests began a doleful chang, which is taken up by the assembled multitude and loudly sung over and over again. The circle moves toward the left. For the first half hour the motion is short step...After the space of half an hour...“Weep for your sins” commands the high priest. They moan and cry, rolling upon the ground, apparently in great agony. Some of the more desperate ones crowd up to the sapling...Others cut their arms...The scene is most impressive. Surely the [Lakota] are serious in their grief...A new song is struck up...the dancing becomes fast and furious. The men and women leap backward and forward. They seem possessed of the spirit of demons...the priests are extremely active. They run from one excited dancer to another, gently compelling them to lie prone upon the earth...The scene of a Ghost Dance at night makes a vivid impression upon the mind. The music in its strange wild key rings in the ears for days, while one can never forget the reeling figures, the earnest, expressive faces.(10)

Why had the Ghost Dance caught on in such as big way? In November of 1890 around 40% of the Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation and 30% at the Rosebud Reservation had taken up the religion of the Ghost Dance.(11) The answer lies in the colonial policies of the United States government and the history of repression that had fallen upon the Lakota in the decades culminating before the Ghost Dance revival. Essentially what the Ghost Dance was, was a “ritualized resistance as a means of repelling colonial rule” taken up by the Lakota to protest and fight back against the U. S. government and the white settlers who were legally (by U. S. standards), and illegally (even by U. S. standards), encroaching on their reservation lands.(12)

In 1868, leaders of the Lakota agreed to sign the Ft. Laramie Treaty which forfeited most of their hunting grounds in exchange to never be disturbed in by any outsider while they live on the “Great Sioux Reservation.” Yet this treaty had taken away hunting, as well as sacred, grounds that originally had been theirs according to the original reservation treaty of 1858 (which gave them their entire western half of South Dakota). Yet once gold was found in the sacred Black Hills the U. S. government moved quickly to take it away from them. Again, their lands were encroached upon and the Lakota were forced to sign a treaty breaking up the “Great Sioux Reservation” into six smaller reservations divided into three distinct land masses, all separate from each other (classic divide and conquer), further humiliating the Lakota and subjugating them to further colonial rule.(13) Instead of living like they had, as hunter-gatherings with the freedom to move about the land, they were forced, like prisoners of war, to stay in one area which further lead them to take up crop growing (in an area unsuitable to grow crops), cattle ranging, and as well as receiving ration handouts from the government.(14) In 1887 the Dawes Act also allowed the purchase of Lakota lands. Senator Henry L. Dawes, from Massachusetts, argued in 1890 for the cutting of further rations to the Lakota, this despite food shortages resulting in the near extinction of the buffalo by white settlers (which lead to massive starvation in the winter of 1889). Dawes stated that “the best way to treat the Indian was to starve him into self-support. ‘Root, hog, or die...Next year you are only to have so much, and you must supplement it by the labor of your own hands.’”(15)

The Ghost Dance was born out of this misery, the Lakota, a once proud warrior society that roamed free on the Great Plains, were now reduced to obeying the whim of the U. S. government and the white settlers; they also faced starvation and loss of land (one of the greatest blows of this was the loss of the sacred Black Hills). The Ghost Dance was a repudiation of everything the white man and the U. S. government stood for and was the basis for the resistance to the colonial powers. The hope of the Ghost Dance for the Lakota was that the white man would be destroyed and that the buffalo (and the hunting grounds) would return to the earth for the Lakota and other Native Americans to enjoy. In response to the ever looming and encroaching presence of white culture, participants in Ghost Dance circles (in the Lakota reservations) were forbidden to bring anything associated with white culture into the dance, only traditional Lakota clothing and artifacts were allowed (this despite the fact that Wovoka would wear white man’s clothing). Capeci and Knight state that “[t]he antiwhite bias of the Ghost Dance was important. The reservation spectacle of once-proud [Lakota] warriors humbling themselves before officials by wearing store-bought” white clothing was seared into the minds of the Lakota and “the act of shedding these cloths” was a “liberating gesture. For some, western dress also foretold the violent end to be suffered by the white race, as the Messiah would” use western dress to distinguish between who to kill and who to allow to survive.(16)

While violence and rebellion against the white settlers and the government was not preached in the Ghost Dance (all though it had been used before by the Lakota, as the Battle of Little Big Horn has shown us) the Lakota were willing to use force to protect their dances from reservation police, government agents and military, as well as white settlers. Violent resistance to protect their sacred traditions had been uncommon during reservation period (in fact, some of their traditions had been banned by the government).(17) Yet for the Ghost Dance, the Lakota were willing to die, and indeed, go to war. Although the Lakota were still tempered by the fact of past defeats and constantly having their land being encroached by white settlers.

Despite the promise for renewal, and re-energizing the Lakota in their fight against their oppressors, the Ghost Dance ended in tragedy at the Massacre of Wounded Knee where over 150 men, women, and children were killed (fleeing) by the Seventh Calvary. Not even this non-violent (though potentially violent in certain aspects) religion was allowed by the colonial masters. Where the Lakota saw hope in the Ghost Dance whites saw a threat. The actions at Wounded Knee, states Scott L. Pratt, were seen by whites and the government as “a necessary, even humanitarian, response because it brought a quick end to a ‘craze’ that was good for neither whites nor” Native Americans.(18)

Due to the "theological eclecticism" of the Lakota and the fact that the Lakota were a traditional warrior society their “interpretation of the Ghost Dance was more militant than Wovoka’s teachings.”(19) The Lakota believed that their ritualized rebellion against the government and white settlers would evolved into a military victory and restore the Lakota and other Natives back to their original state in a new world. It gave the Lakota a source of pride and revitalized their spirits as a nation as well as meeting the needs of the Lakota warriors, who had been feeling the sting of defeat by the white man for years. The Lakota “adapted traditional rituals to redress the wrongs done to them. In this way they waged war long before any bullets had been fired or lives lost.”(20) The Lakota wouldn’t have a revolt this large (ritualized or armed) until February of 1973, when around 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) took over Wounded Knee by force and declared it the “Independent Oglala Sioux Nation” and told the government they would not leave until they had addressed the grievances of tribal leaders, an investigation into the treatment of Native Americans in America, and a review of all treaties signed by the government.

—
The whole world is coming,
A nation is coming, a nation is coming,
The Eagle has brought the message to the tribe.
The father says so, the father says so.
Over the whole earth they are coming.
The buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming,
The Crow has brought the message to the tribe,
The father says so, the father says so.(22)
—

Endnotes

1. James Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1965), 221. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Arapaho tribe, Mooney (who wrote this in 1892-1893) states that, “In this song the father tells his children of the desolation, in consequence of their folly and injustice, that would come upon the whites when they will be left alone upon the old world, while the Indians will be taken up to the new earth to live in happiness forever.” (Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 222).
2. William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 2.
3. Alice Beck Kehoe, The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization (Fort Worth, Chicago,
San Francisco, Philadelphia: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1989), 5, 35.
4. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 6, 9-10.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid., 8.
7. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 19.
8. Dominic J. Capeci, Jr. and Jack C. Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism: The North American
Ghost Dance and East African Maji-Maji Rebellions,” Historian 52, no. 4 (Aug. 1990): 584-602,
Academic Search Premier, http://0-web.ebscohost.com.
9. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 8.
10. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 36-39.
11. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
12. Ibid.
13. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 15-16; Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 11.
14. Kehoe, The Ghost Dance, 16.
15. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee, 18.
16. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
17. Ibid.
18. Pratt, Scott L. “Wounded Knee and the Prospect of Pluralism.” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 154.
Endnotes
19. Capeci and Knight, “Reactions to Colonialism.”
20. Ibid.
21. Encyclopedia Britannica (2006), “Wounded Knee,” Encyclopedia Britannica Online,
http://www.search.eb.com/eb/article-9077525 (accessed November 16, 2006).
22. Mooney, The Ghost Dance Religion, 307. This is a Ghost Dance song of the Lakota. Mooney sums up the aspect of this song quite nicely by stating, “This fine song summarizes the whole hope of the Ghost dance—the return of the buffalo and the departed dead, the message being brought to the people by the sacred birds, the Eagle and the Crow. The eagle known as wañ’bali is the war eagle, from which feathers are procured for war bonnets.” (Mooney, ibid., 307).