#ghost dance

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Tata'nka I'yota'nke (Sitting Bull)'s name and reputation are among the best known of Indigenous leaders in American history. He is often described as the 'chief' of the Lakota people, but he was, in fact, a spiritual leader, a medicine person of great stature for his integrity and courage. In 1890, one of the two main sites of the Ghost Dance in the Dakotas was on his land. He encouraged his people to take up the dance as a way to appeal to the Great Spirit to bring justice to the oppressed.

By December of that year, the American authorities were sufficiently afraid of the dance to plan the arrest of Sitting Bull. A number of 'indian police', backed up by a company of American troops, descended on Sitting Bull's home to make the arrest. As so often happens in volatile situations like this, things got out of control. Members of Sitting Bull's family protested. Some of the women ran forward to protect him. A shoving match began and then gunfire.

Sitting Bull was killed on December 15, 1890, at about fifty-six years of age. He died because of the Ghost Dance, which he understood to be a sacred liturgy of hope and reconciliation, but which his killers took to be a war dance by 'Indian Hostiles'. Ignoring the Constitution, the American government proclaimed the Ghost Dance religion to be outlawed. Without ever seeing or understanding it, they simply made it illegal. This level of paranoia on the part of the dominant culture led, a short time later, to the infamous massacre at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. So great was the Americans' fear that even a small band of starving people were seen as dangerous--so dangerous they had to be wiped out.

The massacre of unarmed dancers, the women and children left in the snow, had a chilling effect on all the nations that had taken up the dance. Among most of them there were ghost shirts or trances. The dances were the simple but dignified invocations of a people facing an apocalypse.

The level of brutality associated with Wounded Knee shocked the Indigenous nations and caused them to take the dance underground. To spare the lives of the innocent, Wovoka called on people to stop dancing in 1892. But the danced continued in secret for many years.

Ghost Dances

Record Group 75: Records of the Bureau of Indian AffairsSeries: Records of ControversiesFile Unit: Correspondence Between Military Officers Regarding Wounded Knee Tragedy