#ghostdance

Wounded Knee Massacre

The Wounded Knee Massacre of 29 December 1890 was the slaughter of over 250 Native Americans, mostly of the Miniconjou people of the Lakota Sioux nation, by the US military at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. Although the US government defined the event as a "battle", most of the Native Americans were ill, unarmed, and women and children.

Ken McMullen

- Ghost Dance

Wounded Knee, the Ghost Dance, and the Native American  Movement

“The white man says that the 1890 massacre was the end of the wars with the Indian, the end of the Ghost Dance. Yet here we are at war, we’re still Indians, and we’re Ghost Dancing again.”

-Russell Means, Pine Ridge Reservation, 1973

On this day in 1973, Native American activists surrendered to government officials, ending the Native occupation of the Pine Ridge reservation and Wounded Knee. Though the American Indian Movement was founded in 1968 to support the Native American community, the path to the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee started long before the 1960’s. In 1890, approximately 300 Lakota men, women, and children were killed by American troops at Wounded Knee in South Dakota. The 1960’s and 70’s saw a rising Native activism, what one historian called the shift from termination to self-determination.

The National Guardian was a radical leftist weekly newspaper published in New York City between 1948 and 1992. The Tamiment Library holds the photography files for the publication, which are a rich source of materials on activism, civil rights, politics, and Cold War America. The newspaper published many stories on AIM and the occupation of Pine Ridge, following the activists through the 1960’s into the turbulent 70’s and beyond. By 1970, few businesses and little farmland on the Pine Ridge reservation were Lakota-owned. Partly as a result, poverty rates were high for the Lakota on the reservation and national AIM activism sparked local action. On February 27, 1973, several hundred Native people, Oglala Lakota leaders, and AIM members made demands at Wounded Knee on the Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation as a part of what is known as the Trail of Broken Treaties, a traveling American Indian protest that started on the west coast in 1972 with a 20 point manifesto to be delivered to the United States Government.

The points were largely aimed at the restoration of Native American land, the enforcement or repeal of previous treaties, Bureau of Indian Affairs overhaul in light of corruption, and other legal safeguards to ensure Native sovereignty and authority. The federal government did not acquiesce to AIM’s 20 point manifesto, but instead rejected the organization’s claim to speak for Native American interests.

A 71-day standoff between activists and the United States government ensued, during which scores of Native activists were arrested on criminal charges such as arson and theft. Russell Means, an Oglala Lakota and one of the activist leaders prosecuted by the US government as a result of the events, stated during the Pine Ridge occupation that, “The white man says that the 1890 massacre was the end of the wars with the Indian, the end of the Ghost Dance. Yet here we are at war, we’re still Indians, and we’re Ghost Dancing again.”

The 1890 Ghost Dance was a syncretic Native American prophetic religious practice that spread throughout the West and the reservation system, in many ways uniting American Indians in a common tradition in the face of a tide of settler colonialism aimed at dispossessing many peoples. In a time of the aggressive widespread implementation of the reservation system, assimilation programs, and tragic massacres throughout the west, the Ghost Dance provided and, as this quotation shows, continued later to provide a spiritual language of resistance and solidarity.

The lasting impressions of pan-Native identity began with a Nevada-born Numu man whose message would spread across Native America and extend to this day. On January 1, 1889, the Ghost Dance prophet Wovoka experienced his first vision during a solar eclipse. He began to preach across the west and his teachings, historians have noted, were adapted by different Native peoples to incorporate traditions from any Native group. Though regional interpretations of Ghost Dance prophecies differed, some people believed that they heralded the end of Euro-American settler colonialism. Gregory Smoak, Historian of the Ghost Dance and Native identity found that an American investigator recorded a Paiute’s Ghost Dance-based belief that when, “Old Man [God] returned, all the Indians would climb up into the mountains to escape the flood that killed all the white people.”

A poster held here at the Tamiment from the Mohawk Nation at Akwesasne included a similar sentiment in a run of identity politics-oriented publications during the 1970’s and 1980’s saying that, “There will come a time when we will take refuge in the mountains to escape the burning fires on the plains and there we will plan our return to that charred ground.”

Smoak argues that the Ghost Dance, the massacre at Wounded Knee, and larger continuing trends of Native American identity and ethnogenesis are inextricably linked, saying that, “The Ghost Dances and Wounded Knee have become synonymous. Yet the Ghost Dances did not necessarily lead to Wounded Knee, nor did they die there. The religion was far more than a tragic coda to the autonomous life that native peoples enjoyed before their dispossession. Ghost dances became part of a common process of identity formation that took place at different times and in different ways in Native communities across the United States.” In 1973 at Wounded Knee, AIM and the Pine Ridge activists invoked the language of the Ghost Dances to assert Native American identity and sovereignty.

On May 8, 1973, the protesters at Wounded Knee surrendered to federal officials. Trials and protests continued, but the occupation ended in a ten point treaty. The effects of Native activism from the 1960’s and 70’s, notably the continued imprisonment of AIM activist Leonard Peltier, reverberate to this day. Peltier was convicted of killing two federal officers in a standoff at Pine Ridge two years after the occupation. Activists argue that evidence was tampered with in the case and the trial itself was unfair. Peltier’s case remains a rallying point and symbol for AIM and for their supporters everywhere.

“Ghost Dancer” 

Original Native American / Western Art Painting by Fine Artist, KJ Burk 

Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance (Spirit Dance) is an expression of rebirth and renewal using the traditional Native American circle dance, first practiced by the Paiute Nation in 1869 and again in 1889 when it was adopted by other Plains Indians nations. US government agents' fear of the dance led to the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.