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May 27, 2007 · Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: Directed by Yves Simoneau. With Anna Paquin, Chevez Ezaneh, August Schellenberg, Duane Howard. A historic chronicle based on the book by Dee Brown explains how Native Americans were displaced as the United States expanded west.
- (7.5K)
- Drama, History, Western
- Yves Simoneau
- 2007-05-27
The prophet Wovoka raised Western Native American hopes with his spiritual movement based on a revival of religious practice and the ritual Ghost Dance; it was a messianic movement that promised an end of their suffering under the white man.
YearAwardCategoryNominee (s)2007Outstanding Achievement in Casting – TV ...René Haynes2007Kevin O’Connor2007Michael Ornstein2007Online Film & Television Association ...Best Motion PictureBest Motion Picture- Western Historical Drama
Hope rises for the Indians in the form of the prophet Wovoka and the Ghost Dance - a messianic movement that promises an end of their suffering under the white man.
Ghost Dance & Wounded Knee. The Ghost Dance represented a movement that embodied the hope of thousands of Native Americans who longed to have their land returned and be rid of white men.
- 6 min
- 66.3K
- mrholtshistory
- Overview
- The Ghost Dance
- Clash of cultures: white Europeans and Native Americans
- The massacre at Wounded Knee
- What do you think?
By 1900, there were fewer than 250,000 remaining Native Americans.
During a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889, Wovoka, a shaman of the Northern Paiute tribe, had a vision. Claiming that God had appeared to him in the guise of a Native American and had revealed to him a bountiful land of love and peace, Wovoka founded a spiritual movement called the Ghost Dance. He prophesied the reuniting of the remaining Indian tribes of the West and Southwest and the banishment of all evil from the world.
According to the teachings of Wovoka, the Ghost Dance ceremony would reunite the spirits of the dead with those of the living, and the power of these spirits could be harnessed in battle with white settlers and the US Army. Though the practice of the Ghost Dance originated with the Paiute tribe of Nevada, it quickly spread to other Indian tribes in the Southwest. Wovoka’s most influential prophecy was that the white man would be forever banished from the land, and that the buffalo, which had been hunted to near-extinction by white settlers, would return and bring with it a lasting revival of the Native American way of life.1
From the earliest days of colonial contact between white Europeans and Native American Indians, certain key assumptions informed their interactions. Most native tribes did not adhere to the European view of land as property. For most Indians, land was communal, and its resources were to be protected and shared. This was in direct contradiction to European notions of land as individual property. As white settlers pushed ever westward, guided by the ideology of Manifest Destiny, they forced Native Americans off of their ancestral lands and onto reservations. Many Indian tribes resisted, unleashing a series of violent conflicts known as the Indian Wars.2
Although the Battle of the Little Bighorn marked the beginning of the end of the Indian Wars, Wovoka and his Ghost Dance triggered one last wave of resistance to the encroachments of white settlers and their way of life. Chief Sitting Bull, who had led the Sioux to victory over the US Army 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, embraced the Ghost Dance and helped facilitate its spread throughout the Sioux Reservation. On December 15, 1890, police officers who feared that Sitting Bull was about to flee the reservation with adherents of the Ghost Dance shot and killed Sitting Bull.3
A mere two weeks later, on December 29, 1890, the US 7th Cavalry Regiment surrounded an encampment of Sioux Indians near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. While attempting to disarm the Sioux, a shot was fired and a scuffle ensued. The US army soldiers opened fire on the Sioux, indiscriminately massacring hundreds of men, women, and children. The few Sioux survivors of the battle fled. In the aftermath of the massacre, an official Army inquiry not only exonerated the 7th Cavalry, but awarded Medals of Honor to twenty soldiers. US public opinion of the massacre was generally favorable.
Though the massacre at Wounded Knee was not the last armed conflict between Native Americans and the US Army, it marked the definitive end of the Indian Wars. After Wounded Knee, the remaining Indian tribes were either subdued or forcibly assimilated into mainstream white US society. Estimates of the pre-European contact native population range widely, from a low of 2 million to a high of 18 million. By 1900, the native population had been reduced to approximately 237,000 individuals.4
What do you see as the most significant difference between the culture and society of white European-Americans and those of Native American Indians?
Why do you think Wovoka and his Ghost Dance became so popular among Indian tribes in the Southwest?
What is the significance of the massacre at Wounded Knee?
[Notes and attributions]
The film is a loosely based fictional portrayal of events relating to the Wounded Knee incident in 1973, [2] when followers of the American Indian Movement seized the South Dakota town of Wounded Knee in protest against federal government policy regarding Native Americans.
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Apr 16, 2021 · The Lakota Ghost Dance and the Massacre at Wounded Knee. How the American drive to force Indian assimilation turned violent on the plains of South Dakota. Native Americans performing ritual...
