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Loading... Aug 9, 2024 · Ghost Dance, either of two distinct cults in a complex of late 19th-century religious movements that represented an attempt of Native Americans in the western United States to rehabilitate their traditional cultures. Learn more about the history and significance of the Ghost Dance in this article.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
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Jan 31, 2024 · 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.
- Joshua J. Mark
- Overview
- US Troops Mobilized Against Ghost Dancers
- Massacre Participants Received the Military’s Highest Honor
- HISTORY Vault: Native American History
White settlers feared the Lakota's Ghost Dance presaged an armed uprising. But US troops carried out the bloodbath.
The slaughter of some 300 Lakota men, women and children by U.S. Army troops in the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre marked a tragic coda to decades of violent confrontations between the United States and Plains Indians.
In the years leading up to the massacre, the Indigenous Lakota Sioux had suffered a generation of broken treaties and shattered dreams. After white settlers poured into the Dakota Territory following the 1874 discovery of gold in the Black Hills, they seized millions of acres of land and nearly annihilated the native buffalo population. As their traditional hunting grounds evaporated and culture eroded, the Lakota, who once roamed as free as the bison on the Great Plains, found themselves mostly confined to government reservations.
Throughout 1890, the Lakota endured droughts and epidemics of measles, whooping cough and influenza. “The Lakota were very distraught at that time,” says Lakota historian Donovin Sprague, head of the history department at Sheridan College and a descendant of both survivors and victims of the Wounded Knee Massacre. “They lost massive amounts of land under the Dawes Allotment Act of 1887, and many of them were dealing with the recent surrender to the reservation system, which forbade the Sun Dance, their most important religious ceremony, and required permission to leave.”
This Day in History: 12/29/1890 - Massacre at Wounded Knee
A glimmer of hope, however, arose with a religious movement that swept across the Great Plains. The Ghost Dance movement, which first appeared in Nevada around 1870, gained popularity among the Lakota after its 1889 revival by the Paiute prophet Wovoka. Its adherents believed that participants in a ritual circular dance would usher in a utopian future in which a cataclysm would destroy the United States, eradicate white colonists from the continent and bring about the resurrection of everything they had lost—their land, their buffalo herds and even their dead ancestors.
Members of the 7th Cavalry firing the opening shots at Wounded Knee, where some 300 Lakota Sioux, many of them women and children, were slaughtered within minutes.
As the Ghost Dance movement spread, frightened white settlers believed it a prelude to an armed uprising. “Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy,” federal agent Daniel F. Royer telegrammed U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters from South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in November 1890. “We need protection, and we need it now.”
“This is a big problem on the reservations because federal agents thought those who danced were going on the warpath, like the stereotype,” Sprague says. “I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy—but they weren’t,” a Lakota at Pine Ridge later recalled. “They were only terribly unhappy.”
The federal government banned Ghost Dance ceremonies and mobilized the largest military deployment since the Civil War. General Nelson Miles arrived on the prairie with part of the 7th Cavalry, which had been annihilated at the Battle of the Little Bighorn 14 years earlier, and ordered the arrest of tribal leaders suspected of promoting the Ghost Dance movement.
When Indian police attempted to take Chief Sitting Bull into custody on the Standing Rock Reservation on December 15, 1890, the noted Sioux leader was killed in the ensuing melee. With a military warrant out for his arrest, Sitting Bull’s half-brother, Chief Spotted Elk (sometimes referred to as Chief Big Foot), fled Standing Rock with a band of Lakota for the Pine Ridge Reservation more than 200 miles away on the opposite side of the state.
Chief Big Foot, leader of the Sioux, was captured at the battle of Wounded Knee, South Dakota. Here he lies frozen on the snow-covered battlefield where he died, 1890.
The dead were carried to the nearby Episcopal church and laid in two rows underneath festive wreaths and other Christmas decorations. Days later a burial party arrived, dug a pit and dumped the frozen bodies in a mass grave.
“To add insult to injury, some of the survivors were taken to Fort Sheridan in Illinois to be imprisoned for being at Wounded Knee,” Sprague says, until William “Buffalo Bill” Cody took custody of them for inclusion in his Wild West Show. “The show was not a positive portrayal of their people, but it beat sitting in a jail cell.”
Although Miles, who wasn’t present at Wounded Knee, called the carnage “the most abominable criminal military blunder and a horrible massacre of women and children,” the U.S. Army awarded the Medal of Honor, its highest commendation, to 20 members of the 7th Cavalry who participated in the bloodbath.
“When I look back now from this high hill of my old age,” survivor Black Elk recalled in 1931, “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there.”
From Comanche warriors to Navajo code talkers, learn more about Indigenous history.
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May 18, 2018 · The Ghost Dance was the major revivalist movement among nineteenth-century North American Indians. Dating from about 1870, it had its culmination in the 1890 – 1891 "messiah craze" of the Plains, which caused the last Indian war in the Dakotas.
Jun 15, 2019 · The ghost dance was a religious movement that swept across Native American populations in the West in the late 19th century. What started as a mystical ritual soon became something of a political movement and a symbol of Native American resistance to a way of life imposed by the U.S. government.
www.pbs.org · wgbh · americanexperienceThe Lakota Ghost Dance and the Massacre at Wounded Knee - PBS
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. April 16, 2021 | Louis S. Warren....
The Ghost Dance Movement was a religious revivalist movement among Native Americans in the late 19th century that sought to restore their way of life through spiritual ceremonies and dances. It emerged as a response to the profound social, economic, and cultural disruptions caused by westward expansion and U.S. government policies that ...
