Ghost Dance

Wovoka was a Northern Paiute man of the Mason Valley in Nevada, known to his white neighbours as Jack Wilson, who fell ill during the solar eclipse of 1 January 1889 and returned with a vision. In it he had been taken up and shown the dead alive and happy, and had been given a dance and instructions: the people were to live at peace, to work, to harm no one, to lie and steal not at all, and to perform the dance he had been given at intervals of several days. If they did, the dead would return, the buffalo would come back, and the world would be renewed.

Delegations came from across the Plains and the Great Basin to hear him, some travelling by railroad, and carried the dance home with them. It was a simple form: dancers held hands in a circle and shuffled sideways, singing songs that came to individual dancers in trance, sometimes for four or five nights running. There was no drum. Because it spread through delegates rather than through any central authority, the dance was understood differently in each nation that received it, and its emphasis shifted as it moved east. The Northern Paiute doctrine of patient waiting and peaceable work was not what every receiving community heard, and the difference between what Wovoka taught and what was later attributed to him is one of the clearer findings of the record.

Among the Lakota the dance arrived in 1890 into conditions of hunger and broken agreement. The reservations had been cut up two years earlier, rations had been reduced, and the crops had failed. Lakota dancers took up the form and added to it the ghost shirt, a painted garment held to turn bullets, an element not present in Wovoka's teaching. Indian agents at Pine Ridge and Standing Rock read the dancing as the preparation for a rising and asked for troops, and troops came in November 1890.

Sitting Bull was killed at Standing Rock on 15 December during an attempt to arrest him. Spotted Elk, called Big Foot, led his band toward Pine Ridge and was intercepted by the Seventh Cavalry, who camped them at Wounded Knee Creek. On the morning of 29 December, during the disarming of the camp, firing began, and the soldiers killed something close to three hundred Lakota people, a large proportion of them women and children, many shot while fleeing. Twenty five soldiers died, a number of them from their own crossfire. Twenty Medals of Honor were awarded for the action, and the demand to rescind them has been made repeatedly ever since.

The Ghost Dance did not end there, though the reporting of the time said it had. Versions of it continued quietly in several nations through the twentieth century, and Wounded Knee itself became a place of return, occupied in 1973 in a protest that took its meaning directly from what had happened there.