The Sioux Ghost Dance (2)

excerpt from The World of the American Indian, published by the National Geographic Society
(c) 1974, pp. 147-148, 150.


During these years of war and suppression the government made its final repudiation of the nation-to-nation relationship under which tribes had sought to hold the white man's society at arm's length. In 1871 Congress abolished treaty-making powers of the tribes and indicated that the government's public servants could make better decisions for the Indians than Indians could make for themselves. The ultimate devide for fostering dependency had been discovered.

Constricted in their lands, pressed by military forces, many Indians turned to spiritual movements. In the 1870's and '80's the cult of the prophet of Smohalla spread throughout the northwest. A member of the tribe related by language to the Nez Perce, he experienced a vision, then urged a return to Indian wasys, preaching that the white man's exploitation ruined mother earth. "You ask me to plough the ground! Shall I take a knife and tear my mother's bosom? You ask me to dig for stone! Shall I dig under her skin for her bones? ... You ask me to cut grass and make hay and sell it...But how dare I cut off my mother's hair?

...But it was the Ghost Dance ritual of the prophet Wovoka, a young Paiute, that triggered the final bloody crushing of Indian resistance. Wovoka's message, borne from his home in the Nevade desert by disciples, began to sweep across the plains in 1889. Soon village after village of Sioux began to perform his "Ghost Dance" with the promise of a return to old ways in a world from which white would have been erased by a flood.

..."Dance," the prophet said: "everywhere, keep on dancing." This would hasten the day when the world would be renewed, the white man destroyed, the game brought back, and the Indian restored to happiness with all his kin. Because it promised a return of the dead, whites called it the "Ghost Dance."...Whites took the rite for a war dance, not noting that women participated...And they overlooked Wovoka's tenet for the new life: "You must not ...do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always."

...The dancing appalled and frightened whites. One commented, "A more pernicious system of religion could not have been offered to a people...on the threshold of civilization." Another wired Washington, "Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy...We need protection..."

Army troops fanned out to round up the Ghost dancers and to settle them near their agencies. Among the last to be caught was a group of about 350 Sioux under Big Foot. They were led to a military camp at Wounded Knee Creek. An incident, and cavalry carbines and rapid-fire canons rent the camp. When firing ended...men, women and children lay dead. Others fled or crawled off wounded.

A handful of survivors were taken to shelter in the nearby Pine Ridge Episcopal Mission, still hung with grenery from a Christmas service a few days earlier. The words of Chief Red Cloud serve as an epitaph: "We had begged for life, and the white men thought we wanted theirs."

The Sioux Ghost Dance

Exerpt from Red Man's Religion, by Ruth M. Underhill, (c) 1965, pp. 260-261

“Delegations went to Wowoka, and in the summer of 1890 the Sioux began dancing. The slow, shuffling circle dance was foreign to them, but they made it more dramatic by placing a dead cottonwood tree in the center to be hung with offerings. The cottonwood, the only tall tree of the Plains, was a symbol of life, ever renewed. Then one of their number began making ghost dance shirts—long garments of white sheeting decorated with symbols and in red and with eagle feathers at the elbows. Wowoka had a garment of that sort, which he had said would turn away any bullet, though he averred that no fighting would be necessary. Still, more and more men and women wore the white garment. And more and more fell unconscious during the dance, which might last five days and nights without stopping. The dreamers recovered to tell how they met the approaching dead and all sang:

                The whole world of the dead is returning, returning

                Our nation is coming, is coming.

                The spotted eagle brought us the message

                Bearing the Father’s word-

                The word and the wish of the Father.

                Over the glad new earth they are coming,

                Our dead come driving the elk and the deer.

                See them hurrying the herds of bullalo!

                This the Father has promised,

                Thus the Father has given.

There were, of course, groups that did not join in the movement. And there were leaders like old Sitting Bull, medicine man and rainmaker of the Hunkpapa, who remained undecided even when their followers had joined. The white agents could not follow such distinctions. They were nervous and therefore the Indians were nervous. Bands kept moving from place to place and holding councils. More soldiers came. Newspaper men arrived as they had never been able to do with earlier prophecies, and the whole country read lurid reports. One careful investigator avers that the tragedy which developed was “a newspaper man’s war.” It seems likely that, with better-trained officials and with the knowledge of social conditions that we have today, there need have been no tragedy.

But tragedy there was.

…Indians were being searched for weapons and a gun went off. Then began the massacre, for it was nothing less. Most Indians had been disarmed long ago and the search produced only a few guns, beside knives and hatchets used as tools. Without defense, all Big Foot’s people could do is run—toward the tents or toward a ravine in the distance.  Soldiers and canons were ranged on three sides of them, and some of these soldiers were survivors from the Custer fight. They rushed among the fleeing men, women, and children with the battle cry, “Remember Custer!” Some three hundred Indians were killed or died later of injuries. The whites lost twenty-nine men, mostly from their own crossfire since the Indians had no weapons…

The Ghost Dance ceased, and with it ceased all hope that the whites would be conquered or disappear. But contemporaneous with those whom I have called the “hostile prophets” was the series of visionaries who preached a new religion of the Indians’ own. It would not destroy the whites but would reach the Red Men to live in the same world with them, accepting such of their products, as seemed useful(of course not the enemy alcohol) but receiving supernatural power through their own visions for their own comfort.

New Projects by Doug Blackmon: Author of Slavery by Another Name

Friends, Friends and followers of Slavery by Another Name, Thank you again for all your enthusiasm for my book and PBS film. Many of you have asked me what's coming next, and the answer is a lot, including a new film and a new book on the horizon. More on that later. In the meantime, I want to let you know about something I and some very talented colleagues and students have been developing over the past year--a weekly public television talk show called American Forum. Broadcast from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, American Forum is currently carried by nearly 100 PBS stations around the country, and hopefully many more very soon. The idea is that in the midst of all the sniping and bickering in American life today, it's time for some thoughtful discussion---sometimes about things that are difficult (like race and war and healthcare) and ohter times things that are just fascinating or illuminating (like history and culture and leadership). We believe much can be learned in a thoughtful, hour-long conversation with some of the most influential scholars, political figures and journalists in America. Some are famous or powerful. Others are not so well known. All of them bring a wealth of understanding of our history and the issues of our time. On American Forum, we'll dig into all that, and listen to different points of view without a lot of political nonsense. Earlier this month, I interviewed Attorney General Eric Holder and pressed him on whether he and President Obama are finally going to move in meaningful ways to deal with mass incarceration. He said big things are coming. See what you think about his answers: http://millercenter.org/events/2014/a-conversation-with-eric-holder And read my blog about the conversation here: Is President Obama truly ready to release thousands of prisoners?   www.slaverybyanothername.com/blog/is-president-obama-ready-to-release-thousands-of-prisoners/ If you like the program, drop me a note, forward the link to a friend, and let your local PBS station know. (If you need a name of who to email, ask me.) You will also be able to watch the program online every week at www.millercenter.org.     If you'd like to get a regular sneak peak of the program, just send me an email at this address. I hope you'll send me your ideas too. And concerns. And what you'd like to see some of these great minds wrestle with. In the weeks ahead, I'll keep everyone updated on the progress of the show and some of those other new projects coming very soon. Thanks again for all your support and friendship, and the work all of you are doing across the country. Doug American Forum Attorney General Eric Holder, with Doug Blackmon on American Forum.

About Douglas A. Blackmon

     Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same name. His is also a contributing editor at The Washington Post and chair and host of Forum, a public affairs program produced by the University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 100 PBS affiliates across the U.S.

   His book, a searing examination of how the enslavement of African-Americans persisted deep into the 20^th century, was awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The Slavery by Another Name documentary was broadcast in February 2012 and attracted an audience of 4.8 million viewers.

   Until joining the Washington Post in 2011, Blackmon was the longtime chief of The Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau and the paper’s Senior National Correspondent. He has written about or directed coverage of some of the most pivotal stories in American life, including the election of President Barack Obama, the rise of the tea party movement and the BP oil spill. Overseeing coverage of 11 southeastern states for the Journal, he and his team of reporters were responsible for the Journal’s acclaimed coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the failed federal response after that disaster, the Journal’s investigation into the training and preparations of the 9/11 hijackers in Florida, immigration, poverty, politics and daily reporting on more than 2,500 corporations based in the region.

   As a writer and editor at large, Blackmon more recently led the Journal’s coverage of the tea party and the final hours before the BP oil spill—for which he and a team of other Journal writers were finalists for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. Those stories received a Gerald Loeb Award in June 2011.

   Blackmon has written extensively over the past 25 years about the American quandary of race–exploring the integration of schools during his childhood in a Mississippi Delta farm town, lost episodes of the Civil Rights movement, and, repeatedly, the dilemma of how a contemporary society should grapple with a troubled past. Many of his stories in The Wall Street Journal explored the interplay of wealth, corporate conduct, the American judicial system, and racial segregation. International assignments have included the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of East and West Germany, the Civil War in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, post apartheid South Africa and the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague.  Political assignments have included the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2008, presidential campaigns of 1988, 2002, 2008, and 2012, the post presidency of Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton while governor of Arkansas in the 1980s.

   Blackmon is also a co-founder and board member of two socially and ethnically diverse charter schools serving more than 600 students, including his own two children, in grades kindergarten through eight in the inner city of Atlanta.

   In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Slavery by Another Name was a New York Times bestseller in both hardback and soft cover editions, and was awarded a 2009 American Book Award, the 2009 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters non-fiction book prize, a 2008 Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Award, the NAACP Freedom Fund Outstanding Achievement Award, and many other citations. He has been honored by the state legislature of Georgia for distinguished scholarship and service to history. In 2010, he received the Grassroots Justice Award from the Georgia Justice Project.

   The documentary film based on Slavery by Another Name was directed by distinguished filmmaker Sam Pollard, with more than $1.5 million in funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and major corporate sponsors.

   Blackmon is a much sought after lecturer on race, history and social memory.  In Spring 2010, he was invited by Attorney General Eric Holder to present a lecture to senior Department of Justice of officials in Washington D.C.  He also has lectured at Harvard School of Law, Yale University, Princeton, the New School, Emory University, Vanderbilt School of Law, the Clinton and Lincoln presidential libraries, and many other institutions.

   The Journal’s coverage of Hurricane Katrina received a special National Headliner award in 2006. In 2000, the National Association of Black Journalists honored Blackmon for his stories revealing the secret role of J.P. Morgan & Co. during the 1960s in funneling funds to opponents of the Civil Rights Movement.

   Prior to his work at The Wall Street Journal, Blackmon covered race and politics at the Atlanta Journal Constitution for seven years. His reporting on corruption at Atlanta City Hall in the 1990s helped lead to the conviction and imprisonment of eight city officials, including two former councilmen and the city’s chief investment officer.
 

   Slavery by Another Name grew out of his 2001 article on slave labor in The Wall Street Journal.  It revealed the use of forced labor by dozens of U.S. corporations and commercial interests in coal mines, timber camps, factories and farms in cities and states across the South, beginning after the Civil War and continuing until the beginning of World War II.

   Janet Maslin wrote in the New York Times that the book is “relentless and fascinating” and “will now haunt us all.” New York University Pulitzer Prize winning historian David Levering Lewis says the book reveals “an America holocaust that dare not speak its name, a rivetingly written, terrifying history of six decades of racial degradation in the service of white supremacy.” Bill Moyers called Slavery by Another Name “brilliant” reporting.  Cynthia Tucker, Pulitzer winning editorial page editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution wrote that Slavery by Another Name “illuminates … an ignominious economic system that depended on coerced labor and didn’t flinch from savagery toward fellow human beings. Blackmon’s exhaustive reportage should put an end to the oft-repeated slander that black Americans tend toward lawlessness.”

   Blackmon joined the Journal in October 1995 as a reporter in Atlanta. Prior to joining the Journal, Blackmon was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution where he covered race and politics in Atlanta. Previously, he was a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat in 1986-1987, and co-owner and managing editor of the Daily Record from 1987 to 1989, both in Little Rock, Ark.

   Raised in Leland, Miss., Blackmon penned his first newspaper story for the weekly Leland Progress at the age of 12. He received his degree in English from Hendrix College in Conway, Ark.  He lives in downtown Atlanta and Charlottesville, Va.

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