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.