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."