Summary Overview

In Nevada in January 1889, a Paiute holy man called Wovoka had a vision that caused him to advocate a new American Indian religious movement called the Ghost Dance. Though an earlier Ghost Dance movement had arisen twenty years earlier, led by a Paiute named Wodziwob, Wovoka’s Ghost Dance arose within the context of the massive loss of American Indian land, sovereignty, and culture as a result of the end the Indian Wars that had been ongoing since the Civil War. Wovoka’s Ghost Dance was a peaceful movement that drew upon Christian morals, calling on Indians to live peacefully and ethically, abstain from alcohol, and work hard. As most tribes were facing difficult times due to being rounded up onto reservations, the Ghost Dance spread rapidly, as it promised a restoration of Indian life and culture, and the destruction of the whites by God. In 1890, the Ghost Dance had reached the Lakota at Pine Ridge Reservation in Dakota Territory. The Lakota had resisted confinement to the reservation, and their most noted leaders, Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, had become symbols of Indian resistance.

The two documents presented here give two very different views of the Ghost Dance religion. One, the “Messiah Letter,” was written by Wovoka, in which he describes the movement in detail. He outlines a peaceful movement that will allow Indians to regain their past glory, while eschewing warfare against the whites. Z.A. Parker’s description of witnessing the Ghost Dance performed at Pine Ridge, from the perspective of a white woman, gives some important detail interspersed with perspective that clearly categorizes the Ghost Dance as a form of hysteria, not in line with Christian faith and practice.

Defining Moment

American Indian nations faced an increasingly hopeless situation in the late nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1830s, eastern tribes were being forced off of their land and marched over 1,000 miles to Indian Territory, in present-day Oklahoma and Kansas. The western tribes, though some still held their ancestral lands, were witnessing a massive influx of whites moving west. Also confined to reservations, the land base of the Indian nations was shrinking rapidly, as the more fertile lands were being transferred to white immigrants. Federal Indian policy, as implemented by government officials and missionaries on the reservations, as well as in boarding schools where Indian children were forced to attend, held that Indians needed to give up their traditional religions, languages, and lifestyles in favor of American Christianity and farming.

At the same time as the Indian Wars were causing massive casualties, as well as cultural displacement, among Indian nations, a Northern Paiute holy man from western Nevada named Wovoka began to spread the word of a new religious movement that would eliminate the American settlers and restore the Indian way of life and the lands their ancestors had held. To bring this utopia about, Indian people needed to perform the Ghost Dance, as described by Wovoka, observe a Christian-based moral code, and remain at peace with white people. As Indians around the Great Basin began performing the dance, stories of visions and healings began to spread.

In late 1889, two Lakota men named Short Bull and Kicking Bear visited Wovoka, learned the Ghost Dance, and brought it to the Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, and Rosebud Reservations in Dakota Territory. The Lakota had already had their holiest place, the Black Hills, which had been promised to them in perpetuity in the Treaty of Fort Laramie in 1868, taken from them by gold-seeking white Americans. They had resisted, to the point of fighting against the U.S. Army, but even their iconic victory over General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 did not slow white expansion. The Ghost Dance gave the people of Pine Ridge, who had a profound sense of hopelessness in the aftermath of the Sioux Wars, hope for a different future. The Lakota, perhaps more than most tribes, were forced to abandon their seasonal cycle lifestyle of following the bison, and were forced to practice agriculture, which had previously been only the domain of women. Also, the lands in Dakota Territory to which they had been assigned were particularly poor for agriculture without irrigation.

Many tribes throughout the West sent holy men to learn the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance, which promised a way back to the Lakotas’ cultural past, and large numbers accepted its message and began participating in the dance. The most influential Lakota leader at the time, Sitting Bull, supported the practice among his people, though he did not participate in the dance itself. Agents of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, including Standing Rock’s James McLaughlin, opposed the movement, as they believed it presaged a renewed call for war against the United States.

Author Biography

Wovoka, also called Jack Wilson, was born in Nevada around 1856. He had been raised by a white rancher’s family after his father died, where he learned English and Christian religion. At the age of about thirty, Wovoka began to make experience visions like the Ghost Dance prophet Wodziwob had some twenty years earlier. He foresaw a new pan-Indian religion, with a moral code like Christianity, but that would bring about the end of white dominance and herald a return to the Indian past. His new religious movement espoused pacifism and personal ethics, but at the same time was influenced by the dances and mystical aspects of the religious beliefs of his own tribe. Tribes like the Lakota took Wovoka’s message and adapted its principles to meet their own circumstances. The author of “The Ghost Dance among the Lakota,” Mrs. Z. A. Parker, was a teacher on the Pine Ridge Reservation who observed Lakota performing the Ghost Dance on June 20, 1890. Little else is known of her, other than the fact that she was associated with the famous Smithsonian ethnographer James Mooney. Mooney took accounts like Parker’s as sources for his own writings on the Ghost Dance.

Document Analysis

Wovoka’s “Messiah Letter” was written to Arapaho and Cheyenne holy men who had traveled to Nevada to meet with him and learn the Ghost Dance. It was dictated by Wovoka and written down by an Arapaho named Casper Edson and the daughter of a Cheyenne named Black Short Nose. It was published by Smithsonian ethnographer James Mooney. The letter describes the basic tenets revealed in Wovoka’s vision, leaving much room for interpretation and variation in how they were implemented.

Wovoka instructs Indians to perform the dance for five days. He did not dictate the exact form of the dance, but the circle dance, which was common among western tribes, was most commonly used. Wovoka then gave himself supernatural status, by stating: “[i]n the fall there will be such a rain as I have never given you before.” Later, Wovoka claims, “Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud,” referencing himself as the bringer of the weather.

Wovoka then described how those who follow the Ghost Dance movement must conduct themselves. He tells followers to live in peace with all people, regardless of race, and to “do right always.” At the aftermath of decades of bitter warfare, this was a very different approach. Wovoka asked his followers not to resist the whites, since the fulfillment of his prophecies will make all things right. He also says that the Ghost Dance is for Indians alone and must not be shared or even discussed with whites. Wovoka stated that he, personally, would reward the people only if they perform the dance and live as he instructed. If they did so, Wovoka stated that “the dead” would be “alive again,” and that, though they have not yet arrived, they may be there by “this fall or in the spring.” Wovoka dwelled extensively on the idea of keeping peace with white people, encouraging Indians to not avoid being employed by them.

As opposed to Wovoka’s very peaceful description of what he hoped would revitalize the tribes, Z. A. Parker’s account of the Ghost Dance demonstrates a number of differences between Wovoka’s vision. Her portrayal of how the dance was practiced by the Lakota was laced with assumptions of what she perceived to be the militaristic nature of Indian dances. This perception would have been common and understandable, as decades of war between whites and Indians were just coming to a cataclysmic end. Parker assumed that the practice of the Ghost Dance by the Lakota was a prelude to resumed resistance to westward migration.

Parker described a facet of the Ghost Dance not from Wovoka, but unique to the Lakota: the ghost shirts, which were worn during the practice of the dance. She stated, “[t]he wife of a man called Return-from-scout had seen in a vision that her friends all wore a similar robe, and on reviving from her trance she called the women together and they made a great number of the sacred garments.” The Lakota ghost shirts were the basis for much of the perception of the Ghost Dance as a militant movement. While Wovoka had emphasized peace with white people, the Lakota, who had been fighting whites for over thirty-five years, instead viewed the Ghost Dance as a millennial drama of which they would be a part. They dared whites, such as Indian Agent James McLaughlin (who adamantly opposed the Ghost Dance) to stop them, by claiming the ghost shirts would protect them from bullets. Additionally, part of the chant reported by Parker—“Father, I come; Mother, I come; Brother, I come; Father, give us back our arrows”—seems to imply both the resurrection of the Indians who had died before and the resumption of hostilities with the Americans.

Essential Themes

Alarmed by such accounts, James McLaughlin called for the Lakota to stop the Ghost Dance, but he was unsuccessful in doing so. He requested help from the U.S. Army in tracking any bands that left the reservation, and sent tribal police to the home of Lakota holy man Sitting Bull – one of the Ghost Dance’s staunchest backers – to arrest him, but the ensuing melee ended up costing Sitting Bull his life. The army then arrived and chased down a band led by a chief named Big Foot. Immediately after the killing of Sitting Bull, Big Foot, took approximately 350 Lakota, mostly women and children, and fled the nearby Cheyenne River Reservation for Pine Ridge. They were pursued by troops under the command of Major Samuel Whitside and were eventually intercepted. Spotted Elk, who had contracted pneumonia during the journey, surrendered, and he and his band were escorted to Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29, 1890, soldiers were attempting to disarm the Lakota when a shot was fired. The federal troops opened fire on the largely unarmed camp with Hotchkiss artillery, killing at least 150 Lakota. The massacre at Wounded Knee is widely regarded as the symbolic end of the Sioux Wars, which had begun with the First Sioux War in 1854. The tragedy ended both the widespread popularity of the Ghost Dance movement and, for the most part, open warfare between whites and Indians.

After the Wounded Knee Massacre, Wovoka remained an influential religious leader among both his own Paiute people and Indians across the West. The peaceful nature of his movement was not lost on Indian agents in his home region, who saw him as a calming influence. In his later years, he made a living by selling items that he had personally used, from clothing to the paint and feathers used in Indian religious ceremonies. The Ghost Dance religion may have ended in 1890, but some tribes, especially on the Great Plains, still practiced the Ghost Dance for many years. Even during the Red Power movement of the 1960s, members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), specifically Oglala Lakota activist Leonard Crow Dog, performed the Ghost Dance. Many of the movement’s participants looked to the Ghost Dance as inspiration for their own conflict, as it symbolized American Indian resistance to U.S. policy and the encroachment of American culture.

The locations of the drama that played out in the Ghost Dance movement in 1889-1890 remain holy to many Indian people. In 1973, AIM activists and about two hundred Lakota returned to Wounded Knee, seizing the town to protest the failure of the U.S. government to honor its treaties with Indian nations. FBI agents and U.S. marshals besieged the activists for seventy-one days, and one agent and two protesters were killed during the standoff. The event and the publicity given it by the press resulted in greater attention for the cause of American Indian rights throughout the United States.

Bibliography and Additional Reading