Ghost Dance

According to the millenarian teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka (renamed Jack Wilson), proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American Westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.

As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, different tribes synthesized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs.

The Ghost Dance has been associated with Wovoka's prophecy of an end to colonial expansion while preaching goals of clean living, an honest life, and cross-cultural cooperation by Native Americans.

Practice of the Ghost Dance movement was believed to have contributed to Lakota resistance to assimilation under the Dawes Act.

The Northern Paiute community at this time was thriving upon a subsistence pattern of fishing, hunting wild game, and foraging for pine nuts and roots such as Cyperus esculentus.

Spier studied peoples of the Columbia plateau (a region including Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of western Montana).

Eyewitness accounts of the Ghost Dance prior to the Wounded knee massacre include Ella Cara Deloria and Goodale Sisters.

During a period of two to four days dancers hold hands with their heads looking upwards and slowly sideways shuffle their feet in a clockwise formation while singing Ghost Dance songs.

The combination of days-long dancing caused with exhaustion and ensued with participants falling unconscious into the center, and the gap was closed by other dancers.

The goal was to enter a Trance, where the dancer is transported into the afterworld and meets with lost realities, and times before the arrival of Europeans when the Bison was found in abundance.

Jack had received training from an experienced holy man under his parents' guidance after they realized that he was having difficulty interpreting his previous visions.

Preaching a message of universal love, he often presided over circle dances, which symbolized the sun's heavenly path across the sky.

He said that if his people abided by these rules, they would be united with their friends and family in the other world, and in God's presence, there would be no sickness, disease, or old age.

[15] Shortly after the commercialisation of Emile Berliner's Gramophone, a small set of Ghost dances (curated by James Mooney) were recorded and pressed in 1894, the original masters being held at the Library of Congress.

The invention of the Kinetoscope created and developed by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson was a part of the beginning of a movement to cast and film Indigenous North Americans performing ceremonies, dances, and hunting.

Thus they had to re-fight a losing war nightly; and their hollow victory in the Little Big Horn enactments demonstrated over and over to their audiences the justification for American conquest.

The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man's ugly things – the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories.

The farming plan failed to take into account the difficulty that Lakota farmers would have in trying to cultivate crops in the semi-arid region of South Dakota.

By the end of the 1890 growing season, a time of intense heat and low rainfall, it was clear that the land was unable to produce substantial agricultural yields.

[24] Kicking Bear was forced to leave Standing Rock, but when the dances continued unabated, Agent James McLaughlin asked for more troops.

A former agent, Valentine McGillycuddy, saw nothing extraordinary in the dances and ridiculed the panic that seemed to have overcome the agencies, saying:[25] The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians.

If the Seventh-day Adventists prepare the ascension robes for the Second Coming of the Savior, the United States Army is not put in motion to prevent them.

Spotted Elk (Lakota: Unpan Glešká – also known as Big Foot) was a Miniconjou leader on the U.S. Army's list of 'trouble-making' Indians.

The following day, during an attempt by the officers to collect weapons from the band, one young, deaf Lakota warrior refused to relinquish his arms.

[29][30] American Indian and human rights activists have referred to these as "Medals of Dis-Honor" and called for the awards to be rescinded, but none have been revoked.

[29][31][32][33] Following the Wounded Knee Massacre, open participation in the Ghost Dance movement declined gradually for fear of continued violence against practitioners.

Kehoe believed the movement did not gain traction with the tribe due to the Navajo's higher levels of social and economic satisfaction at the time.

[10] During the Wounded Knee incident of 1973, Lakota men and women, including Mary Brave Bird, did the ghost dance ceremony on the site where their ancestors had been killed.

In her book Lakota Woman, Brave Bird wrote that ghost dances continue as private ceremonies.