Analysis: The Ghost Dance Among the Lakota

Date: June 20, 1890

Author: Z. A. Parker

Genre: report

Summary Overview

In January 1889, a Paiute medicine man named Wovoka had a vision that resulted in the birth of an American Indian religious revitalization movement called the Ghost Dance. A peaceful movement that called on Indians of all tribes to live peacefully and ethically, abstain from drinking alcohol, work hard, and perform the sacred dance, the Ghost Dance spread rapidly through many tribes in the western United States, as most tribes were facing difficult times and cultural upheaval due to being confined to reservations. By 1890, the Ghost Dance had reached the Lakota Sioux at the Pine Ridge Reservation in Dakota Territory. The Lakotas had been particularly hard hit by the realities of reservation life and had fought the US Army since 1866 for the right to continue their traditional way of life. This document gives an outside observer's perspective on the practice of the Ghost Dance at Pine Ridge.

Defining Moment

In late 1889, two Sioux medicine men, Short Bull and Kicking Bear, arrived in Nevada to visit Wovoka and learn the Ghost Dance, in order to bring it back to the Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, and Rosebud Reservations. When the Ghost Dance arrived at Pine Ridge in 1890, it gave hope to a people who had believed their future to be hopeless. It promised that if the Lakotas performed the dance with all of their hearts and abstained from violence and vice, the white people who were flooding into the Great Plains would be eradicated, and the idyllic lifestyle of the American Indians would be restored. A nomadic people who had once sustained themselves by following the bison, the Lakotas had been asked to practice agriculture on their reservations. Not only was this completely alien to their cultural background, but also the lands in the Dakota Territory, to which they had been assigned, were particularly poor for agriculture, especially without dependable irrigation methods, which were neither naturally occurring nor provided by the government.

Adding to the cultural crisis faced by the Lakotas, their holiest place, the Black Hills, which had been promised to them in perpetuity in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, had since been invaded by gold-seeking white Americans, resulting in the rebellion that led to the Lakotas' iconic victory over General George A. Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. That victory, however, did not turn the tide of white expansion, and great Sioux leaders, such as Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull eventually settled on the reservations, dependent on government subsidies to help their people survive on a land that was not suited to agriculture and did not permit them to sustain themselves any other way.

Into this hopeless situation came 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 US 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

Little is known about Mrs. Z. A. Parker, the woman who relayed this eyewitness account of the Ghost Dance. According to James Mooney, the ethnographer who took down her recounting of the dance, she was a teacher on the Pine Ridge Reservation who observed Lakotas performing a Ghost Dance near White Clay Creek on June 20, 1890. Much more is known about Mooney, as he was one of the foremost ethnographers of American Indian rituals and beliefs and the first scholar to do significant work on the Ghost Dance. Mooney worked for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, where his job was to compile information on American Indian tribes. His most significant work was among the Sioux and the Cherokees, and he was widely regarded as his generation's leading expert on American Indians.

Document Analysis

Parker's account of the Ghost Dance demonstrates a number of differences between Wovoka's vision and the way the dance was practiced and thought about by the Lakotas. The account also conveys Parker's perception, common among white people at the time, that the practice of the Ghost Dance by the Lakotas was leading to resumed resistance to white expansionism.

One of Parker's most notable observations is her description of the Lakota ghost shirts, which were worn during the practice of the dance. Wovoka made no mention of such shirts; they were a purely Lakota addition to the dance. According to Parker, “The 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.” There were different versions of the shirt for men and women to wear. Both versions were decorated by various painted symbols, including birds, stars, the sun, and the moon.

The ghost shirts were largely responsible for the perception of the Ghost Dance as a militant movement that could possibly lead to a renewal of warfare. While Wovoka had preached that Indians should coexist peacefully with white people, it has been argued that the Lakotas ignored this message of nonviolence and instead saw the Ghost Dance as a potential precursor to the elimination of the white race. They claimed that the ghost shirts would protect them against the bullets fired by the US Army. 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. Parker's account demonstrates the fervor with which the Lakotas practiced the Ghost Dance, noting that at least one hundred of those participating danced until they fell unconscious.

Alarmed by accounts such as Parker's, McLaughlin called for the Lakotas to stop the dancing, but he was unable to control the spread of the movement. McLaughlin then asked the US Army to dispatch a unit to the reservation and also sent his own tribal police (Lakotas who worked directly for the reservation agent) to arrest Sitting Bull, whom he erroneously believed to be the leader of the movement. When the tribal police arrived at Sitting Bull's home on Standing Rock Reservation to bring him into custody, a firefight broke out that resulted in the death of the great Lakota spiritual leader.

Bibliography and Additional Reading

Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West. New York: Holt, 1970. Print.

Hittman, Michael. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. Ed. Don Lynch. Expanded ed. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997. Print

Kehoe, Alice Beck. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. New York: Holt, 1989. Print.

Niehardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Premier ed. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. Print.