Don Wildman

On the horizon, the golden mountain range simmers, dimming to dusk.

All around, bird songs rise to a frantic crescendo, then suddenly go silent.

In the eerie silver-white glow of totality, the sun's corona bursting from behind the lunar disk, a Paiute prophet suffers the ill effects of scarlet fever.

Seized by delirium and chills, he slips in and out of a deep trance, experiencing visions of a different world, a renewed world, where his people's ancestors have returned, where the buffalo roams free again and native nations thrive in peace.

Moments later, as the day is reborn and the sun brightens, this man, Wovoka, returns to the living, his visions becoming revelation, sparking a movement, the Ghost Dance, that will soon spread across the land.

Greetings all.

Welcome to another episode of American History Hit.

Glad you're listening.

Thanks very much.

I'm Don Wildman.

Today's subject, in many ways, is a last chapter.

Literally so.

Open almost any book on the history of Native tribes in North America, turn to the final pages, and you'll find in there the story we're covering today.

A dark, closing moment in the long erosion of what was once a stable and vibrant civilization.

It's a chapter that ends with what even at the time was recognized as an unthinkable atrocity, U.S.

troops firing on defenseless families.

The era to which I refer is known as the Ghost Dance Movement, and it's often reduced in those books to a cult, an oversimplification of what was so much more, a profound spiritual response to the pressers of extinction inflicted by conquering European Americans.

Why did it begin?

What did its believers hope to achieve?

And how did the ghost dance era echo onward, against all odds, not only in American history, but in the living memory of today's Native cultures?