Gregory Smoak

I'd be happy to.

I would also add, though, you know, right up front, one of the things that I'm going to argue here today is that the ghost dance isn't the end.

Yeah.

And the ghost dance is still practiced today.

And from my perspective, the ghost dance is as much a beginning as anything.

And we'll get back to that.

Yeah, I would say that's fair to say, but I would say you're absolutely right when it comes to the popular understanding of the ghost dance movement of 1890, which is not the first ghost dance movement, but that's the popular understanding.

And one of the most famous books written about in the early 1960s was called The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, clearly linking it to Wounded Knee.

That would come as a great surprise to Sioux people today who would say, Lakota people would say, hey, we're still here.

This Lakota nations, plural, is certainly still living.

Anyway, but yeah, so removal and confinement on reservations, you know, 1830, the Indian Removal Act makes removal of native people east of the Mississippi federal policy and people are pushed west.

The idea is to clear land for white Americans.

That

idea of a permanent Indian frontier in an Indian territory where they would remain doesn't last very long.

And very soon Americans, white Americans, are spreading across the continent.

And so removal will take place in the West as well, but it's not going to be a centralized policy.

It's not going to be pushing people hundreds or thousands of miles or a thousand miles or more from where they had lived.

It's going to be concentrating them onto smaller pieces of ground

often within their aboriginal territory, but also in some cases moving people fairly large distances.

This becomes really the central policy of the federal government in the 1850s.