Chapter 1: What significant event marked the beginning of the Ghost Dance Movement?
New Year's Day, 1889. In the vast open skies of western Nevada, a solar eclipse begins as if a bite's been taken out of the sun, then gradually more and more until fully consumed by the moon. 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.
The Ghost Dance
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? We'll discuss this all with Gregory Smoke, professor of history at the University of Utah, a leading scholar of Native American history and religion.
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Chapter 2: How did Wovoka's visions influence the Ghost Dance?
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. reaches its zenith after the American Civil War in this period that we think of as the classical period of the Indian Wars, which stretches from even before the Civil War, but really after the Civil War up to 1886 when Geronimo surrenders at Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. That ends the armed resistance to this system.
Yeah.
I mean, there's- And people then confined on reservations.
Those policies you talk about are Indian Removal Act 1830, then the Indian Appropriations Act 1851, the General Allotment Act, which is also known as the Dawes Act 1887. All of these were created policies. And my curiosity is, how did they grow through the century in terms of an evolution?
Well, this is all linked to transforming Native people. making them essentially disappear.
And I say that very intently, that going back even into the colonial period, and if we think of British colonialism as a basis for the United States, obviously there are other colonial powers, the French and the Spanish and so on, but British colonialism has the greatest impact on the creation of American federal Indian policy.
It is a centralized policy, and it really doesn't have a place for Native people within Euro-American society. The Indian Removal Act illustrates this. The idea was to move people from these areas. The argument in humanitarian terms is we're going to move them out of the way where they'll be free of the vices and the problems of white society, where then they can slowly assimilate.
Even before the Removal Act, though, there were provisions and treaties to provide farming implements to people, even to the Cherokees who got most of their diet from farming. The idea is we're gonna civilize them by making them farmers. Well, that policy, I mean, that kind of idea of transforming native people is a constant. It becomes incredibly intense
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Chapter 3: What historical context led to the emergence of the Ghost Dance?
And Edson had attended Carlisle. He wrote this down as the prophet spoke in a very broken English. That was rewritten by a young Cheyenne woman when he returned to his home in Oklahoma, and then that letter was given to Mooney. In his work, he publishes all three of these, but he provides a
free rendering of this letter and white people do not really have a place but it is not a violent necessarily removal of white people he preaches and this is directly what he says Grandfather says when your friends die, you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do always right. It will give you satisfaction in life.
Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here, maybe this fall or in the spring. When the time comes, there will be no more sickness and everyone will be young again. Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them.
So that's another ominous note there. When the earth shakes, do not be afraid. It will not hurt you. What year was that again? That is recorded in 1889. Wovoka had his – it was given to James Mooney in the early 1890s. Wovoka's vision was probably around the 1st of January, 1889. It spread very rapidly. And ironically, as it's branded as this kind of primitive vision.
backward-looking movement, the irony is it spread through the English language, native people who had learned to read and write English, and technology, the trains. People, you took the trains to see the prophet, they went to trains there. So this word can spread very rapidly in this modern world. It is native people, as they always have done, are adapting to the world in which they live.
You've mentioned Wovoka. That's his native name. Also goes by Jack Wilson, I suppose. Yeah. And that speaks to the cultural mixing that's happening at this point, enforced or not. It is a reality for different reasons. So we're talking about a redemptive ritual. Is ritual the right word for it?
Yeah. I mean, it is a religious ceremony that is meant to bring about a particular end. So I guess, you know, you could call that, I mean, the ceremony itself is was based on a traditional round dance, which is people counterclockwise, slowly shuffling. There's no drum. People are singing. Round dances can be social, but they can also be ceremonial.
In this case, obviously, it's a ceremonial dance. One thing I want to add about Wovoka, though, Wovoka means the cutter or wood cutter. And Jack Wilson is the name that he got when he lived among the Wilson family. And this is very indicative of life among Native people, especially in the Great Basin at that time. Many survived by wage labor.
Wovoka is the first generation to really grow up in a colonized world. People survived through often wage labor. Woodcutting is one of those occupations. But also, you know, people who were alive at the time, white and Indian, often simply called him Jack Wilson.
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Chapter 4: What were the main beliefs and goals of Ghost Dance participants?
It's funny you mentioned the Mormons, something I've written about in my work on the ghost dance, but they are looked at in sometimes the same ways as native ghost dancers. And they're blamed for the ghost dance directly by Nelson Miles, because he can't believe, and many white Americans can't believe that a native person could be behind this religion or have created this religion.
or Native people could have spread this religion. He says there has to be some designing white men behind it. And it must be the Mormons because they are un-American and they're against the government.
A few years before this, 1882, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller issued new orders to suppress, he calls them, heathenist dances, such as the Sundance, the scalp dance, and so forth, in order to bring Indians, as he says, into line with conventional Christian practice.
Right.
That hits the nail on the head, I would say, in terms of the motivations here, right?
Yeah, I think, you know, what are the conditions in 1890 Native people faced? That culture war is part of it. And the fact that you have your Native religions being suppressed, there's pressure to become Christian. And you put on top of this, you know, specifics on most reservations where there's little income source. Tuberculosis is killing people. Yeah, not bad.
And it becomes the real horrible disease that peaks in the 19-teens and 20s. In Native America.
We didn't even mention that the land that they were put onto was not great for farming, which was supposed to be the idea for so many of them.
Exactly. That's the idea of that. So, for instance, at Fort Hall, land sessions. The railroad comes in in the 1880s and then the Pocatello land session. And there's no development of irrigation. There's no development of irrigation in a place like Fort Hall until after most of the reservation is ceded and white farmers are agitating for that irrigation development.
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