The Ghost Dance Movement

All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back all game of every kind…all dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong just like young men, be young again. Old blind Indian see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, than all the Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can't hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood like water and all white people die, get drowned! After that, water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick… (Wovoka, The Paiute Messiah qtd. In Brown 416).

In 1973, Christopher Bruce heard about the murders going on in the small villages and towns of Chile on the orders of the government; just to show off their power, and how they were not afraid to use it. Bruce found out as a result of a letter received from a widow of a Chilean folk singer who had been murdered. He was asked to do work for the Chilean Human Rights Committee. The dance first premiered in 1988, the costume designer being Belinda Scarlett and the music being by Incantation, playing the song ‘Ojos Azules’ which is Spanish for ‘Blue Eyes’.

Most of the women and children in Big Foot's tribe were family members of the warriors who had died in the Plains wars. The Indians had agreed to live on small reservations after the US government took away their land. At the Wounded Knee camp, there were 120 men and 230 women and children. At the camp, they were guarded by the US Seventh Cavalry lead by Major Samuel Whitside. During the year 1890 a new dance called the Ghost Dance started among the Sioux and other tribes. The Sioux's Christ figure, Wovoka, was said to have flown over Sitting Bull and Short Bull and taught them the dance and the songs. The Ghost Dance legend was that the next spring, when the grass was high, the Earth would be covered with a new layer of soil, covering all white men. Wild buffalo and horses would return and there would be swift running water, sweet grass, and new trees. All Indians who danced the Ghost dance would be floating in the air when the new soil was being laid down and would be saved. The Ghost Dance was made illegal after the Wounded Knee massacre though. On December 28, 1890 the Seventh Cavalry saw Big Foot moving his tribe and Big

For many tribes of Plains Indians whose bison-hunting culture flourished during the 18th and 19th centuries, the sun dance was the major communal religious ceremony . . . the rite celebrates renewal - the spiritual rebirth of participants and their relatives as well as the regeneration of the living earth with all its components . . . The ritual, involving sacrifice and supplication to insure harmony between all living beings, continues to be practiced by many contemporary native Americans. -Elizabeth Atwood LawrenceAs the most important ritual of the nomadic Plains Indians, the Sun Dance in itself presents many ideas, beliefs, and values of these cultures. Through its rich symbolism and complicated rituals we are able to catch a glimpse

In Native American religions a dance called the Sun Dance is used as the rite of passage for young men. You men would stick a rod though their peck and dance around a pole of three days as a way to become connected with the Spirit World. The pole is used to show strength and the boys would quickly have to get the rod out by dancing. Another rite of passage in Native Americans religions is the Vision Quest. Young boys and girls partake in this to find their spirit animals. They go into the woods mostly naked and sometimes covered in body paint and fast in the woods for days. Eventually a spirit comes to them, most of the time as an animal but it can be in human form, and is said to be their guardian

Native Americans lost their culture once the Spanish made them a part of the mission system. Before European arrival, they were predominantly pagan and had multiple gods or spirits which they worshipped as part of their rituals for successful harvest or hunt. Through the mission system, they underwent baptism through Catholicism and learned to worship only one supreme being and

Modern era Powwows progressed from the Grass Dance Societies that shaped throughout the early 1800’s. Dances remained an occasion for the warriors to recreate their valiant actions for all the members of the tribe to observer. Furthermore growing of the reservations provided growth to the contemporary Powwow. This was a time of transition for Native American people across North America. Outlawing of the Tribal customs and the religion of the Native people was as results of the federal government involvements. The Grass Dance was one of the few celebrations that were allowed into this new era. The Grass Dance became

old customs and the Ghost Dance allowed the Indians to “live like Indians and not try to live and act like

The Native Americans had settled in the land years before the arrival of the Euro-Americans. Hundreds of Native American groups occupied the land, each tribe with its separate culture, language, and spiritual way-of-life. Despite the many differences, “there was also considerable interaction and dialogue among tribes about spiritual concepts. Through the common language of sign-talk, ideas could be shared and compared among Indian tribes including the spiritual concepts that are an intricate part of the Indian’s everyday experience” (Treat). The Native American culture was primarily oral. Almost all tribes believed in a cosmology or creation myth regarding how this world and the things inhabiting it came to be. Most native peoples worshiped an all-powerful, all-knowing “Master Spirit.” They also revered and placated a host of lesser spirits in hopes of receiving assistance in their daily interactions with the world around them. Often times shamans, who were believed to have supernatural powers through visions, were called upon to communicate and implore the spirits to ensure a good harvest, or victory in warfare, or healing, or interpreting dreams, or other matters of great

The religion of the Ghost Dance started with a man named Wovoka. On January 1, 1889, he had a ‘vision’ during a solar eclipse in Nevada (Peterson 27). It brought a message of hope to the oppressed Indians of only the Indians living. The Indians called Wovoka the ‘Messiah’ (“The Ghost Dance” par. 1) and it was believed that he would bring a “day of deliverance” (Phillips 16) to the

The second Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868, guaranteed the Lakota people ownership of 25 million acres of land, now known as the Great Sioux Reservation, only to be occupied by Indian people (“Treaty of Fort Laramie” Article 2). While this treaty kept the peace for a few years, the United States government soon reneged on the agreement and allowed miners to enter reservation lands to look for gold. Eventually, the government decided to use military force to retake the land from the Sioux people and so began the Great Sioux War. In response to the US government’s illegal actions, Kicking Bear asked the Lakota people to practice the Ghost Dance, which was said to be a prophecy of the Great Spirit renewing the earth by making it free of evil and more beautiful than before (Kicking Bear, 1890). This included ending the white man’s expansion into Indian lands. This rhetorical analysis will argue that Kicking Bear’s “Address at the Council Meeting of the Hunkpapa Sioux, Great Sioux Reservation” in 1890 was a fitting response to the United States Government’s expansion into reservation land through the examination of purpose, audience, and persona.

When the Europeans came to America they impacted the Native American religions in many different ways. The Native Americans had to adapt to Europeans, but they also kept to their original ways. Even before the adaptations, the Native Americans and Europeans had similarities including: believing one god and one main evil spirit, believing in an afterlife, and they both believed in the immortality of the soul. Even though the Natives believed in one god, “Master Spirit”, unlike the Europeans, they believed that the god could assume a variety of forms and both genders; Native Americans also believed in many lesser spirits. Other differences were that Natives passed their beliefs down verbally instead of documenting everything in a book or books. As a result of exposure to Europeans, Native American traditions gradually intermixed with Christian beliefs. One example of the influence of Christianity on Native American rituals is the adaptations to the Sun Dance. Before the Sun Dance was primarily practiced in the Upper Plains and the Rocky Mountains and performed at the summer solstice. The dance was often practiced differently for each tribe, but the Eagle, helping bring body and spirit in harmony, is an important symbol for all tribes. There are many similarities for each tribe including: specific songs and dances that

Native Americans are losing their background and where they come from starting with culture and heritage that has been passed down to each generation. Not losing site of that, there is a chance in seeing the positive of preserving and continuing the culture and heritage of the Native Americans and bringing significance to ceremonies.

Crazy Horse was brutally murdered and the Sioux surrendered (“Battle”). In 1890 the government learned that the Native Americans were doing the Ghost Dance (Cayton 265). The Ghost Dance was a ritual in which people join hands and twirled in a circle (Cayton 265). When the government saw the Ghost Dance, they thought the Native Americans were crazy and trying to rebel, so they tried to arrest Sitting Bull (Cayton 265). In this conflict that came to be known as the Battle of Wounded Knee, soldiers killed Sitting Bull, 120 men, and 230 women and children (Cayton 265). These battles pushed Native Americans onto reservations and took away their basic human rights.

On the morning of December 29, 1890, many Sioux Indians (estimated at above two hundred) died at the hands of the United States Army near Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The Indians were followers of the Ghost Dance religion, devised by Wovoka, a Paiute prophet, as a spiritual outlet for Indian repression by whites. The United States Army set out to intercept this group of Native Americans because they performed the controversial Ghost Dance. Both whites’ and the Sioux’s misunderstanding of an originally peaceful Indian religion culminated in the Battle of Wounded Knee. This essay first shows how the Ghost Dance came about, its later adaptation by the Sioux, and