I. The Ghost Dance: Continuity or Revival?
What is the Ghost Dance?
Jack Wilson - Wovoka Paiute (Pyramid Lake) ± 1888. Followed earlier prophet of 1870s.
A. What did he preach?
B. What did the people have to do?
C. What would happen if they did, and when?
What happened at Wounded Knee? (Dec. 29, 1890):
Ghost Dance
James Mooney visited Wovoka in 1891, after Wounded Knee. Knowledgable and friends of Cheyenne-Arapaho. Extensive investigation of the Ghost Dance Religion from 1890 though 1894 for the Bureau of American Ethnology.
Mooney believed that the original doctrine of Wovoka had no military or anti-white elements, but that among the Sioux, "already restless under both old and new grievances, and more lately brought to the edge of starvation by a reduction of rations, the doctrine speedily assumed a hostile meaning." The power of the ghost dance shirts to protect against bullets seemed an important intimation of Lakota intentions.
Not all of Mooney's contemporaries agreed with his judgment of the Ghost Dance. Alice Fletcher took enough time off from her work - chopping up the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho into allottments as directed by the Dawes Act to give her opinion to the Annual Meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society in November 1890: "The Ghost Dance presents nothing new as a rite, as it holds to old forms in the trance, in the manner of dancing, and use of the pole. Its teachings of a deliverer, and the events to follow are equally old." Although Fletcher's focus on the continuity of religious elements found in the Ghost Dance offers an important point of departure from the dominant interpretation of Mooney and other contemporaries.
Concepts that seemed both incomprehensible and radical to White observers, such as the reappearance of the buffalo, fit perfectly within the Lakota view of the interrelated origins of man, animals, and the earth. In the case of the buffalo, the Pte people originated under the earth along with the Lakota, and could return or reemerge depending on the treatment they received from men. If the buffalo had been driven back into the earth by the white men they could be released again by the Messiah.
Emissaries to Wovoka such as Short Bull brought back the actual dance adopted by the Lakota, at least one of the principal goals of the Ghost Dance corresponded to one of the purposes of the Sun Dance; to assure continued buffalo for the people of those who participated in the ceremony.
One of the Protestant missionaries, Mary Collins, who watched the Ghost Dance performed by Sitting Bull's camp, wrote of the many similarities in function that she saw in common with the Sun Dance. The dancers gazed at the sun while they danced, praying to it; they shifted from the round dance to a sun dance step in straight lines; they pushed themselves through dizziness and weariness into altered states, and alluded to cutting themselves in order to see and talk to the Messiah. Collins concluded, "I watched all the performance, and I came to the conclusion that the 'ghost dance' is nothing more than the sun dance revived."
Perhaps the clearest statement of the continuity between the Ghost Dance and older religious rituals comes from a message that Short Bull instructed the Pine Ridge Agency doctor, James R. Walker, to deliver to the agent. George Sword and Short Bull instructed Walker in Lakota sacred lore to help him better treat his Indian patients. Short Bull had sought a vision before deciding whether to work with Walker. In 1898, one of the men in Short Bull's band fell afoul of the law for holding a give-away ceremony marking the departing of the soul-bundle of his son who had died. The Court of Indian Offenses (1882) - distribution of private property a crime. The Pine Ridge agent began to enforce it in 1892 after the Ghost Dance tumult had subsided.
Short Bull began his communication by reminding Walker,
Write what I say to you and tell it to the Agent. I went to the Indian Messiah in a far away country. He taught me the Ghost Dance. I brought this ceremony to the Lakotas. I was the leader of the Ghost Dance among the Teton Lakotas. This was our religion. I taught peace for all mankind. I taught my people that the Messiah would make all things right and that they should not make war on anyone.
Having taken away the possibility that all the departed Lakota would return to the earth through the Ghost Dance, the US government now forced the Lakota to impoverish their own Indian afterlife:
The white people made war against the Lakotas to keep them from practicing their religion. Now the white people wish to make us cause the spirits of our dead to be ashamed. They wish us to be a stingy people and send our spirits to the spirit world as if they had been conquered and robbed by the enemy. They wish us to send our spirits on the spirit trail with nothing so that when they come to the spirit world, they will be like beggars. We give to the departing spirits what they need on the trail and in the spirit world. If we enrich the spirits with our gifts, they will go into the spirit world with pride and honor and all we give will be there for us when our spirits come there. If we give nothing to the dead, then their spirits will come into the spirit world with only shame.
Short Bull's explanation eloquently illustrates the seamless integration of the ìnewî Ghost Dance into "traditional" Lakota concepts of death and the afterlife.
Anthony FC Wallace article "New Religions among the Delaware Indians."
In contrast to the analysis of Mooney, the continuity of the historical Ghost Dance also illuminates a process used by the Lakota at the end of the nineteenth century to reconfigure basic elements of social status and cosmology.
Like transition between the Ojibwa Feast of the Dead and the Midéwiwin. Not a sudden shift to a new, syncretic, Messianic religion. Lakota developed a new religious ritual through the traditional cultural tools: the reproduction of ceremonies and symbols offered from outside (Wovoka); the innovation of ideas concerning the Lakota afterlife and reappearance of the buffalo; and ultimately, the revival of traditional religious concepts packaged in new forms.
Such an option existed for the Lakota, even after having been forced onto the reservation, because the gift of new religious rites always formed a part of Lakota Religion. Buffalo Calf Woman tells Lakota that new rituals will be given to them from time to time.
Massacre of 1890 - end of Lakota Ghost Dance until 1973. Not end of Ghost Dance among other native groups, including Pawnee, Cheyenne-Arapaho, and Cherokee.
II. The Revival of "Red Power" in the 20th Century.
Sun Dance of Lakota - claim that after 1884 went underground until performed again in 1930s. Revived among Crow, Cheyenne, Hidatsa.
Ghost Dance revived in early 1970s by AIM.
Why do the Ghost Dance and Sun Dance have such different contemporary histories?
The Ghost Dance and Sun Dance both acquire meanings connected to an idea of a new, reconfigured Indian nation. Not identical. Sun Dance connected to a meaning more successful in the present
The Ghost Dance not successful in connecting to World View.
Shows problem with AIM's original view of the World.
Accounts by Native Americans who occupied Wounded Knee in South Dakota during the early spring of 1973 describe the return to traditional Indian religion as the central tenet that linked the political grievances and demands of the activists to a new configuration of the idea of an American Indian Nation. With the exception perhaps of the performance of the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee II, the AIM protesters reflected rather than began the reemphasis on religious ritual and meaning that characterized the movement towards rebuilding Indian pride and community in the late 1960s. As Mary Crow Dog explained some two decades later:
You should know that the movement for Indian rights was first of all a spiritual movement and that our ancient religion was at the heart of it. Up to the time of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Indian religion was forbidden. Children were punished for praying Indian, men were jailed for taking a sweat bath. Our sacred pipes were broken, our medicine bundles given to museums. Christianizing us was one way of making us white, that is, making us forget that we were Indians. Holding onto our old religion was one way of resisting this kind of slow death. As long as people prayed with the pipe or beat the little water drum, Indians would not vanish, would continue to exist as Indians. For this reason our struggles for Indian rights over the past hundred years came out of our ancient beliefs. And so, under the impact of AIM and other movements, more and more native people abandoned the missionaries and went back to the medicine men and peyote road men.
In the struggle to express the ìancient beliefs,î Indians assured their survival in spite of the coercion and deprivation that they endured. In this context, the practice of Indian religion helps to define a common vision of a nation.
In Mary Crow Dog's account, the Ghost Dance performed on March 22, 1973 by the occupants of Wounded Knee, South Dakota drew its religious and symbolic power directly from a perspective of the 1890 Ghost Dance religion that led to the massacre of Big Foot's band of Mineconjou Lakota at Wounded Knee. She writes:
The most memorable thing Leonard [Crow Dog] did was to bring back the Ghost Dance. I think that he did this not only for us, the living, but also for the spirits of those lying in the mass grave
In addition to the notion of physically completing the circle on the same sacred ground, Mary Crow Dog equates the resurgence of contemporary Indian Religion to the historical Ghost Dance:
It was the Ghost dance religion which was at the core of the first Wounded Knee, and Indian Religion as much as politics was also at the heart of the second Wounded Knee in 1973.
On this level, the fact of Native American religious expression becomes as important as its ritual content and significance.
Both Mary and Leonard Crow Dog emphasized the authenticity of the revived Ghost Dance performed at Wounded Knee II. Mary Crow Dog invokes Leonard's great-grandfather, "the first of the Crow Dogs, [who] was not only one of the earliest ghost dancers among the Sioux, but also one of their foremost leaders." Leonard Crow Dog writes more explicitly,
On January 14, 1890, my great-grandfather Jerome Crow Dog came out of the Badlands with his people to surrender. He and his band were the last of the ghost dancers, the last to dance the wanagi wachipi. In March of 1973, I, Leonard Crow Dog, brought the ghost dance back. At the right place, at the right time. I started where the first Crow Dog had stopped.
He also explains how he came by his knowledge of the performance of the Ghost Dance so that he could direct its revival:
I ran this ghost dance the way my father, Henry, and Uncle Dick Fool Bull had described it to me. My father was fourteen years old when Jerome, the first Crow Dog, died. So he still remembered much of it, and also what he learned from his own father, John. Uncle Fool Bull died in 1975. He witnessed the ghost dance as a teenager.
Leonard Crow Dog's claim to an authentic connection to the performance of the nineteenth century Ghost Dance helps to bridge the potential gap in religious feeling and ritual meaning caused by a hiatus of over eighty years.
The conscious and direct evocation of the historical Ghost Dance formed the link that AIM sought to forge between Native American religious revival and the idea of a nation of American Indians that encompassed all of North America. "I spoke to the people," says Leonard Crow Dog:
Somebody taped it, so my words are not lost: "Tomorrow, we're going to ghost dance. For eighty-three years it has never been danced. When they killed our people here so long ago, it was said that the nation's hoop was broken. We'll make the sacred hoop whole again. We're going to dance, whether it rains or snows. Whether the land is muddy or covered with snow, the spirit will come traveling. There'll be no rest, no intermission, no coffee break. During the day, we're not going to eat or drink water. We'll unite together as one tribe through the language of the Great Spirit. We're not going to divide. We're going to be brothers and sisters. Whether you're Mohawk or Cheyenne, we'll be as one.
We're going to remember our brothers who were killed by the white man, and you will see your brothers, your relations who have died. You will see them. The ghost dance spirit will appear. The sacred pipe is going to be there. The fire is going to be there. It starts physically and goes into spirituality. And then you will get into the power. It's going to start here, at Wounded Knee, and it will continue. We are going to unite as brothers and sisters. We will ghost dance. Everybody has heard about the ghost dance, but nobody has ever seen it. It was something the United States government had forbidden - no ghost dance, no sun dance, no Indian religion. That hoop has not been broken. We will dance for future generations."
Mary Crow Dog summed up the meaning that the group accorded to their performance,
In that ravine, at Cankpe Opi, we gathered up the broken pieces of the sacred hoop and put them together again. All who were at Wounded Knee, Buddy Lamont, Clearwater, and our medicine men, we mended the nation's hoop. The sacred tree is not dead!
The renewal of the sacred hoop functioned equally as an image of the Independent Oglala Nation of the occupation, and of the larger community of all American Indians.
The Ghost Dance performance during Wounded Knee II embodied a conscious articulation of the theme of a nation constituted through intertwining the recurrence of a historic religious dance, the violent state intervention that followed, and the political demands based on past treaty and moral obligations.
The historic Ghost Dance, then, provided Native Americans with a ready-made, powerfully emotive rhetorical vehicle with which to confront a dominant American society that seemed bent on making Indians conform to federal regulations and hegemonic codes of behaviour.
The brief public reprise of the Ghost Dance in 1973, and its lone performance the following May at Crow Dog's place (performed in the "vision pit" traditionally reserved for the Sun Dance), contrasts sharply with the role that other religious ceremonies, most notably the Sun Dance, came to play in the construction of Native American identity and concepts of an Indian nation. The reminiscences of participants in the planning of the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969 make clear the role that the "powwow circuit" and new singing and drumming groups in the Bay Area played in creating "their own subtle political statement of cultural unity and affirmation." Among the Lakota, heightened interest in performing the Sun Dance in accordance with sacred traditions began in the early 1960s, but also related directly to the activism of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Sun Dance ceremonies performed on the Lakota reservation since the 1950s had developed into a combination of a powwow and tourist attraction. AIM activists, primarily from urban environments, insisted upon restoring the "traditional" piercing on the fourth day of the Sun Dance.
In 1971 Russell Means participated in his first Sun Dance on the Rosebud Reservation. "I had long yearned to feel like my ancestors," he writes, "It was part of being an Indian. I knew that the Sun Dance could give me some insights." Means takes credit for reinstituting the preference for piercing on both sides of the chest rather than one during the Pine Ridge ceremony in August 1973 (after the occupation).
As Bea Medicine notes, AIM members took participation in the Sun Dance and piercing "as a new badge of commitment." The Lakota Sun Dance has also grown as an intertribal event that includes dancers from other reservations and urban areas. While Medicine taught at the University of New Brunswick in 1976, she observed that "many of the Micmac Indians felt they were not Indians if they did not travel to South Dakota to participate in the Lakota Sun Dance." Some Anishinabe (Chippewa) from Michigan, on the other hand, declined because the ceremony did not stem from their own tribal history. The number of sun dancers at Green Grass steadily rose since the early 1970s to fifty-seven in 1976 and ninety dancers in 1978. In the 1990s, annual sun dances take place each year in states from Oregon and California to the east coast, many supervised by recognized Lakota religious leaders, and some by other-than-Lakota or by non-recognized practitioners. Participation of women taking flesh offerings from their arms in the manner of men has also increased in keeping with the expansion of the role of the Lakota Sun Dance as a "nativistic" or "revivalistic" religion.
The contrasting fate of the Sun Dance and Ghost Dance as expressions of Native American resurgence since the 1970s raises complex questions about the interplay between tradition and revival. What in the relationship between the contemporary and historical "performances" of these two ceremonies encouraged a pan-tribal acceptance of the Sun Dance in the present as an expression of Indian identity, but at the same time limited the utility of the Ghost Dance? The answer becomes critical to understanding the different ways in which the performance of these two dances constructed the idea of the nation among American Indians.
Within the discussion about the Ghost Dance following its revival in 1973 lies a historical interpretation of the earlier religious movement of 1890 that served to limit the viability of ghost dancing as a means of reconfiguring the Native American nation. Critics of Wounded Knee II such as Vine Deloria Jr. have long pointed out that, "[e]veryone doesn't have to do everything that the old Indians did in order to have a modern Indian identity. We don't have to have every male in the tribe do the Sun Dance." Deloria also criticized the "eschatological vision" that the Ghost Dance offered both in the 1890s and the 1970s which, "asserts the cultural superiority of Indian traditions over those of Anglo-Saxon people. The inherent superiority will, it is alleged, become historically manifest." According to Deloria, not only does this ideological position lose sight of possible pragmatic responses to contemporary conditions, but it also endangers the very potency underlying Native American religion. "Truth is in the ever changing experiences of the community," writes Deloria. "For the traditional Indian to fail to appreciate this aspect of [her or] his own heritage is the saddest of all heresies. It means the Indian has unwittingly fallen into the trap of Western religion."
Deloria's position helps us to follow the links that functioned to bring historical meanings for the Ghost Dance and Sun Dance into modern play. Consider the following historical explanation by Mary Crow Dog:
Leonard always thought that the dancers of 1890 had misunderstood Wovoka and his message. They should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their ancient beliefs by practicing Indian religion. For Leonard, dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop - to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago.
Russell Means echoes and elaborates on this critique of the Lakota ghost dancers of 1890.
If the historical claims of Mary Crow Dog and Russell Means sound familiar they should. They mirror the conclusions reached by James Mooney after his extensive investigation of the Ghost Dance Religion from 1890 though 1894 for the Bureau of American Ethnology. Mooney believed that the original doctrine of Wovoka had no military or anti-white elements, but that among the Sioux, "already restless under both old and new grievances, and more lately brought to the edge of starvation by a reduction of rations, the doctrine speedily assumed a hostile meaning." The power of the ghost dance shirts to protect against bullets seemed an important intimation of Lakota intentions. Both Mary Crow Dog and Russell Means appear to agree with Mooney that the Lakota got it wrong in 1890 because of the oppression and deprivation that they suffered, and that Wovoka had it right; return to Indian religion.
Not all of Mooney's contemporaries agreed with his judgment of the Ghost Dance (Fletcher, ect... mentioned above).
Critical principle; Lakota religious practice emerged from core religious concepts that form a fundamentally open system of belief. By the late nineteenth century, if not before, a large contingent of Indian peoples of the Plains, Plateau, the Great Basin, Indian Territory and elsewhere shared the basic elements that made up this open system.
To the concept of an open system of religious belief, it is important to add that religious element