These Native Americans were murdered just for dancing
The Sioux Ghost Dance terrified white troops
Soldiers watched as members of the Sioux tribe circled the fire slowly, their eyes closed, their feet padding through the dust. They held hands and chanted. They wept and fainted from exhaustion. The white man had taken their land. Maybe if they danced, God would return it.
The Ghost Dance had spread like a brush fire. Across the Western United States, tribes danced to restore the earth to its former, peaceful majesty, and to unite with their fallen ancestors. Some even hoped it would eliminate the white man.
“I hope to God that reinforcements will come before the red devils make their break,” said one American infantry officer.
The troops watched the dance. It went on for days. It felt foreign, like a threat. It scared them. What was it building toward?
In the end, there would be blood, but it would be on their hands.
Two years earlier, on January 1, 1889, Paiute religious leader Wovoka had a vision. He saw God and all those who had died. God told Wovoka he must return and tell his people to be good and love one another, to live in peace with the whites. If they obeyed, they would be reunited with their ancestors on earth. There would be no more death.
Then God gave Wovoka the Ghost Dance. If his people performed it for five consecutive days it would hasten their salvation.
Wovoka began to preach his prophecy. Different tribes translated his speech and passed it rapidly throughout the West. American anthropologist James Mooney received a copy of the “Messiah Letter” while reporting on the Ghost Dance in 1892. In it, Wovoka pleads: “You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.”
Wovoka was already a respected leader by the time of his historic vision. Born in Western Nevada in about 1856, he was orphaned at age 14. A nearby white rancher took him in and raised him under the name Jack Wilson.
Wovoka studied Christian religious doctrine and tribal mysticism, respectively. In the 1880s he learned of an earlier version of the Ghost Dance, proposed in 1870 by Tävibo, a man rumored to be his own father. Wovoka adapted the ritual into his own “Christianized” Ghost Dance, which promised salvation through virtuous behavior. In fact, Wovoka often invoked Jesus by name.
His peaceful prophecy became a movement, a religion in itself. Dozens of tribes across the West adopted the Ghost Dance and its teachings. This led to a variety of interpretations based on each group’s customs, but the main rituals stayed remarkably intact.
That is, until Wounded Knee. Though the Sioux performed the Ghost Dance in peace, according to its “Christian” intent, the military refused to accept it as a valid demonstration of religious protest. It threatened the nation’s decades-old strategy of tribal oppression.
In 1890, the government broke a Lakota treaty by parceling their land into five smaller reservations across Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The maneuver would accommodate new white settlers and divide powerful tribal relationships. Indians were warned to “conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, or forcibly if they must.” The government separated Indian children from their families into Christian boarding schools, where any tribal customs were forbidden, and mandated that everyone else relocate to raise livestock and farm their new land. However, the arid region and its weather produced low yields, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs lost its patience with the “lazy” Indians. It cut rations by half.
Faced with poverty and starvation, Sioux tribes turned to the Ghost Dance in the fall of 1890. BIA agents became alarmed, claiming Indians were becoming militaristic by wearing “ghost shirts,” white shirts believed to repel bullets. (Some scholars believe the the idea came from Mormon temple garments, thought to protect wearers from evil.)
The dancers’ desperation came off as savage and violent to the untrained eye. To a New York Times reporter: “The spectacle was as ghastly as it could be: it showed the Sioux to be insanely religious.” The writer counted 182 “bucks and squaws” dancing around a tree near Wounded Knee Creek. Some 400 others sat watching. “Many of the reds were in war paint” and wore white cotton cloths. Five medicine men waved sticks painted like snakes. Dancers held hands and moved slowly around the tree, shuffling, eyes closed and heads bent to ground. “I see my father, I see my mother, I see my brother, I see my sister,” they chanted. Some cried out in trance. Others fainted from weariness.
Two days later the Sioux were still dancing. Troops became even more nervous and watchful. Indian scout Joseph Culbertson reported the dancers were “better armed to-day than they have ever been before.” Many are taken with the new Ghost Dance “superstition.” Still, Culbertson witnessed no talk of any hostility against whites. Most accounts tell of an exhausted group of Sioux dancing through their desperation. If only they were left alone, “there will be no need of troops; they will kill themselves dancing.”
The New York Times published Culbertson’s letter under the sensational headline: “To Ambush the Soldiers: A Murderous Plan of the Indians Revealed.”
Tension heightened day after day. It was a paralyzing standoff — one side danced while the other tapped his trigger. “When the Indians…wake up to-morrow morning they will find themselves surrounded by the strongest body of United States troops which has been mustered in the West since the defeat of Geronimo,” the Times reported. Days later, “They are being closely watched, for Indian blood runs very thick.”
Then on Dec. 15, agents asked Sitting Bull, a famous Lakota resistance leader, to command his people to cease dancing. He refused. They arrested him. Amidst the struggle, shots were fired on both sides. Sitting Bull was killed.
That’s when the US deployed the Seventh Cavalry.
On Dec. 28, 500 troops escorted about 350 Sioux men, women, and children to Wounded Knee Creek and positioned their Hotchkiss guns over the camp. The following morning soldiers commanded the Indians to disarm. They did, and began another Ghost Dance, praying that the soldiers be scattered like dust in the air. The soldiers gathered remaining guns, but a deaf man named Black Coyote didn’t understand and refused the order. A scuffle ensued, during which a shot rang out. It is unclear from which side. American troops commenced shooting indiscriminately and at close range on mostly unarmed Indian people. As women and children fled into the fields, they were hunted down and shot.
In less than one hour, at least 150 Sioux were killed.
After Wounded Knee, the Ghost Dance was widely criminalized, and forced underground. In the 1970s, Leonard Crow Dog revived the practice as part of the Red Power movement. Congress formally apologized a century later for the injustice of the massacre. But widespread criminalization of peaceful religious worship had led to decades of arrests and suffering.
Wovoka remained well-respected until his death in 1932. Despite obvious flaws in his prophecy, the Ghost Dance symbolized more than blissful resurrection; it represented Native American resistance to white brutality and cultural erasure. In that it was always successful.
But the United States military perceived the Ghost Dance as an act of war. Rather than allow Indians to dance in peace, they slaughtered more than 150 Sioux, half of whom were women and children, in what would become known as the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890.
