The Ghost Dance: Ritual, Resistance, and a New Religion

The Ghost Dance movement arose among the Paiute community in what is now known as the United States before spreading to the Lakota, Shoshoni, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Pawnee, Wichita, Kiowa, Comanche and Delaware communities among others (Kehoe 2006, 8). It was during a time of dispossession, cultural destruction, ritual repression, famine, and starvation. In response to these conditions, and the real threat to the way of life of the original inhabitants of the land, the Ghost Dance was a ritual ceremony drawn from a series of visions. Its stated purpose was to restore society and the land to the way it was before the invasion of Euro Americans. This movement drew from a cosmology in which the people related directly to the spirit world, and ritual dances were part of the fabric of society and the balance between humans and the earth. These realities have led numerous scholars to suggest the Ghost Dance movement was a revitalization movement[1] (Kehoe 2006, Wallace 2003, McLoughlin 1978) as the practitioners struggled to resist their destruction, preserve their culture—all with an aim at deliverance from the consequences of conquest and cultural genocide. We will be looking at the role of dance as a space for cultural resistance and adaptation and why this example suggests a revision to our ideas about religion is necessary in a postmodern world. 

Below you will find the first part of my paper. 

Here are some of my sources:

- Andersson, Rani-Henrik. A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices of the Ghost Dance. University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. 

-Bear, Luther Standing. My People, the Sioux.  University of Nebraska Press, 1975. 

-Good Feather, Doug, and Doug Red Hail Pineda. Think Indigenous: Native American Spirituality for a Modern World. Hay House, Inc., 2021.

-Hittman, Michael. Wovoka and the Ghost Dance. University of Nebraska Press, 1998.

-Kehoe, Alice B. The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory and Revitalization. Waveland Press, 2006.

 -Spier, Leslie. The Prophet Dance of the Northwest and Its Derivatives: The Sources of the Ghost Dance. George Banta Publishing Company, 1935. 

-Warren, Louis S. God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. Basic Books, 2017. 

- Wenger, Tisa. We Have A Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom. University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

A note on terminology 

How we refer to and imagine the indigenous, and/or native peoples of the Americas is a major concern for this project. This is a discursive vocabulary also impacts the way we think about the category of “religion” generally. In this case the indigenous people in question have “almost been created anew within the categories of the disciplines of the human sciences” (Long 1999, 4). Literature, history, and popular culture have employed the phrase “Indians” which was imprecise and geographically incorrect even from the fifteenth century. Not only did not all indigenous people practice the Ghost Dance, even amongst the groups where it was most popular there is not a uniformity of identity among the broader indigenous culture outside of the Western lens which construes “Indians” as a category (Andersson 2018). The Ghost Dance appealed to members of many different groups who identified as distinct tribes and peoples even at the time, and this diversity of culture continues until the present.

In contemporary discourse, some observers insist there is a preferred terminology to describe the diversity of indigenous people in the Americas: indigenous people, First Nations etc. This is not really the case, as becomes evident if you ask people from this background how they self-identify. Indigenous people have a huge diversity of language, culture, and identity and there remains tension about naming a group something as opposed to how a group refers to itself. While recognizing this incongruity, we will attempt to use tribal names when possible (Lakota, Paiute) but we must also recognize the terminology (Indians/Native Americans) which runs through the literature and society at large. 

The second major point of concern is the idea of “religion,” which can be defined a hundred different ways in theory, practice and as a field. The Ghost Dance Movement was characterized by White observers or scholars as a “craze” or an “outbreak” and was reported as such in the newspapers of the time. It was denounced by the Indian Agents (Warren 2017, 235, 254-5) vehemently denounced by government officials, and U.S. population at large (Warren 35, 214-5). The movement was framed as hostile, threatening, “heathen,”[2]  and is spoken of as if it was “catching,”unstoppable and disturbing (Boyd 1891; Andersson 2018; Kehoe 2006; Dunbar-Ortiz 2014, 154). As described by Missionary Myron Eells, “It seemed to be as catching, to use the expression of the Indians, as the measles” (Mooney 1973, 748). The “danger” of the dance as a social disrupter and threat to peace is rhetorically made clear in reports such as “Thousands of Indians were ‘crazed by the religion’ and ready to fight” (in Andersson 2018, 13). This turn meant that a ritual action tied to the everyday life of the Lakota becomes a hostile even un-American activity (Boyd 2018, 180).

This was true to the extent that there was an 1883 Religious Crimes Code which authorized government agents to “stop any Indian religious practices that they believed to be immoral, subversive of government authority, or impediments to the adoption of white civilization” (Wenger 2009, 39). In the eyes of the government, the Indians were less than people, their worldview primitive, their rituals a “false religion”(Wenger 2009, 42).