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

The Ghost Dance Movement is historically and culturally complex and open to misrepresentation and misinterpretation. This partly stems from the Ghost Dance’s discursive association with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 as a result of the governmental response to the movement. Misunderstood and mis-framed by the government at the time, the Ghost Dance movement did not end with that massacre, but expanded in subsequent years and has appeared again in the twentieth century (Warren 2017; Wenger 2009; Kehoe 2006). Instead of being understood as an effort on the part of the Ghost Dancers to address their conditions using the ritual actions of their past, the entire popular record of the Ghost Dance emphasizes this violent “end,” while obfuscating the ongoing presence of indigenous people, dance, and cosmovision in the United States continuing to today.