August 10, 2009 • 12 mins
During an eclipse in 1889, Jack Wilson dreamed that he died, spoke with God and returned to spread a message through the resurrection of a ritual called the Ghost Dance. Learn more about the Ghost Dance in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today. It's my cocost,
Sarah Downy. Hey Katie, how are you doing? Hey Sarah.
Today we are going to talk about the ghost Dance. Yeah,
(00:23):
the ghost dance. It actually was kind of a dance craze,
but more than that, it is a religion. So not
a relative of thriller. Okay, And if you've heard of
the ghost dance, it's probably in reference to sitting Bowl,
but we won't get to that until later. Yeah, it
actually started in eighteen sixty nine UM with this guy
(00:45):
wad zawob Um who started up this kind of cult
religion UM that focused on dancing and singing UM. And
it's spread to California and Oregon tribes and then died
out or was kind of transformed into other cults, and
it came back with a guy named wo Woka also
(01:07):
known as Jack Wilson, who brought it back. I think
in the is it the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, the
eighteen eighties among the piute, But you know a little
bit more about his background life I think than I do. Yeah,
he was actually raised by white people from his teens
and was strongly influenced by Presbyterians and Mormons. And during
(01:34):
an eclipse on January one, eighteen eighty nine, he had
a vision, and it was some vision. He dreamt that
he died, spoke with God in heaven, and then became
a messenger to spread a dance and millennial message. And
if you're saying some Christian overtones in this, that would
make sense. But he also said that the white people
(01:56):
would disappear from the earth and all of the new
of American dead would come back to the earth and
live free from disease and free from all the unhappiness
that they were currently experiencing. Their lands would be returned,
their friend supplies their way of life. There would be
game for everyone again. And you have to remember at
this time what was going on with Native Americans in
(02:18):
the United States government. Things weren't going well. To put
it mildly, the Native Americans had been put on reservations
and pretty much every treaty that the government made with
them was broken quickly broken. And the government was getting
a lot more violent too, and they would put the
Native American tribes on a reservation, but as soon as
(02:39):
they decided they wanted that land, they would move them
somewhere else. And so they just get pushing and pushing
them two places where things were getting worse and worse.
So this was right, and you know, they'd send them
to South Dakota and then say, okay, farm and hold
up your end of the deal. Well, in some parts
of the farmers or it wasn't their way of life
and the land might not be so great for timing. Right. Um,
(03:03):
So he had this vision and Uh, part of the
deal was dancing and singing and clean living could hasten
the millennial apocalypse basically, um, and not drinking alcohol, basically
abstaining from things associated with the white people. Right. And
(03:28):
the actual dance was supposed to happen for five days
and on the last night they would dance until dawn,
and you were supposed to repeat it every six weeks.
And if you're wondering what the experience was like, it
was hypnotic trances and shaking. According to one source I found,
and Sarah and I both listened to a recording from
the Library of Congress. It was very the recordings we
(03:52):
heard seemed to be one male singer. We couldn't tell
if there was instrumentation in the background because they were
very old recordings and kind of scratchy, but it was
mournful and kind of in a minor tune. I mean,
it sounded appropriate for something called a ghost dance and
something that's trying to bring back the dead. And most
(04:14):
of the lyrics I could find, I guess to the
songs were all to the father and father come home,
or Father here I am, or the father will return.
And so you just have to picture this group of
people who have been oppressed constantly for the past several decades,
and there's starvation is rampant at this time. A lot
of people are sick, and the people are feeling hopeless,
(04:38):
and here comes this man who has this vision for
them where their lives will be returned to something wonderful.
And the thing about it is it gives them a
sense of agency. There are things that they can do
to make it happen. And the songs and dances were
actually revealed in the visions, the lyrics, the right steps
(04:58):
and all that um and dancers would fall into trances
and sometimes they would receive new songs from their own
visions and pass those on UM. So ghost Dance ended
up spreading quickly and very far. It made it as
far as the Missouri River, the Canadian border, the Sierra
(05:19):
Nevada in northern Texas. So UM emissaries would actually come
in and meet with Wavoca uh To, you know, initially,
probably to check out what was going on. You know,
they might have heard something and might have been a
little skeptical initially or just being polite, you know, wanting
to send an ambassador to him, but would come back,
you know, firm converts and the government wasn't too thrilled
(05:44):
about this taking back their culture thing. And even though
it was pacifist, you mentioned that it was very much
It was not a militant movement at all. It was
something that would happen naturally. I think the idea was
that the earth would be set down again and all
the white people would be underneath the surface of the earth. Yea.
The moral code to bring on the millennium vision actually
(06:09):
forbade war against Native Americans or whites. A central tenet
of it was making peace with the white people, because
after all, wouldn't be there after so long, because they'd
be buried so you might as well. But again the
government wasn't thrilled with it. The agents who were out
in the field, We're sending messages back that people were
(06:31):
joining up in these big groups and they didn't know
it was going on. And in this case, fear of
the unknown led to a lot of distrust. Yeah, they
did not see the Christian connection to this, not at all,
even though basically Wovoca was the Christ. He was considered
a messiah bringing a message. He actually performed a self
(06:51):
inflicted stigmata on his hands and feet. Yeah, believing Jesus
said come to the Native Americans as a new missilea A.
So there was a strong Christian element, but that was
it was still very disturbing to the government. Well, they
weren't used to seeing people dancing in circles, and it
was apparently very hypnotic to watch, and it was rather
(07:15):
frenzied and you know, with people falling down and going
into trances. It wasn't what they were used to. And
about this point is where sitting Bowl comes in, because
in eight ninety the Ghost Dance reaches the Lakota Sioux,
the westernmost part of the Sioux tribes, which coincided with
(07:37):
the Sioux outbreak, even though they're unrelated, kind of happened
around the same time, and it was too Sioux medicine
men who actually started the idea of ghost shirts, which
was not linked to anything well Voca had thought of UM.
The idea was that if you wore a ghost shirt,
you could stop the bullets from white men, and this
(08:01):
kind of led to an increased militancy UM and you
know something that was very at odds with the pacifism
right because Booca wasn't talking about bullets at all. Bullets
were not involved in Boca's ghost dance. And some people
think these UM protective shirts might have come from Mormons
(08:21):
and their ideas of special clothing, and that they've been
adopted by this tribe. But they decorated their shirts with
red paint and with feathers and ornamentation, but they didn't
wear hats or any kind of head dress, which was
unusual because they were trying to repudiate all the white
men's trappings and that was one of them. So in
eighteen ninety a suit Indian named Kicking Bear went to
(08:43):
visit Sitting Bull at Standing Rock and he told him
all about Wovoka and how many Native Americans were becoming
interested in his ideas, and he told him of Bovoca's
prophecy and about the grass growing and the game coming back,
and you know how it would save the people. Sitting
Bowl agreed to get involved in the movement and to
(09:04):
help the people. And this is the point when the
government really got involved and they wanted to stop it
because there was this large gathering of people, some of
them were coming to see Sitting Bowl and they were
planning to do this big dance, and the government agents
had had enough and the Ghost Dance had basically finally
gotten too big for the government, and they were afraid
(09:25):
it would turn into some sort of militant uprising. And
it turned out that they ended up struggling, and Sitting
Bowl was killed accidentally, as were several police officers. And
that night the who banded together anyways to come and
do the dance. So soon after that the army started
to round up Native American leaders um and arrest them,
(09:49):
and uh one particular leader who was elderly and ill
big Foot wanted peath and brought his band of people
to an encampment at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and uh,
it sounded I don't know if it was an accident.
People aren't sure or if Yeah, there's a lot of
(10:11):
disagreement if this guy's gun just went off, but one
of Bigfoots span fired a shot, and all of a sudden,
the soldiers were shooting at the group, which included women
and children, and the men in Bigfoots group went to
retrieve their weapons and started shooting, and it ended up
(10:33):
just being a huge massacre, which is kind of thought
of as the less stand Right. And that was December
twenty Nights in eight nine, and I keep finding conflicting
numbers on how many suit were killed at Wounded NY,
but it seems to be around two hundred and there
was something like four hundred and fifty soldiers just opening
(10:53):
fire on you know, unarmed women, children and men. So
that was kind of the end of ghost dancing to uh.
It didn't really go much further than that. Versions of
it continued into the twentieth century, but it was actually
more of a I don't know, a stepping stone for
(11:14):
some people getting closer to Christianity and some people getting
closer to traditional shamanism. And it's interesting because some historians
look at this as just a sad time in US history,
the conflict between the US government and the Native American
people's and other people will actually go back and try
to say that it's a good example of Native Americans
(11:35):
being militant, and therefore the government was justified in trying
to squelch this revitalization of culture, which I would say
I ascribed to the former at that point, because this
movement started off as something that was completely peaceful and
(11:55):
it just got wrapped up in a lot of violence
and miss can indication. One of the government agents at
the time, there's only one who stood up for them,
and she said, well, if it was you know, Seventh
day Adventists, you know, going out and doing their religious things,
she wouldn't be worried. But just because it's Native Americans
and their religion, you've decided that it means that they're
(12:16):
out to get us, and they weren't. She was the
voice of reason, and no one wanted to listen to her.
If you'd like to learn more about Native American culture
and check out the Stuff You missed in History Class blog,
come to the website at www dot how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(12:38):
you think, send an email to podcast and how stuff
works dot com, and be sure to check out this
stuff you Missed in History Class blog on the how
stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and joining me today. It's my cocost,
Sarah Downy. Hey Katie, how are you doing? Hey Sarah.
Today we are going to talk about the ghost Dance. Yeah,
(00:23):
the ghost dance. It actually was kind of a dance craze,
but more than that, it is a religion. So not
a relative of thriller. Okay, And if you've heard of
the ghost dance, it's probably in reference to sitting Bowl,
but we won't get to that until later. Yeah, it
actually started in eighteen sixty nine UM with this guy
(00:45):
wad zawob Um who started up this kind of cult
religion UM that focused on dancing and singing UM. And
it's spread to California and Oregon tribes and then died
out or was kind of transformed into other cults, and
it came back with a guy named wo Woka also
(01:07):
known as Jack Wilson, who brought it back. I think
in the is it the eighteen seventies, eighteen eighties, the
eighteen eighties among the piute, But you know a little
bit more about his background life I think than I do. Yeah,
he was actually raised by white people from his teens
and was strongly influenced by Presbyterians and Mormons. And during
(01:34):
an eclipse on January one, eighteen eighty nine, he had
a vision, and it was some vision. He dreamt that
he died, spoke with God in heaven, and then became
a messenger to spread a dance and millennial message. And
if you're saying some Christian overtones in this, that would
make sense. But he also said that the white people
(01:56):
would disappear from the earth and all of the new
of American dead would come back to the earth and
live free from disease and free from all the unhappiness
that they were currently experiencing. Their lands would be returned,
their friend supplies their way of life. There would be
game for everyone again. And you have to remember at
this time what was going on with Native Americans in
(02:18):
the United States government. Things weren't going well. To put
it mildly, the Native Americans had been put on reservations
and pretty much every treaty that the government made with
them was broken quickly broken. And the government was getting
a lot more violent too, and they would put the
Native American tribes on a reservation, but as soon as
(02:39):
they decided they wanted that land, they would move them
somewhere else. And so they just get pushing and pushing
them two places where things were getting worse and worse.
So this was right, and you know, they'd send them
to South Dakota and then say, okay, farm and hold
up your end of the deal. Well, in some parts
of the farmers or it wasn't their way of life
and the land might not be so great for timing. Right. Um,
(03:03):
So he had this vision and Uh, part of the
deal was dancing and singing and clean living could hasten
the millennial apocalypse basically, um, and not drinking alcohol, basically
abstaining from things associated with the white people. Right. And
(03:28):
the actual dance was supposed to happen for five days
and on the last night they would dance until dawn,
and you were supposed to repeat it every six weeks.
And if you're wondering what the experience was like, it
was hypnotic trances and shaking. According to one source I found,
and Sarah and I both listened to a recording from
the Library of Congress. It was very the recordings we
(03:52):
heard seemed to be one male singer. We couldn't tell
if there was instrumentation in the background because they were
very old recordings and kind of scratchy, but it was
mournful and kind of in a minor tune. I mean,
it sounded appropriate for something called a ghost dance and
something that's trying to bring back the dead. And most
(04:14):
of the lyrics I could find, I guess to the
songs were all to the father and father come home,
or Father here I am, or the father will return.
And so you just have to picture this group of
people who have been oppressed constantly for the past several decades,
and there's starvation is rampant at this time. A lot
of people are sick, and the people are feeling hopeless,
(04:38):
and here comes this man who has this vision for
them where their lives will be returned to something wonderful.
And the thing about it is it gives them a
sense of agency. There are things that they can do
to make it happen. And the songs and dances were
actually revealed in the visions, the lyrics, the right steps
(04:58):
and all that um and dancers would fall into trances
and sometimes they would receive new songs from their own
visions and pass those on UM. So ghost Dance ended
up spreading quickly and very far. It made it as
far as the Missouri River, the Canadian border, the Sierra
(05:19):
Nevada in northern Texas. So UM emissaries would actually come
in and meet with Wavoca uh To, you know, initially,
probably to check out what was going on. You know,
they might have heard something and might have been a
little skeptical initially or just being polite, you know, wanting
to send an ambassador to him, but would come back,
you know, firm converts and the government wasn't too thrilled
(05:44):
about this taking back their culture thing. And even though
it was pacifist, you mentioned that it was very much
It was not a militant movement at all. It was
something that would happen naturally. I think the idea was
that the earth would be set down again and all
the white people would be underneath the surface of the earth. Yea.
The moral code to bring on the millennium vision actually
(06:09):
forbade war against Native Americans or whites. A central tenet
of it was making peace with the white people, because
after all, wouldn't be there after so long, because they'd
be buried so you might as well. But again the
government wasn't thrilled with it. The agents who were out
in the field, We're sending messages back that people were
(06:31):
joining up in these big groups and they didn't know
it was going on. And in this case, fear of
the unknown led to a lot of distrust. Yeah, they
did not see the Christian connection to this, not at all,
even though basically Wovoca was the Christ. He was considered
a messiah bringing a message. He actually performed a self
(06:51):
inflicted stigmata on his hands and feet. Yeah, believing Jesus
said come to the Native Americans as a new missilea A.
So there was a strong Christian element, but that was
it was still very disturbing to the government. Well, they
weren't used to seeing people dancing in circles, and it
was apparently very hypnotic to watch, and it was rather
(07:15):
frenzied and you know, with people falling down and going
into trances. It wasn't what they were used to. And
about this point is where sitting Bowl comes in, because
in eight ninety the Ghost Dance reaches the Lakota Sioux,
the westernmost part of the Sioux tribes, which coincided with
(07:37):
the Sioux outbreak, even though they're unrelated, kind of happened
around the same time, and it was too Sioux medicine
men who actually started the idea of ghost shirts, which
was not linked to anything well Voca had thought of UM.
The idea was that if you wore a ghost shirt,
you could stop the bullets from white men, and this
(08:01):
kind of led to an increased militancy UM and you
know something that was very at odds with the pacifism
right because Booca wasn't talking about bullets at all. Bullets
were not involved in Boca's ghost dance. And some people
think these UM protective shirts might have come from Mormons
(08:21):
and their ideas of special clothing, and that they've been
adopted by this tribe. But they decorated their shirts with
red paint and with feathers and ornamentation, but they didn't
wear hats or any kind of head dress, which was
unusual because they were trying to repudiate all the white
men's trappings and that was one of them. So in
eighteen ninety a suit Indian named Kicking Bear went to
(08:43):
visit Sitting Bull at Standing Rock and he told him
all about Wovoka and how many Native Americans were becoming
interested in his ideas, and he told him of Bovoca's
prophecy and about the grass growing and the game coming back,
and you know how it would save the people. Sitting
Bowl agreed to get involved in the movement and to
(09:04):
help the people. And this is the point when the
government really got involved and they wanted to stop it
because there was this large gathering of people, some of
them were coming to see Sitting Bowl and they were
planning to do this big dance, and the government agents
had had enough and the Ghost Dance had basically finally
gotten too big for the government, and they were afraid
(09:25):
it would turn into some sort of militant uprising. And
it turned out that they ended up struggling, and Sitting
Bowl was killed accidentally, as were several police officers. And
that night the who banded together anyways to come and
do the dance. So soon after that the army started
to round up Native American leaders um and arrest them,
(09:49):
and uh one particular leader who was elderly and ill
big Foot wanted peath and brought his band of people
to an encampment at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, and uh,
it sounded I don't know if it was an accident.
People aren't sure or if Yeah, there's a lot of
(10:11):
disagreement if this guy's gun just went off, but one
of Bigfoots span fired a shot, and all of a sudden,
the soldiers were shooting at the group, which included women
and children, and the men in Bigfoots group went to
retrieve their weapons and started shooting, and it ended up
(10:33):
just being a huge massacre, which is kind of thought
of as the less stand Right. And that was December
twenty Nights in eight nine, and I keep finding conflicting
numbers on how many suit were killed at Wounded NY,
but it seems to be around two hundred and there
was something like four hundred and fifty soldiers just opening
(10:53):
fire on you know, unarmed women, children and men. So
that was kind of the end of ghost dancing to uh.
It didn't really go much further than that. Versions of
it continued into the twentieth century, but it was actually
more of a I don't know, a stepping stone for
(11:14):
some people getting closer to Christianity and some people getting
closer to traditional shamanism. And it's interesting because some historians
look at this as just a sad time in US history,
the conflict between the US government and the Native American
people's and other people will actually go back and try
to say that it's a good example of Native Americans
(11:35):
being militant, and therefore the government was justified in trying
to squelch this revitalization of culture, which I would say
I ascribed to the former at that point, because this
movement started off as something that was completely peaceful and
(11:55):
it just got wrapped up in a lot of violence
and miss can indication. One of the government agents at
the time, there's only one who stood up for them,
and she said, well, if it was you know, Seventh
day Adventists, you know, going out and doing their religious things,
she wouldn't be worried. But just because it's Native Americans
and their religion, you've decided that it means that they're
(12:16):
out to get us, and they weren't. She was the
voice of reason, and no one wanted to listen to her.
If you'd like to learn more about Native American culture
and check out the Stuff You missed in History Class blog,
come to the website at www dot how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Visit how stuff works dot com. Let us know what
(12:38):
you think, send an email to podcast and how stuff
works dot com, and be sure to check out this
stuff you Missed in History Class blog on the how
stuff works dot com home page
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