The Glasgow Ghost Shirt - iv

[Sometimes people asked me where my interest in Native American history came from. The answer begins here--with the Ghost Dance, a phenomenon I first discovered in Ian Frazier's Great Plains. My own birthright is deeply religious in the European Calvinistic tradition, so I fascinated by a species of religious faith and ferver that Frazier calls "the first American religion." Why do people believe what they do remains a perplexing and fascinating question. Thus, today's installment begins something of an explanation of "the Ghost Dance."]

The problems faced by both Big Foot and Red Cloud, Lakota headmen, in December of 1890 had other origins as well, origins rooted thousands of miles away in Nevada, where a Paiute mystic named Wovoca saw a vision during an eclipse. What he experienced was a beautiful dream of peace and good will, a vision of heaven.

That vision was so blindingly beautiful that First Nations all over the west met in celebration to dance as Wovoka had instructed. A committee of Lakota holy men, appointed by Sitting Bull, had returned from Nevada earlier that year, returned from a meeting with the Paiute, who claimed to be Jesus. Those who traveled returned as converts. Perhaps foremost among them was Kicking Bear, from Cheyenne River, a disciple of a religious ritual dance that became the primary sacrament of what grew into a spectacular new religion.

There was no dancing in the camp at Wounded Knee on December 28, 1890, the night before the massacre; but for just about a year, the phenomenon white people called “the Messiah craze,” a spiritual prairie firestorm had spread throughout the fragmented reservation system, as it had elsewhere throughout the West.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Then purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious; and offer yourselves as sacrifice. Often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their humility for being the conduit for the people’s blessing.

Wovoka, whose Euro-American name was Jack Wilson, considered himself “the Messiah,” a claim that was confusing to some who’d come to believe that Jesus was a white man. Unsure of his own perceptions, Kicking Bear approached Wovoka to see if the man had the tell-tale scars of the crucifixion. His feet were not visible beneath his moccasins, but there was a scar on his arm. Wovoka told the Lakota who’d come to see him that Christ had once left the earth for heaven when he was rejected by white men, but that he’d come back to tell the good news of the return of all that was good and pleasant about life as the people had known it before the coming of the white man.

Wovoka told them and other religious seekers to dance—women and men together, something rare back then in Native religious traditions. He told them to dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance, not to stop until they fell from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind floats upward and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstasy.

Across the American west, dozens of tribes gathered in wide-open spaces to worship, to participate in the ritual Wovoka created. It was a frenetic, mystic ceremony, a blend of Christianity, mysticism, and Native ritual, but spread abundantly by the sheer desperation created by the Lakota’s sense of the imminent end of a way of life they knew and loved. If the people would dance, Wovoka had told them, beauty would return because the Wakan Tanka had heard their prayers and felt their suffering. He’d bring with him the old ones, the ancestors—hence the name, “the Ghost Dance.” The buffalo would return as well, and once again, bountifully, the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white man invaders, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their desperation comforted.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple really, and that compelling. It was a vision of a beatific afterlife.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. Throughout the newly created Great Sioux Reservations open belief in the Ghost Dance flourished, nowhere more dedicatedly than at Pine Ridge, where somewhere close to half the people were converted. At Cheyenne River, one in five became apostles of Wovoca’s teaching and became dancers; but the numbers and the percentage of believers grew among those Lakota in the reservations farther south.