Ghost Dance
The Ghost Dance is a ceremony incorporated into numerous Native American belief systems. According to the millenarian teachings of the Northern Paiute spiritual leader Wovoka, renamed Jack Wilson, proper practice of the dance would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring the spirits to fight on their behalf, end American Westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples throughout the region.
The basis for the Ghost Dance is the circle dance, a traditional Native American dance which involves moving in a circular formation in large groups. The Ghost Dance was first practiced by the Nevada Northern Paiute in 1889. The practice swept throughout much of the Western United States, quickly reaching areas of California and Oklahoma. As the Ghost Dance spread from its original source, different tribes syncretized selective aspects of the ritual with their own beliefs.
The Ghost Dance has been associated with Wovoka's prophecy of an end to colonial expansion while preaching goals of clean living, an honest life, and cross-cultural cooperation by Native Americans. Practice of the Ghost Dance movement was believed to have contributed to Lakota resistance to assimilation under the Dawes Act. The Lakota variation on the Ghost Dance tended to be directed towards millenarianism, an innovation that distinguished the Lakota interpretation from Jack Wilson's original teachings. The Caddo still practice the Ghost Dance today.
History
Paiute influence
The Northern Paiutes living in Mason Valley, in what became the U.S. state of Nevada, were known collectively as the Tövusidökadö at the time of European contact. The Northern Paiute community at this time was thriving upon a subsistence pattern of fishing, hunting wild game, and foraging for pine nuts and roots.The Tövusidökadö tended to follow various spiritual leaders and community organizers. Community events centered on the observance of seasonal ceremonies such as harvests or hunting. In 1869, Hawthorne Wodziwob, a Paiute man, organized a series of community dances to announce a vision. He spoke of a journey to the land of the dead and of promises made to him by the souls of the recently deceased. They promised to return to their loved ones within a period of three to four years.
Wodziwob's peers accepted this vision, likely due to his reputable status as a healer. He urged the populace to dance the common circle dance as was customary during a time of celebration. He continued preaching this message for three years with the help of a local "weather doctor" named Tavibo, father of Wovoka.
Prior to Wodziwob's religious movement, a devastating typhoid fever epidemic struck in 1867. This and other diseases more common among the European population killed approximately one-tenth of the total population, resulting in widespread psychological and emotional trauma. The disruption brought disorder to the economic system and society. Many families were prevented from continuing their nomadic lifestyle.
Round Dance influence
A round dance is a circular community dance held usually around an individual who leads the ceremony. Round dances may be ceremonial or purely social. Usually, the dancers are accompanied by a group of singers who may also play hand drums in unison. The dancers join hands to form a large circle. The dancers move with a side-shuffle step to reflect the long-short pattern of the drum beat, bending their knees to emphasize the pattern.During his studies of the Pacific Northwest tribes the anthropologist Leslie Spier used the term "prophet dances" to describe ceremonial round dances where the participants seek trance, exhortations and prophecy. Spier studied peoples of the Columbia plateau. By the time of his studies the only dances he was allowed to witness were social dances or ones that had already incorporated Christian elements, making investigation of the round dance's origin complicated.
Ghost Dance ceremony
Eyewitness accounts of the Ghost Dance prior to the Wounded Knee Massacre include Ella Cara Deloria and Elaine and Dora Goodale. The Ghost Dance included hundreds of participants in its peak, with many visiting from nearby reservations to participate, with those participants fasting for one to two days prior to the ceremony. On the day of the dance, men and women enter a separate Sweat lodge. During a period of two to four days dancers hold hands with their heads looking upwards and slowly sideways shuffle their feet in a clockwise formation while singing Ghost Dance songs. Shamans will wave eagle wing fans in the faces of the participants.The combination of days-long dancing caused exhaustion, participants fall unconscious into the center, the gaps being closed by other dancers. The goal was to enter a Trance, where the dancer is transported into the afterworld and meets with lost realities, and times before the arrival of Europeans when the Bison was found in abundance. Wailing, cries, and perplexed looks were found from the dancers as they woke from their unconscious state and retold their experiences to the shamans.
The Ghost Dance is danced with Ghost Dance songs. Leonard Crow Dog recalls in his memoir during the Wounded Knee Occupation of 1973 the chants they were singing:
"The whole world is coming, a nation is coming, a nation is coming, the eagle brought the message, says the father, says the father, the whole world is coming, the buffalo are coming, the buffalo are coming, the crow has brought the message, says the father, says the father. The crow nation is coming, says the father, says the father."
The Prophet
, the prophet otherwise known as Jack Wilson, was believed to have had a vision during a solar eclipse on January 1, 1889. It was reportedly not his first time experiencing a vision, but since it was his first as a young adult, he claimed that he was now better equipped, spiritually, to handle this message. Jack had received training from an experienced holy man under his parents' guidance after they realized that he was having difficulty interpreting his previous visions. Jack was also training to be a "weather doctor", following in his father's footsteps. He was known throughout Mason Valley as a gifted and blessed young leader. Preaching a message of universal love, he often presided over circle dances, which symbolized the sun's heavenly path across the sky.Anthropologist James Mooney conducted an interview with Wovoka, whom he called by his English name, prior to 1892. Mooney confirmed that his message matched that given to his fellow Indians. This study compared letters between tribes. According to Mooney, Wilson's letter said he stood before God in heaven and had seen many of his ancestors engaged in their favorite pastimes, and that God showed Wilson a beautiful land filled with wild game and instructed him to return home to tell his people that they must love each other and not fight. He also stated that Jesus was being reincarnated on Earth in 1892, that the people must work, not steal or lie, and that they must not engage in the old practices of war or the traditional self-mutilation practices connected with mourning the dead. He said that if his people abided by these rules, they would be united with their friends and family in the other world, and in God's presence, there would be no sickness, disease, or old age.
Mooney writes that Wilson was given the Ghost Dance and commanded to take it back to his people. He preached that if the five-day dance was performed in the proper intervals, the performers would secure their happiness and hasten the reunion of the living and deceased. Wilson said that the Creator gave him powers over the weather and that he would be the deputy in charge of affairs in the western United States, leaving current President Harrison as God's deputy in the East. Jack claims that he was then told to return home and preach God's message.
Wovoka claimed to have left the presence of God convinced that if every Indian in the West danced the new dance to "hasten the event", all evil in the world would be swept away, leaving a renewed Earth filled with food, love, and faith. Quickly accepted by his Paiute brethren, the new religion was termed, "Dance In A Circle". Because the first European contact with the practice came by way of the Lakota, their expression "Spirit Dance" was adopted as a descriptive title for all such practices. This was subsequently translated as "Ghost Dance".
Recordings, film, cinema, theater and industrialization
Shortly after the commercialisation of Emile Berliner's Gramophone, a small set of Ghost dances were recorded and pressed in 1894, the original masters being held at the Library of Congress. It is unclear who the interpreter of the songs is, possibly James Mooney himself, owing to the interpretation of different tribes' rituals by one same voice.The invention of the Kinetoscope created and developed by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson was a part of the beginning of a movement to cast and film Indigenous North Americans performing ceremonies, dances, and hunting. The kinetoscope was largely popular in the 1890s in both the East and West coast of the United States. These motion pictures were produced to contain a level of shock value to satisfy the viewers who would pay fifty cents to watch it. Films of Indigenous North Americans include a twenty-two second video of "Sioux Ghost Dance," the passing around of the peace pipe, the buffalo dance, and the Omaha war dance.
The Sioux Ghost Dance film offers non-natives an inaccurate depiction of the Ghost Dance. In the film there is a drum, but the dance itself does not include instruments. The dancer's heads are faced downward, hands are holding pipes and moving their feet in a fast-paced motion, whereas the original dance is slow, hands are held together, and heads are usually looking upward. Dancers are crammed into the small stage to accommodate the small space for the kinetoscope to view.
The rise in popularity coincided with Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows where, "The role of Indian people was both essential and anomalous in the Wild West. At least in the big shows, they generally were treated and paid the same as other performers. They were able to travel with their families, and they earned a living not possible to them on their reservations. They were encouraged by Buffalo Bill and others to retain their language and rituals. They gained access to political and economic leaders, and their causes were sometimes argued in the published show programs. Yet they were stereotyped as mounted, war-bonneted warriors, the last impediment to civilization. Thus they had to re-fight a losing war nightly; and their hollow victory in the Little Big Horn enactments demonstrated over and over to their audiences the justification for American conquest.