Ghost dances and cargo cults. They are deeply embedded within the American narrative. In times of stress there is both a wariness and susceptibility to prophets, from the authentic to the snake oil salespeople. An earthly paradise beckons, and America is always ready….
Dead can dance…The Ghost Dance, as this cult came to be called, was not something suddenly thought up by Jack Wilson-Wovoka. In the Great Basin the belief had existed, probably long before the arrival of whites, that the dead would return and that this return could be encouraged by dancing. A Ghost Dance movement twenty years earlier had predicted the return of the dead and the destruction of whites in a cataclysm.
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The nineteenth-century wild west shows did a great deal to firmly entrench the stereotype of the American Indian in American culture. This stereotype, loosely based on generic Plains Indian cultures, portrays Indians as savages, as a vanishing people destined to go extinct in the face of American superiority, and hindrances to the inevitability of Manifest Destiny.
The most famous of the wild west shows was organized by William F. (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody. He began to put together his Wild West show in 1882. The show included Indian dances and ceremonies, but portrayed the cowboy as the true hero of the West and the Indians as warring savages. Buffalo Bill viewed his show as being highly educational. The dances and ceremonies were almost exclusively from the Plains tribes and thus Plains Indians came to represent all Indians.—Read More:http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/28/1049400/-Indians-101-Wild-West-Shows
As Wovonka’s peaceful teachings spread, they became confused, or rather appropriated by the proponents of this earlier, more violent dance. The Plains tribes heard about Wovonka and sent delegations to talk to him. Ironically enough, these delegations, which would spark the last major rebellion against the whites, traveled on the white man’s railroad to spread the news of the Ghost Dance, and they told about it in English, their only common tongue. The delegates reported back on Wovoka’s teachings of love, absence of quarreling, and living in peace with the whites, in a very garbles and bastardized form. They told the Plains tribes that dancing would bring back not only their ancestors bearing gifts but also the great hers of bison, and that the whites would be wiped off the face of the earth by a landslide that would miraculously leave all their possessions behind. Best of all, the Plains Indians would be invulnerable to white attacks because the ghost shirts were supposed to be bullet proof.
—John Sloan — “Indian Detour” — 1927 — buses, tourists, and travelers surround a group so Santa Fe Indians while performing a ritual dance! No longer is it the wagons surrounding migrating settlers, as was the case in the 19th century. A new era of freedom, indeed. —Read More:http://automobileandamericanlife.blogspot.ca/2010/08/john-sloan-his-paintings-that-included.html
The Shoshonis and the Arapaho began dancing at once, and several other Plains tribes soon followed. The Ghost dance attacked in a particularly virulent way the Sioux, the largest of the Plains tribes. As punishment for their intransigence, in 1890 they were being systematically starved into submission by the cutting off of their rations, on their wasteland reservations in the Dakotas. Present among the Sioux was the spark to ignite a conflagration: Sitting Bull, a white hating leader and a veteran of the 1876 massacre of Custer’s cavalry.
The white authorities became alarmed about the spread of the Ghost Dance, and they alerted the army to put an end to the movement. Sitting Bull was killed in a moment of confusion while he was being arrested. Two weeks later, at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, three hundred of his followers, mostly women and children, were massacred by trigger happy U.S. cavalrymen.
Wounded Knee marked the end of the hopes of the Plains tribes and of the Ghost Dance movement itself, although it lingered on until the 1930′s. Its promise had inflamed the Plains indians, but like a prairie fire, the movement burned itself out quickly.
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