The Ghost Dance: A Prayer the Government Read as a Threat

In eighteen eighty-nine, a Northern Paiute spiritual leader named Wovoka had a vision during a solar eclipse. In the vision, the dead ancestors would return, the buffalo herds would come back, and the world would be restored to what it had been before the catastrophe of dispossession. The practice that spread from this vision was called the Ghost Dance. It required no weapons. Its instructions were to dance and to pray.

By eighteen ninety, the dance had reached the Lakota reservations. The United States Indian agent at Standing Rock reported it to Washington as a military threat. Other agents followed. The resulting alarm set in motion the order to arrest Sitting Bull in December of eighteen ninety, and the military deployment to Pine Ridge Reservation that ended at Wounded Knee Creek on December twenty-ninth.

The Ghost Dance shirts worn by some Lakota practitioners were ceremonial garments. The claim that Lakota people believed the shirts were bulletproof came primarily from military and government reports. Historians who have examined the original accounts have since questioned whether this belief was as widespread among practitioners as official reports claimed, and have noted that the bulletproofing story served the narrative purpose of establishing the dancers as deluded and dangerous.

The dance was not armed resistance. It was a spiritual response to the near-total destruction of Plains life: the buffalo gone, the land gone, the children taken, the old ways forbidden. The government converted a prayer into a military threat. The Hotchkiss guns were already in position before the first shot was fired.