How We Believe, 2nd Ed.

by Michael Shermer

  Wovoka’s influence and following grew, and by the 1880s real-world hope for the survival of Native American culture was fading fast. In 1881 their great leader Sitting Bull surrendered after a long and bitter struggle. Where the plains were once covered with the herds of 60 million buffalo, by 1883 a scientific expedition counted a mere 200 head. Finally, any possibility of peaceful coexistence of whites and Indians was greatly inhibited by the government’s bureaucratic and military actions, driven by the administration’s Indian policy, succinctly summarized by President Benjamin Harrison:

  First, the anomalous position heretofore occupied by the Indians in this country can no longer be maintained.

  Second, the logic of events demands the absorption of the Indians into our national life not as Indians but as American citizens.

  Third, as soon as wise conservation will permit it, the relations of the Indians to the government must rest solely upon the recognitian of their individuality [they had to become legal citizens of the United States and not members of an Indian tribe or nation].

  Fourth, the individual must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.

  Fifth, compulsory education.

  Sixth, tribal relationship should be broken.

  Part of the “absorption” process included forcing the Indians to abandon hunting and take up farming. Unfortunately a drought struck the West in the spring and summer of 1890. forcing many of the reservations to go on starvation rations. Some Native Americans tried to return to the ways of their ancestors by “hunting” the cattle rationed to them by the government, but in July this was prohibited by Harrison’s new Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Thomas J. Morgan, who declared it a savage holdover from a now-banned primitive way of life. By January 1889, the Indians were essentially finished, and the Ghost Dance was becoming more appealing by the day.

  Quite by chance on that first day of January 1889, Wovoka was ill with fever when the solar eclipse approached. As the shadow engulfed him he fell into a hallucination in which he envisioned himself taken to heaven where he could see and speak with God. The Smithsonian anthropologist James Mooney, who documented the Ghost Dance, explains what happened next:

  He saw God, with all the people who had died long ago engaged in their old-time sports and occupations, all happy and forever young. It was a pleasant land and full of game. After showing him all, God told him he must go back and tell his people they must be good and love one another, have no quarreling, and live in peace with the whites; that they must work, and not lie or steal; that they must put away all the old practices that savored of war; that if they faithfully obeyed his instructions they would at last be reunited with their friends in this other world, where there would be no more death or sickness or old age. He was then given the dance which he was commanded to bring back to his people. By performing this dance at intervals, for five consecutive days each time, they would secure this happiness to themselves and hasten the event.

  The umbra of the eclipse receded and the light of day illuminated Wovoka’s prophetic mission. The more he spoke, the more his people listened. Indians from districts far and wide came to sit at his feet. Mormons debated whether Wovoka could be the fulfillment of Joseph Smith’s prophecy that the Messiah would appear in 1890 (many Mormons believed that Indians were descendants of one of the “Ten Lost Tribes” of the Hebrews). His confidence growing by the week, Wovoka even dictated a letter to President Harrison, explaining that if he would be allowed to deliver God’s message to the people of Nevada and the rest of the country he could control the weather, in particular making it rain whenever he wanted (recall this was a drought year). The letter was never delivered.

  While Wovoka called himself a messiah who was like Jesus, he never said he was the Christ. Despite this disclaimer, many (both whites and Indians) referred to him as such, and this started a long process that would cascade into tragedy twelve months later at a creek whose name has become synonymous with the Ghost Dance. As Wovoka’s fame grew and Indian delegates from dozens of nations came to listen, white settlers became concerned that something more than a peaceful dance was taking place. The Indian delegates took home with them blessed tokens of Wovoka’s power (red ocher, magpie feathers, pine nuts, robes of rabbit fur), and there launched their own Ghost Dance ceremonies. Wovoka instructed them as follows:

  Grandfather said when he die never no cry. no hurt anybody. no fight, good behave always, it will give you satisfaction, this young man, he is a good Father and mother, don’t tell no white man. Jesus was on ground, he just like cloud. Everybody is alive agin, I don’t know when they will here, may be this fall or in spring.

  You make dance for six weeks night, and put you foot [food?] in dance to eat for every body and wash in the water. that is all to tell, I am in to you. and you will received a good words from him some time.

  The continual and repetitive motion of the dance, conducted for hours on end, produced profound emotional experiences for the dancers. Some went into a trance, others collapsed and writhed on the ground. It was a spiritual journey from the profane to the sacred. Within months the new religion was taken up by the Utes, Shoshoni, and Washo in Nevada; the Mohave, Cohonino, and Pai in Arizona; and the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Assiniboin, Mandan, Arikara, Caddo, Kichai, Kiowa, Pawnee, Wichita, Comanche, Delaware, Oto, and Sioux in scattered regions throughout the west from California to Oklahoma, and from Texas to Canada. While the ceremony had the common theme of messianic rebirth, the dances varied in detail and were given different names, including “dance in a circle,” “the Father’s Dance,” “dance with clasped hands,” and “spirit dance.”

  Wovoka, a Paiute Indian and self-proclaimed messiah who spread the salvation of the Ghost Dance.

  Unfortunately for the Native Americans, Indian delegates from the other nations were not the only ones aware of the Ghost Dance. White settlers grew wary, concerned about what the dance might do to stir up trouble, stimulating officials in government to look into the matter. Wovoka’s peaceful dance of renewal began to escalate into a war dance when his disciples (as most disciples are wont to do) added their own components to the religion. By the spring of 1890 the Lakota Sioux leader Kicking Bear, not content to give his fate over to the gods, introduced special clothing into the ceremony, declaring “the bullets will not go through these shirts and dresses, so they all have these dresses for war.” Wovoka never said anything about war—just the opposite—but Kicking Bear was not about to go peacefully into the closing of the American West.

  Someone on the Pine Ridge Reservation told a local resident named Charles L. Hyde about this new development, and on May 29 he wrote to the Secretary of the Interior that he heard the Sioux were plotting a rebellion. Hyde’s letter was passed along to the Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, who in turn sent copies to the agents of the various Sioux reservations. They were to check it out and report back to Washington. Talk of bulletproof vests and the disappearance of whites did not sound like peaceful absorption to white bureaucrats.

  Ghost dancers (photographed by anthropologist James Mooney).

  Arguably the most famous Indian of the time was Sitting Bull, associated with the massacre of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and later a star in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show. The government asked Sitting Bull (through an agent named James McLaughlin) to persuade his people to stop the Ghost Dance. He agreed to try if McLaughlin would accompany him to see Wovoka first to determine if there was really anything to fear. McLaughlin declined to go, and on top of that on November 19 he asked permission to withhold all food rations from Indians in Sitting Bull’s village. Tensions were mounting. Virtually all activities on the Sioux reservations ceased with the exception of the Ghost Dance. At the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota the newly appointed (and now frightened) agent sent a telegram of alarm to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, dated October 30:

  Your Department has been informed of the damage resulting from these dances and of th
e danger attending them of the crazy Indians doing serious damage to others … . The only remedy for this matter is the use of military and until this is done you need not expect any progress from these people on the other hand you will be made to realize that they are tearing down more in a day than the Government can build in a month.

  Two weeks later President Harrison ordered the Secretary of War to suppress “any threatened outbreak.” Word spread around the country that the Indians were planning one final apocalyptic war against the whites. On October 28, the Chicago Tribune ran this headline:

  TO WIPE OUT THE WHITES

  WHAT THE INDIANS EXPECT OF THE COMING MESSIAH

  FEARS OF AN OUTBREAK

  OLD SITTING BULL STIRRING UP THE EXCITED REDSKINS

  The Chicago Herald, Harper’s Weekly, and the Illustrated American all sent correspondents to cover the event. The renowned painter of the West, Frederic Remington, was sent to provide images. When facts were lacking, rumors filled the journalists’ columns. General Nelson Miles, for example, reported to the Washington press corp that “it is a more comprehensive plot than anything ever inspired by Tecumseh, or even Pontiac.” By December thousands of army troops moved onto the Sioux Reservation, including a new Seventh Cavalry. Between the starving, messiah-seeking Indians and the trigger-happy soldiers, something was bound to give. It did on December 15, 1890, when Indian policemen were ordered to arrest Sitting Bull, the man they feared would lead the Indians into war.

  The Indian police, now under McLaughlin’s command, broke into Sitting Bull’s cabin, ordered him to awake, dress, and come with them. There was tragic irony in this situation. Many of the arresting officers had ridden with Sitting Bull and stood by his side through the dog days of the 1870s. But Sitting Bull was an old man now, impotent against the white onslaught, biding his time to the end. As he awaited the saddling of his horse, his remaining loyal followers gathered about him, determined not to let him go. It was a situation that could not end peacefully. At that moment a lieutenant named Bullhead moved in to grab Sitting Bull. A warrior named Catch the Bear pulled out his rifle and shot Bullhead in the side, who, as he twirled and fell shot Sitting Bull in the chest. Gunfire rang out on both sides, and a bullet found its mark in Sitting Bull’s head. He died on the spot. Bizarrely, Sitting Bull’s horse had been given to him by Buffalo Bill Cody, who had trained the horse to “dance” in his Wild West Show whenever it heard gunfire. As it was being led to its master’s cabin gunshots broke out and it began to dance. The horse, said the Indians in a final defiance of the white’s prohibition against their new religion, was itself doing the Ghost Dance.

  The other Indian leader of great import was the Sioux Chief Big Foot. Following the Sitting Bull debacle, Big Foot was ordered to come to Pine Ridge to help negotiate a peace settlement. On his way he passed near the encampment of Kicking Bear, the Lakota Sioux who introduced the “bulletproof vest” into the Ghost Dance. General Nelson Miles, looking for a fight, saw this as a potentially hostile action on Big Foot’s part and moved in to investigate. The commanding major encountered the now sick (with pneumonia) Big Foot and his small, travel-weary band, and ordered them to camp at a creek near the Pine Ridge agency, called Wounded Knee.

  On December 28, 1890, 120 men and 230 women and children set up their tepees for the night. Surrounding them were over 500 heavily armed U.S. cavalry troops, Indian scouts working for the Army, and four Hotchkiss artillery cannons. The next morning Big Foot’s people were ordered to relinquish all weapons. Some guns were surrendered, but not all. The soldiers went into the tepees to look for more. Meanwhile, Yellow Bird, Big Foot’s holy man, launched into the Ghost Dance, reminding his men that the shirts they wore would be impenetrable by the soldiers’ bullets. The officers ordered the Indians to strip, hoping to reveal hidden weapons. It was a freezing December winter day. Some of the men refused to obey. The soldiers moved in to frisk them. One spirited young Indian named Black Coyote pulled out a new rifle he had recently purchased, announcing he would not give it up. Two soldiers rushed him from behind and grabbed the rifle. At that moment the Ghost Dancing Yellow Bird threw a handful of dirt into the air, declaring that this was a symbol of the renewal of the Earth promised by their Messiah.

  What happened next was much less symbolic. White officers thought it was a signal for the Indians to attack. By chance Black Coyote’s gun discharged harmlessly into the air, but it triggered Sioux and soldiers to open fire upon one another. Stray bullets found women, children, and Big Foot in their tepees. Those who managed to make a dash from the camp were cut down by the artillery cannons, firing exploding shells one per second. When it was all over 250 Sioux men, women, and children were dead.

  Two weeks after Wounded Knee the last of the Ghost Dancers came out of the Badlands and capitulated to the United States Army. On January 15, 1891, the defiant Kicking Bear gave up his rifle to General Miles at the Pine Ridge agency, and his cause to all eternity. The Ghost Dance was over—it was not the beginning of the end of the Indians, it was the end of the end. The bullets found their mark and the Messiah never came.

  THE ETERNAL, RETURN OF THE GHOST DANCE

  If we do not “believe in” the Ghost Dance, we can nevertheless understand it as an eternally returning cultural phenomenon of oppressed peoples—one version of the messiah myth. Anthropologist James Mooney certainly understood it this way, in the introduction to his great work on the Ghost Dance:

  The, lost paradise is the world’s dreamland of youth. What tribe or people has not had its golden age, before Pandora’s box was loosed, when women were nymphs and dryads and men were gods and heroes? And when the race lies crushed and groaning beneath an alien yoke, how natural is the dream of a redeemer, an Arthur, who shall return from exile or awake from some long sleep to drive out the usurper and win back for his people what they have lost. The hope becomes a faith and the faith becomes the creed of priests and prophets, until the hero is a god and the dream a religion, looking to some great miracle of nature for its culmination and accomplishment. The doctrines of the Hindu avatar, the Hebrew Messiah, the Christian millennium, and the Hesunanin of the Indian Ghost dance are essentially the same, and have their origin in a hope and longing common to all humanity.

  If the Ghost Dance of 1990’s African Americans shares commonalities with that of 1890’s Native Americans, and if Mooney is right about the Hindus, Jews, and Christians from centuries past, might this indeed be the result of something deep within our common evolutionary and cultural humanity? Are there other examples of Ghost Dances around the world and across the ages against which we may test this hypothesis? There are.

  In his comprehensive anthropological study on the origins of religion, Weston La Barre has carefully documented many such Ghost Dances. In May 1856, for example, during colonial domination of parts of Africa by the English, a South Xhosa girl encountered spirit entities while obtaining water at a nearby stream. She told her uncle, who in turn spoke to the deities who informed him that they would help the Xhosa drive the English from the country. In this version the ritual ceremony that would trigger the English departure was the slaughter of cattle. The girl’s uncle, Umhlakaza, ordered his tribesmen to destroy all of their herds as well as the granaries of corn. If this rite was properly carried out, the dead would be resurrected, the old would become young again, illnesses would disappear, herds of fattened cattle would rise from the Earth, and ready-for-harvest millet fields would suddenly appear. It was to be paradise on Earth. What actually happened is that following the mass butchering of some 2,000 head of cattle a famine decimated the Xhosa tribe, nearly driving it into extinction.

  A similar story took place in a Maori village in New Zealand at the end of August 1934, when a visionary member of the tribe had a dream in which an angel told him that a Holy Ghost would deliver his people from the whites and return their confiscated lands to them. For days following the dream the Maori fasted, chanted, danced, and waited for the day of deliverance. Then, as some mem
bers of millennial cults do today, Maori villagers gave away their belongings (who needs material goods in the next life?). White administrators got wind of the ceremonies and came to investigate. Finding starving children and deprivation-crazed adults, they declared the visionary insane and shipped him off to a mental hospital, thus ending the Maori Ghost Dance.