American History Hit - What Was The Ghost Dance?

Episode Date: December 11, 2025

Reunion with the dead. The return of lands, food supplies and buffalo. The disappearance of white settlers.By the end of the 19th Century, the forced assimilation of Native American people was official government policy and Native populations were already in severe decline. The promises of the Ghost Dance had a very story appeal.Professor Gregory Smoak is with Don in this episode to explore the Ghost Dance. What was it? Where did it come from? Was it as dangerous as some suggested?Gregory is Professor of History at University of Utah and author of ‘Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century’. His work with Indigenous Nations has included projects with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Navajo Nation, Big Sandy Rancheria of Western Mono Indians, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.American History Hit is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. New Year's Day, 1889. In the vast open skies of western Nevada, a solar eclipse begins as if a bite's been taken out of the sun,

then gradually more and more until fully consumed by the moon. On the horizon, the golden mountain range simmers, dimming to dusk. All-round bird songs rise to a frantic crescendo, and suddenly go silent. In the eerie, silver-white glow of totality, the sun. corona bursting from behind the lunar disk, a piute prophet suffers the ill effects of scarlet fever. Seized by delirium and chills, he slips in and out of a deep trance, experiencing visions of a different world, a renewed world, where his people's ancestors have returned, where the buffalo roams free again, and native nations thrive in peace.

moments later, as the day is reborn and the sun brightens, this man, Wavoka, returns to the living, his visions becoming revelation, sparking a movement, the ghost dance that will soon spread across the land. Greetings all, welcome to another episode of American History Hit. Glad you're listening, thanks very much. I'm Don Wildman. Today's subject, in many ways, is a last chapter, literally so. Open almost any book on the history of Native tribes in North America,

turn to the final pages, and you'll find in there the story we're covering today, a dark closing moment in the long erosion of what was once a stable and vibrant civilization. It's a chapter that ends with what even at the time was recognized as an unthinkable atrocity, U.S. troops firing on defenseless families. The era to which I refer is known as the Ghost Dance Movement, and it's often reduced in those books to a cult, an oversimplification of what was so much more, a profound spiritual response to the pressors of extinction,

inflicted by conquering European Americans. Why did it begin? What did its believers hope to achieve? And how did the ghost dance era echo onward, against all odds, not only in American history, but in the living memory of today's native cultures? We'll discuss this all with Gregory Smoke, professor of history at the University of Utah,

a leading scholar of Native American history and religion. He's the author of Ghost Dances and Identity, the definitive study of prophetic movements in the 19th century. Professor Smoke has worked extensively with tribal nations and led major research projects for the National Park Service, including at Little Big Horn, Type Spring, and Zion. He's also a past president of the National Council on Public History. Professor Smoke, Greg, welcome.

Thanks. Great to be here. The ghost dance movement begins in the late 19th, century, as I mentioned, around 1890, the end of a century that has witnessed the conquest and collapse of tribal societies across the continent, but most recently, of course, in the West, specifically with the last tribes resisting expansion, the Apache, the Shoshone, Lakota, and others. The management of this conquest after the wars were over was done as it still is today by pushing Native peoples onto reservations. Starts with the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Can you take us through this process historically?

I'd be happy to. I would also add though, you know, right up front, one of the things that I'm going to argue here today is that the ghost dance isn't the end. Yeah. And the ghost dance is still practiced today. And from my perspective, the ghost dance is as much a beginning as

an ending. And we'll get back to that. Yeah. But you're absolutely right. I'm glad you said that because as I was reading that opening that I wrote, it has such a downer feeling. And I want to tell people, that's not the note we mean to strike today. Of course, there's that element to this, but that's your point is that there's as much of a cultural kind of rediscovery going on through this movement. Is that,

is that fair to say? Yeah, I would say that's fair to say, but I would say you're absolutely right when it comes to the popular understanding of the ghost dance movement of 1890, which is not the first ghost dance movement, but it is, that's the popular understanding. And one of the most famous books written about it in the early 1960s was called The Last Days of the Sioux Nation, clearly linking it to wounded knee. That would come as a great surprise to sue people today who would say, Lakota people would say, hey, we're still here. Yeah, exactly.

This Lakota Nations, plural, is certainly still living. Anyway, but yeah, so removal and confinement on reservations, you know, 1830, the Indian Removal Act makes removal of native people east of the Mississippi, federal policy and people are pushed west. The idea is to clear land for white Americans. That idea of a permanent Indian frontier in an Indian territory where they would remain doesn't last very long. And very soon Americans, white Americans are spreading across the continent. And so removal will take place in the West as well, but it's not going to be a centralized policy. It's not going to be pushing people hundreds or thousands of miles from more or a

thousand miles or more from where they had lived, it's going to be concentrating them onto smaller pieces of ground, often within their Aboriginal territory, but also in some cases moving people fairly large distances. And this becomes really the central policy of the federal government in the 1850s and reaches its, you know, it's zenith that after the American Civil War in this this period that we think of as, you know, the classical period of the Indian Wars, which stretches from, you know, even before the Civil War, but really after the Civil War, up to 1886, when Geronimo surrenders a Skeleton Canyon, Arizona. And that sort of ends the armed resistance to this system. Yeah. I mean, there's... And people are then confined on reservations.

Those policies you talk about are Indian Removal Act 1830. then the Indian Appropriations Act, 1851, the General Allotment Act, which is also known as the Dawes Act, 1887. All of these were created policies. And my curiosity is how did they grow through the century in terms of an evolution? Well, this is all linked to transforming native people, making them essentially disappear. And I say that very intently, that going back even into the colonial period, and if we think of British colonialism as a basis for the United States, obviously there are other colonial powers, the French and the Spanish and so on. But British colonialism has a greatest impact on the creation of American federal Indian policy. It is a centralized policy, and it really doesn't have a place for native people within Euro-American society. The Indian Removal Act illustrates this. The idea was to move people from these areas. The argument in a humanitarian terms is we're going to move them out of the way where they'll be free of the vices and the problems

of white society where then they can slowly assimilate. Even before the Removal Act, though, there were provisions and treaties to provide farming implements to people, even to the Cherokees who got most of their diet from farming. The idea is we're going to civilize them by making them farmers. Right. Well, that policy, I mean, that kind of idea of transforming native people is a constant. It becomes incredibly intense after the American Civil War when assimilation. becomes the policy of the federal government.

And controversially, some people argue that it is not a policy of genocide, but arguably it is. If we define genocide as making a group, a group of people, disappear as a distinguishable group, absolutely, right? The Dawes Act, that you mentioned in 1887, is a cornerstone of this policy. The idea of the Dawes Act was to take communally, owned reservation lands and to break them up into individual private land holdings. The idea here was that this would work a transformation of native people, that they would become individual capitalist

German farmers. They would assimilate and melt into white society and tribes would simply go away. This is the same intent of the boarding school system. Start at the first major boarding school 1879, Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Boarding School, that school and others like it were intended to take native youth and transform them culturally. I mean, very famously, people have heard of the English-only rule that is imposed, that students are punished for speaking native languages. The physical transformation of students are cutting their hair, right? and young, young Native men wearing military uniforms, young Native women wearing Victorian dresses. All of this was meant to transform native people and make them disappear as tribes and as a group in American society.

And this culture war is a larger context for the ghost dances. Sure. Was it controversial at the time? I often wonder, we think of this as just a sort of a singular era of manifest destiny, all that stuff. The treatment of Native tribes was that controversial for many people back east? It was. And first of all, I say the program I just mentioned, allotment, boarding schools, the transformation of native sovereignty, these three prongs, right? They are pushed by people who see themselves as humanitarian.

They see this as the only path forward. There is this idea of the vanishing American, that native people are simply going to disappear. This is in part impelled by their view of atrocities against native people. The Sand Creek Massacre causes a major investigation. There are court cases. There are removals of people like the Ponca that arouse a reform spirit. So these people have cultural blinders on. They call themselves, however, the friends of the Indian.

Yeah, right. And they see this as the only path. forward. There are others who do not. Others who believe the military should still be in charge. And as a matter of fact, the Indian Bureau was originally situated in the Department of War when it was founded. And it was transferred to the Interior Department. In the late 1860s with the Indian wars going on, there is an argument that Indian affairs should be returned to the War Department. But then there is a tragic and well-publicized massacre of Blackfeet people in northern Montana on the Marais River that really derails that plan. And Indian Affairs remains civilian at that point.

But I think, you know, this culture war is something that they see as necessary, humane, and the best thing for Native peoples to turn them into indistinguishable American citizens. So this lands us in 1890, as I mentioned. What is the, and let's look at the other side of this issue from the Native American side. What is the vision behind the going to? dance movement. Where does it come from and who thinks of it? First of all, the ghost dance of 1890 is not the first ghost dance. And certainly it's not the first prophetic movement or millennial movement among native peoples. Documented movements like this go all the way back into the 18th century, even before Pontiac's war and the Delaware prophet Neolan. There's a Shawnee prophet, Tenskwatawa, in the early 19th century associated with his brother, Tacoma. So there's Lots of these movies. But in terms of ghost dances, there's one in 1870. There's one that begins around 1869, 1870. And then this is a forerunner of the 1890 movement. Both of these begin in western Nevada among Paiute people.

Okay. What does it mean? What does ghost dance mean? Well, first of all, no native people called it the ghost dance. The names were specific to tribes. Some people said translated to spirit dance. Among some, she should. Shoney's. It was called everybody dragging. And that was a reference to the slow counterclockwise shuffle of a round dance, the ceremonial base of that. So ghost dance is not something any native person called it. And it actually is not that often used by white Americans at the time. The people who are shocked by it and responding to it, call it the Messiah craze. You see that in newspapers. It's anthropologist James Mooney, who calls it the ghost.

stance religion, his initial study in 1896. And, you know, since that time is largely known as the ghost dance. It is, you hear that phrase here and there back then, but it's not often used at that point. But, I mean, the gist of this is in 1870 and in 1890, if these ceremonies are followed, you have the ability to reunite with your lost loved on a renewed earth. And that's essentially the end goal here. So it's a vision of resurrection, basically. It is a vision of resurrection. It's also the one of, you know, it's kind of, it's always off-putting to use the terms

of social scientists might use. But, you know, you can think of the movements as transformative or redemptive. The 1870 ghost dance was more transformative. The message was more of an immediate transformation of conditions. and a radical change, like just reshaping the earth. By 1890, Wauqua, the 1890 ghost dance prophets message, social scientists might say is more redemptive. It incorporates more elements of Christianity,

but it also is a more forward-looking religion in the sense that it gives people the wherewithal to survive in a colonized world. And I mean, that's worth talking about, too, is what are conditions like on reservations, you know, for native people. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. We're talking about a movement that's spread throughout the culture, right? Throughout different tribes and across great regions. And how do they view the white man in this?

Well, I... There's no place for it, of course. Well, that is not necessarily true. So, again, if we look at the 1890 ghost dance, which is the more... redemptive, supposedly, of the two, if we use those phrases. The only written doctrine of the ghost dance that we have, recorded by a native person, is a so-called Messiah letter. And this was given to James Mooney, that anthropologist I just mentioned. It was written down by a young Rappahoe man named Casper Edson. And Edson had attended Carlisle. He wrote this down as the prophet spoke

in a very broken English. That was rewritten by a young Cheyenne woman when he returned to his home in Oklahoma. And then that letter was given to Mooney. And Mooney provided a free... In his work, he publishes all three of these. But he provides a free rendering of this letter. And white people do not really have a place,

but it is not a violent necessarily removal of white people. He preaches, and this is directly what he says. Grandfather says when your friends die, you must not cry. You must not hurt anybody or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do always right. It will give you satisfaction in life. Do not tell the white people about this.

Jesus is now upon the earth. He appears like a cloud. The dead are all alive again. I do not know when they will be here. maybe this fall or in the spring. When the time comes, there will be no more sickness, and everyone will be young again. Do not refuse to work for the whites and do not make any trouble with them until you leave them. So that's another, ominous note there, when the earth shakes, do not be afraid.

It will not hurt you. What year was that again? That is recorded in 1889. Volga had his, it was given to James Mooney in early 1890. Well, Voka's vision was probably around the 1st of January 1889. It spread very rapidly. And ironically, as it's branded as this kind of primitive, backward-looking movement, the irony is it spread through the English language, native people who had learned to read and

write English and technology, the trains. People you took the trains to see the profit, they went to trains there. So this word can spread very rapidly. this modern world. It is native people as they always have done are adapting to the world in which they live. You've mentioned Wavoka. That's his native name. Also goes by Jack Wilson, I suppose. Yeah. And that speaks to the cultural mixing that's happening at this point, enforced or not. It's, it is a reality for different reasons. So we're talking about a redemptive ritual. Is ritual the right word for it? Yeah. I mean, it is, it is a religious ceremony that is meant to bring about a

particular end. So I guess, you know, you could call that. I mean, the ceremony itself was based on a traditional round dance, which is people counterclockwise, slowly shuffling. There's no drum. People are singing. Round dances can be social, but they can also be ceremonial. In this case, obviously, it's a ceremonial dance. One thing I want to add about Wavoka, though, Wavoka means the cutter, or wood cutter. And Jack Wilson is the name that he got when he lived, among the Wilson family. And this is very indicative of life among native people, especially in the Great Basin at that time. Many survived by wage labor.

Well, Volka is the first generation to really grow up in a colonized world. People survive through often wage labor. Woodcutting is one of those occupations. But also, you know, people who were alive at the time white and Indian often simply called him Jack Wilson. The redemption they're looking for is a return to kind of, I suppose, the pre-connobes. contact age, right? That's the, to go back to that time. That might be the way that they understood it, but it's really difficult to say how an

individual native person understood that. But certainly that is the promise. Okay. And they will be assisted in this through the ancestors coming back and making themselves present in life. Right. And I think one way to think about it, though, is that this is not, when people hear ghost dance, they think about raising the dead and as if it's some horror movie.

Think of it more in terms of a millennia. Millennium, right, the return of a golden age, but being reunited with your lost loved ones, right, in their full prime, in a world in which you can live with your own traditions, your own religion, and be prosperous and happy. Yeah. That's the message. And it's a pacifist message as well. It's not about war.

It's not making war, right? Well, sir, I mean, the way that Wavoka described it here, it's certainly a passive as message. Do you always write. Right. Do not hurt anyone. In the literature, the scholarly literature on the ghost dance, there was this idea that came about that the Lakota people misinterpreted or perverted the ghost dance into a violent message. And this is a factor leading to wounded knees. More recently, scholars have really, pushed back against that. But in that early book in the early 1960s, this last days of Sunnation, that's certainly the idea that this is a peaceful message that the Lakotas, because of their culture and because of the conditions they were suffering, turned this into a militant anti-white religion. And that is not true. And, you know, the bit of evidence that you use there has been really debated whether or not this was an accurate account. It appeared only one newspaper, never reported truly through military channels. So there's debate there. But overall, this is a message

is saying this is the way that you can survive in the world you face today. Yeah. I want to be clear on what distinguishes this from traditional dances, which of course we've all seen and have some understanding of. This is a unique ceremony in what guards? Is it what they wear or how they dance or what's the difference? Well, again, the dance is fairly typical of a round dance. People shuffle sideways, counterclockwise, hold hands. They sing. The difference here is this dance could last two to four days. That's not unusual for some dances. Like the sun, later, the sun dance becomes a center of a pan Indian religion. As people dance, as they become exhausted, some people fall.

And they essentially pass out. And during that time, they have visions. And when they come back, when they regain consciousness, they speak with people, with shamans, with others, and they start to sing the songs that were revealed to them in this dance. So this is very much a religion that is adaptive at that moment. The songs that people are singing are changing. And it differs from tribe to tribe, but that's kind of the core ceremonial there.

And the idea is that if this is carried out, that you will hasten or bring on this transformation. In my notes, I have ghost shirts, which are worn. I'm sure they weren't called that. But the actual performance looks different, right? By virtue of that. That is very specific, again, to certain groups like the Lakota. And a lot is made of the ghost shirts. And that theory I said that the Lakota's perverted or changed the ghost dance to make it militant often hinges on that factor.

And so the ghost shirts were meant to make people invulnerable. And they're often called bulletproof shirts. Right. And this was the way that this was interpreted at the time was that this is whipping them up into a frenzy that they believe that they're bulletproof. Not all people had that kind of tradition. the idea of a piece of clothing bringing invulnerability was new to the Lakota. Was it like a hair shirt or something like that? I mean, what was...

They take different forms. There are pictures of them online, Smithsonian and other museums. There are some, some have tufts of hair on them. Most are painted in various ways with symbols that have been revealed to people. So yeah, there's a number of examples online that people can see if they search that. North Dakota Historical Society, the Smithsonian Institution, so on. Right. And through this ritual, which, as you say, could last for days and involved, in one case in Nevada, what became Nevada, a thousand Shoshoneys dancing all night.

I mean, these are massive gatherings in some cases. They could be. Yeah, shouting in unison. And the Christian and native religions sort of mixing up, you know, Christ has come. They hear, they're collapsing, they're weeping. There are elements of Pentecostal, you know, behavior in this. not intentionally, but I'm saying you could sort of reference that. By fall of 1890, I have down that at least 30 nations had adopted some version of this particular ghost stance.

It's nationwide, I guess is the word to say. The Lakota were particularly enthusiastic. Their leader sitting bull. They graft some symbols of their primary religion onto this stance. I mean, it's a very plastic thing, isn't it? It can be flexible. I think that native religions in general are adapted. They're not dogmatic. They're very important traditions in all native religions. But if we look at this in the perspective of Western Christian, Judeo-Christian religion with written books and dogmas and ceremonies and fundamentalism, it's hard to understand. But incorporating spiritual power from many different sources was not something unusual in nature. native beliefs. And so you find that adaption, right? And so the Lakota adopt this dance,

and they make it their own. So do the Cheyenne, so do the Arapahos. So do the Shoshones and Banics, the people at Fort Hall, Idaho, major conduits of this religion. And so the important thing here is that it is a pan-Indian religion. It is not for a single tribe. It crosses those tribal boundaries. It unites people, but it doesn't dictate or mandate that there's a single way to pursue this religion. People interpret it on their own. And in fact, you know, that's the way religious culture and religious distinctions evolve anyway. In any civilization. Yeah, exactly. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So so much of this is a matter of

perspective in those days. And even now, What was the response in the country to the word that this was happening? Did it receive wide publicity? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It was reported widely in the news and in New York Times and all of the newspapers. It was debated in Congress. The United States responds with a major military expedition against the Lakotas to put down the unrest that is perceived there.

because they had experienced this as a prior. I mean, were these sort of previews of military or militant action or what? No, you know, that is really debatable. Scholars have argued that, you know, this is the way in which the United States imposed colonialism, right? That this was a resistance to the system that was being put in place on reservations to control native people. the United States responses with overwhelming force. In the past in situations, the United States may not have done this, but again, this is 1890. You got Nelson A. Miles, who is the commanding general of the United States Army, who wants to really make this, you know, a show of force. So you have,

you know, half of the United States Army descending on the Dakotas to put down the unrest on the reservations. You have Indian agents who are freaking out. The agent at Pine Ridge, who's writing these inflammatory letters. You have sort of a boogeyman perception of Sitting Bull, who isn't even really involved in this religion. He's already been out with the Wild West show. He's now back from that, right? Yeah, but he's a very influential leader. He's on Papa Lakota. So he's at standing rock. But people look to him, even though he may not be leader within their band. I just am curious, why was it so inflammatory to, when it seems so clear that it was about a pacifism and a reach back as religiously oriented, how would it have been such a trigger for American troops? That is not the way that the popular mind understood it.

That's not the way the military understood. That's not the way it was reported in the press. Okay. The inflammatory stuff in the press, just to give you an example, and October 31st, 1890 in the Chicago papers, supposedly these were the words that came from Short Bowl, one of the two Lakota apostles, Short Bull and Kicking Bear were the first you to go out and visit the prophet. And the newspaper reported this, that Short Bull had said, my father has shown me these things, therefore you must continue this dance. If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you on whom I have put the holy shirts will sing a song, which I've taught you, and then some of them will drop dead. The rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth. And so scholars like Jeff Osler, you know, they have said, you know, this is suspect that this was not reported through military channels, even though it supposedly comes from the military.

There's no evidence of it in those records. It might be the fanciful reporting the happening at the time, but this is the kind of thing that people are reading. And they think, this is a major uprising. Sitting Bull is a household name. Right. Sitting Bull, crazy words, other Lakota leaders, Geronimo. These are the names of native people that white Americans know. And they are all military leaders, people who led military resistance.

And so the assumption is that's what this is. They don't hear the Messiah letter. Right. They're not in a native community. They're not listening to Native people. they're reading these papers, these kinds of reports. You know, so much of the West at that time was energized by the Mormon movement, too. I mean, that entire Messiah craze of the Mormons out there in the West, it was a hotbed of lots

going on. But most of all, this was seen as a, the desire was to preempt an unrest and an uprising by confronting this head on, right? Yeah. There's a belief that this is going to turn into something more, but there's also a desire to continue the colonial policies to control the West and to incorporate the West. It's funny that you mentioned in the Mormons, something I've written about in my work on the ghost dance, but they are looked at in sometimes the same ways as Native Ghost Dancers.

And they're blamed for the Ghost Dance directly by Nelson Miles, because he can't believe, and many white Americans can't believe that a native person could be behind this religion or have created this religion or native people could have spread this religion. He says there has to be some designing white men behind it. And it must be the Mormons because they're on American and they're against the government. A few years before this, 1882, U.S. Secretary of the Interior Henry Teller issued new orders to suppress. He calls him heathenist dances such as the Sundance, the scalp dance, and so forth, in order to bring Indians, as he says, into line with conventional Christian practice. Right. That hits the nail in the head, I would say, in terms of the motivations here, right?

Yeah, I think, you know, what are the conditions in 1890 Native people face? That culture war is part of it. And the fact that you have your native religions being suppressed, there's pressure to become Christian. And you put on top of this, you know, specifics on most reservations where there's little income source. Tuberculosis is killing people. Yeah. By the scores and it becomes the real horrible disease. disease that peaks in the 19-teens and 20s in Native America. We didn't even mention that the land that they were put on to was not great for farming, which was it supposed to be the idea for so many of them. Exactly. That's the idea of that. So for instance, at Fort Hall, land sessions. The railroad comes in in the 1880s and then the Pocatello land session.

And there's no development of irrigation. There's no development of irrigation in a place like Fort Hall until after most of the reservation is seated and white farmers are agitating for that irrigation development. So you can't even become the thing that they're trying to turn you into. Yeah. November 13th, 1890, President Harrison orders a third of the U.S. Army to prevent any outbreak. That's a lot, right? I mean, the U.S. Army is not as big as we know it today, but it's a lot of people that there's a lot of troops they're sending out there.

And the press gets involved as it begins to do more and more over this time period about bloodthirsty Native Americans. there were about 4,200 ghost dancers at peak, I suppose, in the Lakota area, right? Is that the idea? Maybe that's accurate. I'm not really certain of that estimate, but that would be about right considering Lakota populations. Yeah, I'm citing... Not the majority of Lakotas were ghost dancers. I'm citing an article in the New York Times, which actually estimated it to be 15,000. I'm just making the point that the... You know, things were out of proportion in the press, for sure. Definitely.

Which leads us to this incident. We have to address what happened in Wounded Knee. How is Wounded Knee located in this story and is it a climax or how does this fit into what we are talking about? I think Wounded Knee is the central event that shapes public perception of the ghost dance for a long time. Right. So the way Wounded Knee came about was that as the Army descended on the Lakota Reservations. Yeah. A number of events transpired that. that set up this situation. Sitting Bull was assassinated in the middle of December 1890. The Indian agent,

James McLaughlin at Standing Rock, wanted to remove Sitting Bull. He sent Indian police out to arrest him under the premise that Sitting Bull was participating in the ghost dance. He really wasn't. And it turns into a shootout. Sitting Bull is and his son are killed. This is a shocking news, right? This shocks people. That news reaches the next reservation to the south, Cheyenne River and the leader Bigfoot, who their, his people are practicing the ghost dance. And they flee the reservation. They flee south. Right. So all of Western South Dakota at one point was the Great Sioux Reservation.

Now it's broken up in individual reservations. They flee south towards Pine Ridge. And they're going to Pine Ridge because the most influential Lakota leader with the United States government, Red Cloud, is there. And so they're going there. They don't make it to the Pine Ridge Agency because they're intercepted by the United States Seventh Cavalry. Custer's old unit and at Wounded Knee Creek. And the morning after the intercepted, the 7th Cavalry moves to disarm the camp.

How large is this camp? Fairly large. It's between 400 or 500. You know, 200 or more people are going to die. So it's extensive casualties that come out of this. And this is not a warrior movement. These are families. This is village.

These men, women, and children. Right. And elderly. I just want to paint the pictures. So they have encamped at this place, Wounded Knee Creek. There are shelters built and they're going to be there for a bit of time. And in comes the 7th Cavalry and they basically surround them, right? I mean, there are literally in places.

They weren't going to be there for a time. They were moving through trying to get to Pine Ridge to their stop by the cavalry. They go into camp there the next morning, the cavalry moves to disarm them. And the stories from the Lakota people is that, you know, one young man who was hard of hearing refused to give up his rifle. And remember, rifles are critical for survival, for hunting for life. And they're very expensive. And in this struggle, you know, the stat story, at least, the gun goes off. And then the 7th Cavalry opens fire.

The 7th Cavalry is around them on three sides and fires directly into the village. Some of the casualties among the soldiers are actually many of their friendly fire because the shooting from across that square. They also employ a light cannon called a Hotchkiss gun and then fire on the people who are fleeing. And that's where you get those horrific pictures. That night, Blizzard comes in and, you know, when people go out to bury the dead, you have these horribly contorted frozen bodies. and the picture's there and then the picture of filling the mass grave of people.

And really the effect of Wounded Knee is to turn the Ghost Dance movement into this desperate last gasp of a dying culture. That's the popular perception. But all of these other things are not being reported

or being seen. And the survival of the ghost dance after Wounded Knee is not widely understood or reported. Exactly. I just want to Cap that by saying, I mean, of my generation, I'm born in 61, so much is defined by that book, bury my heart at wounded knee. I just remember that being such a huge impact.

Yeah, that's Steve Brown. I was referring to Utley's last days of Sunnation earlier, but Very My Heart at Wounded Knee, that is the Coda. That is the dramatic end. You get that scene of them bringing the wounded into that chapel, that wounded knee, with the banner saying goodwill to all men. And that's how deep. Brown, you know, twist, and that's the dramatic end point of that book. And it shocks a lot of people. And I read that when I was in middle school. Yeah. It's one of the books that really got me interested in doing this kind of history. Huge cultural impact. I also went along with the Alcatraz occupation and all the rest of that was happening at that point. There was suddenly a groundswell

of understanding of what had happened. But as you say, the ghost dance, which had been so much of the phenomenon at this time, was lost in this. And the most of the most of the moment of the moment on this time, and the more positive story of it was lost. So let's talk about that. I mean, wounded knee happens and we're moving past this. How does the ghost dance move on even into modern culture today? Well, the ghost dance survives to today. It is practiced on some reservations, not all, but for instance, people at Fort Hall, Idaho,

where I've spent much of my career working for the tribes at various times, the ghost dance is still practiced there in a fairly tricky. traditional form and ghost dancers are a proud group of people up there who continue this religion. But the religion itself, though, is transformed in some areas. It becomes other things among the Pawnee people in Oklahoma. There is a hand game, a game that is invented out of that. Among Nakod or Canadian Sioux people, the new tidings religion is a version of it. And it certainly is a forerunner of other redemptive pan-Indian religions in the 20th century, most notably the Sundance.

Right. So it survives. And in fact that James Mooney, you know, when he's studying this, he goes out in, he gets permission to study the ghost dance and goes out in 1892. And he published his book in 1896. What he says in that book is that the ghost dance is still being practiced and is taking on new forms at every day, every performance. Interesting.

And a lot of people don't see that at the time. They don't read that part of it. They don't, doesn't register with them. And so this idea that wound in knee marks the death of the ghost dance and that after that, it shows, it proves that the prophecy was not right. It's not true at all. Some people continue to practice it. And then it takes these other forms into the 20th century. and then it's resurrected at various times, like at Wounded Knee,

in the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, in various forms. Yeah. Well, it speaks to the resilience of that whole civilization and those cultures, which have been remarkably strengthened over the last century, for sure, quite the opposite of what was expected to happen back in the 19th century, which was, as you called, an assimilation. That's true of so many different societies. That's how it used to be seen,

and that had so much to do with Christianity and how to help these people through changing them. Now it's seen differently. There's a patchwork of conversation about that whole subject because the reservations are troubled places in so many places. But in others, it's a different story. It's a fascinating and pluralistic world we're talking about here. And that's now the fair way to discuss it. Yeah, it is. And any approach to native history has to incorporate diversity and the fact that there never was.

as a typical native person. They're people from hundreds of tribes, hundreds of religions and traditions. The ghost dance is a modern religion and forward-looking in the sense that it speaks to all Native people to the shared American Indian identity. It is not simply a tribal religion, but it's also redemptant and interpreted to teach people how to survive and prosper and survive in this new world that they faced. Yeah. Gregory Smoke is a professor of history at the University of Utah.

who has in the past also taught at Colorado State and Minnesota. He's the author of Ghost Dances and Identity, Prophetic Religion, and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the 19th century. He has worked with Native Nations authoring research projects for Park Service, as well as numbers of indigenous nations. And as I mentioned, past president of the National Council of Public History, thank you, Greg. Nice to meet you. All right. Pleasure being here.

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