What was the rituals of the ghost dance

Corpses turned to ice. When soldiers and a burial party returned three days later, they found several wounded Lakotas yet clinging to life and some surviving infants in the arms of their dead mothers.

All but one of these babies and most of the others soon succumbed. Soldiers heaped wagons with the Indian dead, who looked eerily like the haunting plaster casts of the Pompeii victims of Mount Vesuvius, some having frozen in the grotesque positions in which they had hit the ground.

Others were curled up or horribly twisted, their hands clawing at the air and mouths agape, each a memorial to the agony of open wounds, smothering cold and the relentless triumph of death. A photographer arrived to take pictures which immediately became a popular line of postcards. The gravediggers lowered the bodies of 84 men, 44 women and 18 children into the ground. More had died, but many had been taken by kin or managed to leave the field before dying, perhaps in another camp, or alone on the darkling plain.

We can look at old photographs, read crumpled letters and scan columns of crumbling newspaper, but death is final and pitiless, and its tracks soon vanish. We cannot account for all who were killed at Wounded Knee.

Religion is an affair of the heart, but it offers relief and guidance for people living in a hard-edged world. Indians became Ghost Dancers partly in response to changing material conditions that had created an existential crisis. The Ghost Dance served the needs of Indians hoping to adjust to life under industrial capitalism in a nation where literacy was key to negotiating courtrooms and the government offices that administered so much of Indian life.

In other words, in the aftermath of American invasion, the Ghost Dance helped believers find ways to negotiate and assert new dimensions of control not only over their own spiritual lives but also over their governance. In this sense, the massacre at Wounded Knee marks a brutal suppression not of naive, primitive Indians but of pragmatic people who sought a peaceful way forward into the twentieth century.

It is testament to its modernity that the religion was not so easily killed. The promise of the Ghost Dance was so great that Indian people carried on its devotions long after Wounded Knee.

It survived on the Southern Plains and in Canada well into the twentieth century. In many places, it made lasting contributions to Indian ritual, some of which survive to the present day. Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.

History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches the history of the American West, California history, environmental history, and U. After centuries of encroachment, warfare and neglect, America's Indigenous people remain a vital force in the life of America. In this collection, delve into stories from We Shall Remain , a five-part series on the history and lives of Native Americans, and from other American Experience films.

Follow American Experience into the Everglades, where, more recently, in , we interviewed members of the Seminole and Mikasuki tribes, to learn about their families' histories in southern Florida.

Discover the fascinating story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman, the groundbreaking cryptanalyst who helped bring down gangsters and break up a Nazi spy ring in South America. This occurred at the very time when the disruptive move to reservation life could have caused the stultification of American Indian religion and culture and the demise of Native music. Donald N. Gloria A.

Raymond J. DeMallie Washington, D. Copyright to all of these materials is protected under United States and International law. Ghost Dance Youtube video. Anela, Haley, and I compared the different dance rituals that we researched and found many common themes between them.

The similarities that we found between the Hoop dance, Hawaiian Hula, Maori Poi balls, and the Lakota Ghost and Sun dances were that they all contained the symbol of the circle, consisted of some type of storytelling, conveyed a certain point, acted as a way of passing down information and tradition from generation to generation, and had the mediation of the government at one point in time.

Dance can be seen as a ritual in many different ways. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of new posts by email. Following the demise of Custer, Sitting Bull led his people into safety in Canada. After being offered amnesty, he eventually returned to the United States in By , Sitting Bull was back in South Dakota.

He became sympathetic to the movement, encouraged young Native Americans to embrace the spirituality espoused by Wovoka, and apparently urged them to take part in the ghost dance rituals.

The endorsement of the movement by Sitting Bull did not go unnoticed. As the fear of the ghost dance spread, what appeared to be his involvement only heightened tensions. The federal authorities decided to arrest Sitting Bull, as it was suspected he was about to lead a major uprising among the Sioux. On December 15, , a detachment of U. Army troops, along with Native Americans who worked as police officers on a reservation, rode out to where Sitting Bull, his family, and some followers were camped.

The soldiers stayed at a distance while the police sought to arrest Sitting Bull. According to news accounts at the time, Sitting Bull was cooperative and agreed to leave with the reservation police, but young Native Americans attacked the police. A shoot-out occurred, and in the gun battle, Sitting Bull was shot and killed. The death of Sitting Bull was major news in the East. The New York Times published a story about the circumstances of his death on its front page, with subheadlines described him as an "old medicine man" and a "wily old plotter.

The ghost dance movement came to a bloody end at the massacre at Wounded Knee on the morning of December 29, A detachment of the 7th Cavalry approached an encampment of natives led by a chief named Big Foot and demanded that everyone surrender their weapons. Gunfire broke out, and within an hour approximately Native men, women, and children were killed. The treatment of the native peoples and the massacre at Wounded Knee signify a dark episode in American history. After the massacre at Wounded Knee, the ghost dance movement was essentially broken.

While some scattered resistance to white rule arose in the following decades, the battles between Native Americans and whites in the West had ended. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance.

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