The Ghost Dance — Vision of Healing and Renewal
The Ghost Dance movement of 1889-90, led by the Paiute prophet Wovoka, was a pan-tribal spiritual movement offering a vision of the earth renewed and the ancestors returned — and was suppressed with a massacre that reveals the power authorities fear in Indigenous prophecy.
In January 1889, the Paiute holy man Wovoka (Jack Wilson) had a vision during a total solar eclipse in which he was taken to the spirit world and shown a land of abundance where the dead had returned to life and all peoples lived in peace. He brought back a round dance — the Ghost Dance — and teachings about living a righteous life, abandoning warfare, and working hard. The dance spread rapidly across the Great Plains because it offered something desperately needed: hope and a vision of renewal to peoples devastated by loss of land, slaughter of the buffalo, and forced relocation. The US Army's massacre of approximately 300 Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890 — in response to Ghost Dance gatherings — represents the most brutal confirmation of how seriously colonial authorities took the power of Indigenous spiritual vision.
You must not hurt anyone or do harm to anyone. You must not fight. Do right always.
Historian Rani-Henrik Andersson documents in The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 that Wovoka's teachings were fundamentally peaceful and explicitly prohibited violence — making the Army's massacre at Wounded Knee a politically motivated suppression of spiritual renewal, not a military response to threat.
The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890