Wounded Knee and the Ghost Dance: Christian Prayer, American Politics, and Indian Protest

Perhaps the most notorious massacre in American history took place on December 29, 1890, when 400 U.S. troops surrounded, disarmed, and then gunned down a band of Minneconjou and Hunkpapa Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, South Dakota. The government put 146 bodies into a mass grave, but more fled the scene and later died from their wounds and exposure.

The atrocity was the culmination of army efforts to suppress the Ghost Dance, a pan-Indian religious movement inspired by the visions of Wovoka, a Pauite prophet. We do not know for certain what Wovoka told his followers. But Sioux and Cheyenne disciples often presented the prophet either as an Indian Christ or as his messenger, and his teachings were certainly infused with Christian ideals. Wovoka claimed to have visited heaven, where God told him Indians should perform a communal dance and live by a moral code: do not lie, do not steal, love one another, remain at peace, and go to work. For all this, their reward would be a renewed earth (in some versions, one cleansed of white people), with the Indian dead returned to life, and Indians young and forever free. Coming on the heels of centuries of violence, at the nadir of Indian fortunes in the far West, the prophecy attracted a large following. Among the Lakota, it became known as “the spirit dance,” which eventually translated into its most enduring name among Americans, the Ghost Dance.

Some thirty tribes across the far West took up the Ghost Dance; but historians, drawn to the drama and tragedy of Wounded Knee, have focused overwhelmingly on the Lakota Sioux. Rani-Henrik Andersson’s The Lakota Ghost Dance of 1890 is firmly in this tradition. Taking a page from Robert Berkhofer, Andersson uses the Lakota Ghost Dance as a case study for creating a “Great Story,” a “multidimensional interpretation” that incorporates “various viewpoints of evidentiary sources, others’ stories, other scholars’ texts, and the historian’s own text” into one “interpretive system” (p. xiv).

Sprawling across dozens of conflicting and contradictory accounts and disparate testimonies from hundreds of eyewitnesses, the book offers less a single interpretive system than competing viewpoints. The Ghost Dance teachings arrived at Pine Ridge through Sioux and Cheyenne travelers returning from Nevada. They found growing numbers of adherents in South Dakota as the U.S. Congress stripped away Sioux land and handed it to white settlers, then reduced rations on which the Indians depended for survival. On top of all this, drought withered the land in the summer of 1890. Officials worried that the “messiah craze” would make the reservations uncontrollable. As the dances grew in size, efforts to suppress them only increased tensions. The army’s arrival made matters worse, and when officials tried to arrest Sitting Bull for fomenting the dance, resistance flared and the famed Hunkpapa chief was killed. Despite efforts to keep the peace by Indians and even some soldiers, two weeks later came the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Andersson examines in great detail the reception of the Ghost Dance among Indian agents, the army, Christian missionaries, the press, and the U.S. Congress. All these groups opposed the dance for different reasons. Indian agents saw it as a threat to their authority and to the assimilationist policies they were meant to enforce. For their part, army commanders saw their deployment as a chance to assert control over Indian reservations (which were legally the charge of civilians in the Office of Indian Affairs). Despite the fact that there were only some 26,000 Sioux and probably only 4,000 Ghost...