The Lakota Ghost Dance: An Ethnohistorical Account

Abstract

T HE LAKOTA GHOST dance (wanagi wacipi)1 has been the subject of extensive study, first by newspapermen, who made it a true media event, and later by anthropologists and historians. The chronology of the contextual events in Lakota history-the 1888 and 1889 land cession commissions and their subsequent delegations to Washington, the beef ration cuts at the agencies, the spread of the ghost dance ritual among the Lakotas in 1890, the death of Sitting Bull, the calling in of U.S. troops, the flight of Lakota camps to the badlands, the blundering massacre at Wounded Knee, and the eventual restoration of peace under U.S. army control of the Sioux agencies-is voluminously detailed in the printed literature.2 The historiography of the Lakota ghost dance period begins with two contemporary works drawn primarily from newspaper sources, James P. Boyd's Recent Indian Wars (1891) and W. Fletcher Johnson's Life of Sitting Bull and History of the Indian War of 1890-91 (1891). Despite the sensationalist tone, both volumes compiled a substantial body of important historical material. James Mooney, in his anthropological classic, The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), included a balanced historical discussion based on unpublished government records, newspaper accounts, and interviews with Indians. Mooney stressed the revivalistic aspects of the ghost dance and the hope it offered for regeneration of Indian culture.