Ghost Dance Religion

Juvenile Instructor » The Mormons and the Ghost Dance: A ...

On December 29, 1890, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry surrounded a group of ninety Minneconjou Lakota men just west of Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. The wives and children of the Lakota warriors were camped a few yards to the south of the council ground. The Cavalry was engaged in disarming the warriors, who military leaders believed were part of a wide-ranging indigenous conspiracy to push back white settlement. The Lakota men were known to be adherents of the Ghost Dance, a religious phenomenon that originated with the Paiute prophet Wovoka in Nevada and had spread from the Great Basin to the Plains in 1889-1890. During the disarming, a struggle ensued between the troopers and a young Lakota who thought he could hide his rifle under his blanket, and a shot fired into the air. Chaos—and death—followed, as the five hundred members of the Seventh Cavalry proceeded to slaughter not only the by-then largely disarmed men but also the women and children as they fled the scene. Although exact numbers are unknown, perhaps as many as three hundred Lakotas died. It was shown in the aftermath of Wounded Knee that the Ghost Dance was not a broad-based scheme to overthrow U.S. authority, and, more to the point, that most if not all of the Lakotas who lost their lives on December 29, 1890 had died innocently after surrendering without resistance.[1] Although Latter-day Saints had nothing to do with the massacre at Wounded Knee, since 1890 commentators have speculated that Mormons were somehow connected and even the primary movers behind the Ghost Dance movement.

Such speculations were first voiced by government and military officials in their investigations of the Ghost Dance and the spread of Wovoka’s message. Tapping into public associations between Mormons and Native Americans that stretched back to the church’s 1830 mission to the Indians, Brigham Young’s administration of Indian Affairs in the 1850s, Mountain Meadows, and the “Corinne Scare” of the 1870s , these officials claimed that white men, most likely Mormon missionaries, had worked the Indians into a frenzy.[2] The most thorough and scholarly account of the Ghost Dance in the years immediately after 1890, ethnologist James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion of 1890 , departed somewhat from the earlier speculations when he concluded that the Ghost Dance was primarily an indigenous movement. Based on interviews with Wovoka and other Ghost Dancers, Mooney described the Ghost Dance as a revitalization movement, with dreams of returning Indian ancestors, a resurgent buffalo population, and the supernatural disappearance of the white colonizers. But rather than achieve this vision through violence, Wovoka taught his followers to love each other, to live in harmony with whites, and above all, to dance. Mooney found little direct evidence of a Mormon conspiracy; however, he did include a brief discussion of possible Mormon influences, most notably the Lakota innovation of a Ghost Shirt that promised invulnerability (although Wovoka claimed invincibility, he didn’t use a shirt), which Mooney speculated could have been based loosely on Mormon temple robes.