What Was The Ghost Dance?

American History Hit

History Hit

America, History

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Reunion with the dead. The return of lands, food supplies and buffalo. The disappearance of white settlers.

By the end of the 19th Century, the forced assimilation of Native American people was official government policy and Native populations were already in severe decline. The promises of the Ghost Dance had a very story appeal.

Professor Gregory Smoak is with Don in this episode to explore the Ghost Dance. What was it? Where did it come from? Was it as dangerous as some suggested?

Gregory is Professor of History at University of Utah and author of ‘Ghost Dances and Identity: Prophetic Religion and American Indian Ethnogenesis in the Nineteenth Century’. His work with Indigenous Nations has included projects with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, Navajo Nation, Big Sandy Rancheria of Western Mono Indians, Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.

Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Freddy Chick.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	New Year's Day, 1889. In the vast open skies of western Nevada, a solar eclipse begins as if
0:10.0	a bite's been taken out of the sun, then gradually more and more until fully consumed by the moon.
0:16.8	On the horizon, the golden mountain range simmers, dimming to dusk. All-round bird songs rise
0:23.1	to a frantic crescendo, and suddenly go silent. In the eerie silver-white glow of totality,
0:31.4	the sun's corona bursting from behind the lunar disk, a piute prophet suffers the ill effects of scarlet fever. Seized by
0:40.0	delirium and chills he slips in and out of a deep trance, experiencing visions of a
0:45.8	different world, a renewed world, where his people's ancestors have returned, where
0:51.3	the buffalo roams free again, and native nations thrive in peace.
0:57.0	Moments later, as the day is reborn and the sun brightens, this man, Wavoka, returns to the living,
1:04.0	his visions becoming revelation, sparking a movement, the ghost dance that will soon spread across the land.
1:24.7	Greetings all. Welcome to another episode of American History Hit.
1:28.2	Glad you're listening. Thanks very much. I'm Don Wildman.
1:31.5	Today's subject, in many ways, is the last chapter, literally so.
1:35.8	Open almost any book on the history of Native tribes in North America,
1:39.5	turn to the final pages, and you'll find in there the story we're covering today,
1:43.6	a dark closing moment
1:45.3	in the long erosion of what was once a stable and vibrant civilization. It's a chapter that
1:50.9	ends with what even at the time was recognized as an unthinkable atrocity, U.S. troops
1:55.8	firing on defenseless families. The era to which I refer is known as the Ghost Dance movement, and it's
2:02.2	often reduced in those books to a cult, an oversimplification of what was so much more,
2:07.7	a profound spiritual response to the pressors of extinction, inflicted by conquering European
2:13.4	Americans. Why did it begin? What did its believers hope to achieve? And how did the ghost
	...

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