The ghost dance remains an important part of Native North American cultural history in part because of the savage butchery of the United States Army on the battlefield at Wounded Knee in 1890. This was the subject of a classic monograph by James Mooney (1861 — 1921), student of Franz Boas. Mooney’s firsthand inquiry dealt with the spread of the ghost dance movement in Western North America in the early reservation period and the actions taken by the military to suppress it. His own sympathy for the Irish nationalist struggle for independence from Britain led Mooney to see the ghost dance as a product of Euro-American contact history and the powerlessness of the Native Americans. The dances promoted solidarity and resistance to domination or assimilation. Mooney also compared the ghost dance with millenarian religions in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere and his monograph remains a model for the study of such movements, both theoretically and methodologically.
Ethnohistorians have reported considerable local and regional variation in ghost dance performances. Some dances stressed militancy and included a belief in bulletproof ghost shirts. Many involved feasting to encourage the return of ancestral warrior heroes, and ritual to bring the dead back to life. Others were more concerned with warding off disease and promoting fertility. Scholars have argued that calls for cultural and demographic revitalization enhance the likelihood of cultural survival and the building-up of new forms of moral community. Thus it is not surprising to find that the dances continue on many tribal reservations to this day.
Academically, the ghost dance lies at the heart of discussions of the boundaries of ethnohistory, history and anthropology. Ethnohistorians consider it a reaction to Euro-American settler incursion onto reservations and hunting grounds. They shun global generalizations, preferring to emphasize circumstances within each tribe, arguing the historical occurrence of the dance mainly among those smaller groups that suffered most disease and loss of refuge areas. Historians trace the dance to social and cultural deprivations following the colonization and dispossession of native peoples. Government policies brought increased disease, poverty, and diaspora. Some historians see the ghost dance as part of a global process of European expansion and the marginalization of indigenous peoples dating from the fifteenth century.
Anthropologists have found cultural forms comparable with the ghost dance in many parts of the world and have employed a plethora of terms to characterize them: religions of the oppressed; nativistic movements; messianic movements; transformative movements. Recent North American ghost dance ethnography has begun to examine the dancers’ own categories of meaning and agency, in the context of novelty and cultural continuity. This has established a new precedent for the anthropological study of similar movements elsewhere in the world.
