(1890)
GHOST DANCE
The Ghost Dance is often remembered through the tragedy of the Wounded Knee Massacre. Yet for the thousands of Native people who embraced it, the movement was also a source of hope, revelation, and innovation. Jennifer Graber follows the remarkable “ghost shirts” of Oglala Lakota leader Little Wound and their role in the largest intertribal religious movement in US history.
The dreamer returned to this world and looked for his family and friends. He had something to do. He had special clothes to make. He started with a simple shirt made from long pieces of fabric. The women sewed them using cotton cloth and manufactured thread newly available on the reservation. Unlike their older clothing traditions involving animal hides and sinew, intricate beading and ornamentation, these garments were stitched together quickly. The dreamers needed them as soon as possible.
The dreamer and shirt maker’s name was Tȟaópi Čik’ala, or Little Wound. He was a leader among Oglala Lakotas living on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. Little Wound used paints made from natural pigments and binders to depict his vision on the shirt. On the front, at chest level, he painted an evening star. Smaller stars floated below, with a green triangle at the bottom. Above the stars, surrounded by dots of green paint, two dragonflies flew, their vibrant wings extended. Streaks of blue paint cascaded down the sleeves. Painted fringe adhered to the sleeves, bottom hem, and side seams.
And that was only the front. The back offered more details from Little Wound’s vision. At the center was Thunderbird, a powerful spirit associated with eagles, thunder, and lightning. From the bird’s powerful talons, bolts of red lightning descended toward the green earth. From the beak, blue lightning reached upward, joining the body of the shirt with the sleeves. As on the front, green dots populated the upper portion of the shirt. Unlike the front, an “X” stood against this backdrop. According to one of Little Wound’s descendants, it represented a “station on the way to the hereafter,” available only to those who were “good on earth.” Charting a course to that same desired place was the buckskin fringe “colored with sacred red paint.”
Tȟaópi Čik’ala’s (Little Wound) Ghost Dance shirt
drawing of front side
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
In testimony about his vision, Little Wound explained that a “powerful being” instructed him to make “medicine shirts and pray over them.” His focus on these special garments makes sense given Lakotas’ long tradition of crafting beautiful clothing rich with meaning. For generations, Lakota women prepared animal hides to be sewn into shirts, dresses, capes, and moccasins. They dyed porcupine quills and applied them in decorative patterns. They acquired shell and glass beads, feathers, ribbons, and bells to create clothing of striking beauty. Lakota women gifted their handiwork to beloved kin in order to seal family bonds and mark the passages of life. Lakota men contributed to clothing production by hunting and providing hides, as well as painting designs on shirts and robes. Using the clothing as a canvas, they painted historic battles, memorable hunting expeditions, and details from vision experiences.
Some of these creations were understood to have protective qualities. Women crafted amulets containing umbilical cords, hanging them from cradleboards in which they carried their infant children. Men assembled shields to be used in battle. They painted them with images from visions, imbuing the physical objects with the protective power promised by spirits. Even after the introduction of firearms and bullets that could crash through wooden shields, Lakotas carried them for the spiritual power they possessed. Stories abound in Lakota history and among other tribal nations about powerful shields and clothing invulnerable to bullets and other weapons. Years before, when Lakotas were at the height of their power, Little Wound had been among those wearing special clothes and carrying powerful objects into battle.
By 1890, though, Little Wound painted his special shirt while participating in the Ghost Dance, the largest intertribal religious movement in United States history. Starting in 1889, thousands of Native people across the US West danced in anticipation of their world’s restoration and renewal. Wovoka, the movement’s Northern Paiute founder, had claimed a visionary experience in which he fell to the ground and was taken up into the air. He traveled to the Land of the Dead where he saw an abundant landscape full of thriving plants and animals, his human ancestors living a good life by eating well and observing traditional pastimes. He received instruction about how the people should live. They were to be peaceful and honest, to work and love each other. Wovoka was also given a promise: if the people danced, they could hasten their world’s impending transformation. Even the ancestors would return. In response to this experience, Wovoka retooled an old dance tradition for this new purpose. He urged other Paiutes to follow his lead. Colonial invasion’s destruction would give way to a world of restored relations, he told them. Indigenous peoples and homelands would once again flourish. Wovoka’s Ghost Dance recalled the good life Native people once experienced and offered a foretaste of what would soon be restored.
Wovoka lived in Nevada. His followers carried his message and dance to new places: California, the Canadian prairie, South Dakota, the Grand Canyon, and Oklahoma. Upon hearing the news, Native people across the continent headed for Nevada to see it for themselves. Wovoka and his Northern Paiute relations welcomed thousands of delegates.
While dancing, some visitors experienced visions. They reported conversations with deceased loved ones, recounted sightings of massive buffalo herds, and received messages and songs. Those compelled by these experiences returned home to establish the dance in their own communities. They arrived with gifts Wovoka bestowed: feathers and paint, blankets and pine nuts. Dancers used the gifts to establish the movement among more than two dozen tribal nations. Wovoka did not call on his followers to make special clothing. But dancers from a number of tribal nations experienced visions in which they saw and were instructed to make special shirts and dresses. For them, Ghost Dance garments hearkened back to older clothing traditions and testified to the ways powerful spirits promised to renew their world.
From 1890 and continuing for decades, non-Native commentators claimed that the Ghost Dance exemplified Native people’s primitive spirituality and doomed resistance to America’s inevitable dominion over the continent. In particular, outsiders focused on “ghost shirts” like Little Wound’s. They circulated stories about the shirt’s supposed protective qualities, including rumors they were bulletproof. These voices sometimes cited Ghost Dance garments as evidence of Native credulity. More often, however, they concluded the clothing amounted to preparation for war against American soldiers and settlers.
But the intertribal Ghost Dance was first and foremost a visionary dance movement enacting and calling forth a flourishing Indigenous world. In their dancing and creation of special clothing, Ghost Dancers drew on tribal traditions, confronted new situations with information received in visions, danced to bring about their world’s transformation and, in the meantime, experienced visions of a restored world home to thriving relations. The Ghost Dance represented a commitment to Native ways of being in particular places, in relation to a variety of beings, against a phalanx of destructive forces. Through the dance, they proclaimed their spiritual sovereignty and refusal to defer to the United States, which had, just a few years earlier, criminalized Native ceremonies, dances, and other cultural traditions. A close look at Little Wound’s ghost shirt, along with his testimony and other dancers’ clothing production, offers an opportunity to understand the Ghost Dance as a religious movement committed to Native flourishing.
Tȟaópi Čik’ala’s (Little Wound) Ghost Dance shirt
drawing of back side
Courtesy of University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Little Wound never traveled to Paiute Country or met Wovoka. But he received the movement from travelers and was one of the many men, women, and children who took up Wovoka’s dance. His shirt testified to his connection with the founder. Wovoka had offered red paint to his many visitors. Paiute ritual specialists had long used this paint in their healing work. Paiutes also wore it at dances. Lakota travelers brought the paint home and mixed it with their own pigment sources. Their people also used paint on bodies, horses, tipi covers, and shields. The red painted fringe on Little Wound’s shirt, then, combined elements from Paiute and Lakota country and recalled the many acts of healing and ceremonies for which paint had been used throughout Native history.
Little Wound and many new Ghost Dance participants entered vision states and claimed their own dance-induced visions, like Wovoka, who was swept up into the sky where he was met by a powerful, father-like being. This father guided Wovoka through the afterlife, granting him new knowledge, and offering him songs and new gifts of weather power. In his visions, Little Wound encountered powerful spirits from Lakota cosmology. He depicted them on his ghost shirt.
According to later testimony, Little Wound was carried up into the sky by Thunderbird. The shirt’s back shows the green earth from which he was taken upward. It depicts a Thunderbird figure, made from bold black lines, as well as red and green dots. Red lightning extends from the bird’s talons. Blue lightning emerges from the bird’s beak. On the shirt’s front, Little Wound painted a morning star, a symbol long associated with Lakota ritual traditions. He also depicted two dragonflies. Lakotas observed these creatures’ fast patterns of flight and ability to avoid dangerous elements, such as hail. As such, they were seen as immune to destructive power. According to one of Little Wound’s descendants, a dragonfly used its “medicine” to tell Little Wound what to do “through dreams.”
Like many Ghost Dancers before him, Little Wound was taken to the Land of the Dead and offered the chance to see his ancestors. He saw tipis full of the beloved dead. He reunited with his mother, father, and brother, all of whom died many years earlier. Little Wound was invited to sit with his ancestors and the spirits. They talked and smoked a pipe together.
In later testimony about the visions, Little Wound was particularly focused on his ancestors’ engagement in traditional activities. His relatives rode fine horses, recalling the massive herds for whom Lakotas had once cared. He saw his dead relations wearing garments “brilliant and most superb.” By the time of the Ghost Dance, however, reservation officials encouraged the use of horses for farming rather than for hunting and long-distance travel. They also encouraged “citizen’s dress” consisting of shirts, pants, and plain jackets for men and cotton or wool dresses for women.
A powerful being directed [Tȟaópi Čik’ala] to make “medicine shirts.” “No harm could come to the wearer,” the spirit told him.
Little Wound also saw traditional Lakota encampments that were no longer possible under US occupation and rule. In the Land of the Dead, Lakotas lived in tipis made of many buffalo hides. At Pine Ridge, officials pressed Lakotas toward life in square, wooden houses. Little Wound also observed the remarkable health of the land. It was “broad and fertile,” as in earlier times. Buffalo, deer, and elk fed on the ample prairie grasses. Back on earth, however, American hunters had exterminated the northern buffalo herds. The grasses that once fed game animals had withered during a recent drought.
The ancestors also enjoyed ample traditional foods. Little Wound witnessed women preparing meat, wild fruits, and herbs. The abundance stood in sharp contrast to reservation life. Lakotas has signed treaties with the US, exchanging land for cash annuities and rations to support life on the reservations. Food rations were necessary as Lakotas’ traditional reliance on buffalo became impossible after Americans wiped out the herds. New efforts to farm struggled against unyielding soil and punishing weather. The US, however, failed to provide needed food rations. Indeed, Congress had recently reduced them. Further, reservation agents frequently enriched themselves by purchasing unhealthy cattle and mealy flour. Little Wound protested these government failures on several occasions. The situation was exacerbated by drought that withered crops and affected traditional plant foods.
The flourishing ancestors in Little Wound’s vision proved a stark contrast to the compromised physical health of his relations living on earth. He chided reservation officials with the details. Hunger had caused “sunken cheeks and emaciated bodies,” he told them. The people were stricken with the “ravages of hunger.” The effects were worst among the most vulnerable members of the community. “Many of our children died from hunger,” he explained.
Indeed, waves of epidemic disease struck with regularity and were particularly devastating among Lakota children and youth. Little Wound’s family was not immune. In 1889, his son George became ill with tuberculosis while attending an off-reservation residential school. School officials sent him home to Lakota Country, but the young man never fully recovered. At least one of Little Wound’s wives joined the dance movement. When interviewed, Òwakȟáŋkȟáŋ (Tells Lies) “vigorously defended” her participation. She was one of many Lakota women who had lost children and danced with the hope of seeing them again. Reunion with the beloved dead in Ghost Dance visions and in the soon-to-be world’s transformation mattered to Lakota women experiencing devastating loss.
Given Lakotas’ long traditions of creating special protective clothing and other objects, it’s hardly surprising that Little Wound’s vision included the spirits’ command to make garments and their assurances of protection. According to later testimony, a powerful being directed him to make “medicine shirts.” “No harm could come to the wearer,” the spirit told him.
By summer 1890, Little Wound led Ghost Dances with more than 300 people. Other movement leaders held dances across the Pine Ridge Reservation. Nearly a quarter of the reservation’s Oglala Lakota population eventually took up the dance. Across Lakota Country, officials began to crack down on dance leaders. The US President called for a troop deployment to the region. Little Wound and his followers didn’t balk. In a letter to the reservation agent, he made his position clear: “We do not intend to stop dancing.”
Little Wound painted his shirt in response to instruction, in hope of its promise of protection as soldiers converged on Lakota Country. His shirt proclaimed the spirits still cared for them, the ancestors could come back to them, their people’s health, land, and way of life might be restored. Outsiders saw the dance movement and special clothes as Lakota preparation for war. It was Americans, however, who initiated the violence. In December 1890, soldiers surrounded a camp of Ghost Dancers on Wounded Knee Creek. Their leader surrendered. When a scuffle occurred, soldiers opened fire. They killed more than 300 Lakota men, women, and children.
In the face of state persecution and violence, Ghost Dancers across the US West continued to dance. Kiowas living on the southern plains were still dancing into the 1910s. Pawnees living further east, Southern Paiutes in Nevada, and Eastern Shoshone in Wyoming danced into the 1930s. Ghost Dancers in Canada continued until the 1960s. During the Red Power movement of the 1970s, Native activists looked to the Ghost Dance for inspiration and, in some places, reinstated the dance. In all these places and among all these peoples, the Ghost Dance still offered the powerful experience and commitment to Native flourishing Little Wound once experienced.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
Little Wound’s testimony about his vision: Rani-Henrik Andersson, A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices on the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 108–110. Little Wound’s descendant offering interpretation of the shirt as dictated to museum collector: “Images for Object 45-15-283,” Penn Museum. Lakota clothing practices: Emma I. Hansen and Beatrice Medicine, Memory and Vision: Arts, Cultures, and Lives of Plains Indian Peoples (Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 2007), 74–77, 89–91, 97. Lakota protective clothing: Rani-Henrik Andersson, Under the Tree That Never Bloomed I Sat and Cried Because It Faded Away: An Ethnohistory of Black Elk’s Visions (University of Nebraska Press, 2024), 276–77. Wovoka’s Ghost Dance: Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Wovoka’s gifts and their spread to tribal nations: Jennifer Graber, Ghost Dancing Across Native North America (New York University Press, forthcoming). Older accounts that interpreted ghost shirts as primitive spirituality and/or belligerence: William S. E. Coleman, Voices of Wounded Knee (University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 119–20, 216; Jennifer Graber, “Beyond Prophecy: Native Visionaries in American Religious Studies,” American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020): 72–76. Little Wound’s son’s illness: George Little Wound Student File, Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. Tells Lies’s testimony: Elaine Goodale Eastman, Sister to the Sioux: The Memoirs of Elaine Goodale Eastman, 1885–1891 (University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 150. Little’s Wound’s complaints about conditions on reservation and commitment to dancing: Rani-Henrik Andersson, A Whirlwind Passed Through Our Country: Lakota Voices on the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), 149–55, 226. Wounded Knee: Jerome A. Green, American Carnage: Wounded Knee, 1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2014). Ongoing Ghost Dance practices and invocations: Jennifer Graber, Ghost Dancing Across Native North America (New York University Press, forthcoming). Sources and further reading: Justin Gage, We Do Not Want the Gates Closed Between Us: Native Networks and the Spread of the Ghost Dance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020). Jennifer Graber, “Traditions, Exchanges, and Visions in the Ghost Dance of 1870,” in Native American Religions: Teaching and Learning on Stolen Land, edited by Dana Lloyd (Routledge Press, 2026). Tiffany M. Hale, Fugitive Religion: The Ghost Dance and Indigenous Resistance After the U.S. Civil War (Yale University Press, 2026). Michael Hittman, Wovoka and the Ghost Dance (University of Nebraska Press, 1997). Louis S. Warren, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance and the Making of Modern America (Basic Books, 2017).
Jennifer Graber
is Mary Helen Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities, Professor of History, and Affiliate Faculty in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a scholar of US religious history and Native American religions. Graber is the author of The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West . Her forthcoming book, Ghost Dancing Across Native North America (New York University Press, 2027), has received support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.
