Ghost Dance

Ghost Dance speech from Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee


GHOST DANCE :
A religious dance of the North American Indians, participated in by both sexes, and looked upon as a rite of invocation the purpose of which is, through trance and vision, to bring the dancer into communion with the unseen world and the spirits of departed friends.
The dance is the chief rite of the Ghost Dance religion, which originated about 1890 in the doctrines of the Paiute Wovoka, the Indian Messiah, who taught that the time was drawing near when the whole Indian race, the dead with the living, should be reunited to live a life of millennial happiness upon a regenerated earth.

I went up to heaven and saw all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give my people.
--Wovoka