How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [110]
THE 1890 GHOST DANCE
On January 1, 1889, a total eclipse of the sun projected a black disk that streaked across the North American continent. In its path in Nevada was a Paiute Indian named Wovoka (“The Cutter”), known to whites as Jack Wilson. Wovoka was the son of Tavibo, a Paiute from Walker Valley, just south of Virginia City, Nevada. It was in 1870, almost twenty years earlier, that Tavibo and another Paiute named Wodziwob started the first Ghost Dance movement, on the heels of a devastating drought and an epidemic of typhoid and measles that wiped out a tenth of the Paiute population. Tavibo prophesied that a great earthquake would swallow both Indians and whites, but after three days (note the Christian influence) the Indians alone would return, along with fish, game, and plants. Tavibo created a counterclockwise circular dance around a fire that would bring back the dead, and this evolved (with as many variations as there were groups who adopted it) into the Ghost Dance of 1890. But times were not quite right for the messianic rebirth myth to take off, and the influence of Wodziwob and Tavibo soon faded after 1870. (The Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, in which General Custer and his soldiers were thoroughly quashed in one of the few major victories for the natives, brought hope that perhaps the tide could be reversed by more earthly means.) Shortly thereafter Tavibo left his family and community, abandoning his teenage son Wovoka to a white rancher named David Wilson, who renamed him Jack. Wovoka/Jack grew up in a deeply Christian family that included daily prayers and readings from the Bible. At the age of twenty he married a Paiute woman, and as a young adult began to pursue the interests of his biological father, including reviving the circular dance that was said to open the Paiute soul to greater spirituality. Between dances he preached an amalgam of Native American Christianity, celebrating faith, Jesus, and the monotheistic God, along with traditional beliefs in the spirits of the mountains, clouds, snow, stars, trees, and antelope.
Wovoka’s influence and following grew, and by the 1880s real-world hope for the survival of Native American culture was fading fast. In 1881 their great leader Sitting Bull surrendered after a long and bitter struggle. Where the plains were once covered with the herds of 60 million buffalo, by 1883 a scientific expedition counted a mere 200 head. Finally, any possibility of peaceful coexistence of whites and Indians was greatly inhibited by the government’s bureaucratic and military actions, driven by the administration’s Indian policy, succinctly summarized by President Benjamin Harrison:
First, the anomalous position heretofore occupied by the Indians in this country can no longer be maintained.
Second, the logic of events demands the absorption of the Indians into our national life not as Indians but as American citizens.
Third, as soon as wise conservation will permit it, the relations of the Indians to the government must rest solely upon the recognitian of their individuality [they had to become legal citizens of the United States and not members of an Indian tribe or nation].
Fourth, the individual must conform to the white man’s ways, peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.
Fifth, compulsory education.
Sixth, tribal relationship should be broken.
Part of the “absorption” process included forcing the Indians to abandon hunting and take up farming. Unfortunately a drought struck the West in the spring and summer of 1890. forcing many of the reservations to go on starvation rations. Some Native Americans tried to return to the ways of their ancestors by “hunting” the cattle rationed to them by the government, but in July this was prohibited by Harrison’s