Above, Kiowa woman wearing a Ghost Dance robe (historic or replica?) with turtle, thunderbirds, snake, tree, and stars.

The Ghost Dance was an ecstatic anti-colonial spiritual movement that spread from Nevada across the Rockies to the Great Plains, and also into California and up to Washington, with many local variations. It struck a deep chord as the last sovereign First Nations were militarily defeated and forced into reservations.

Above, another view of the same robe. Below, some of the same motifs: thunderbirds, tree of life, moons and suns, on another Arapaho Ghost Dance robe. The name of the ceremony refers to the visions of slain relatives and other ancestors experienced by many dancers, often when they fell to the ground in an altered state after dancing and singing for hours.

One of the most famous Ghost Dance robes. Here the stars take the shape seen on the U.S. flag. The woman at center holds a sacred pipe and a feather, and stands between two thunderbirds.

A closer view of the woman praying with a pipe.

It's fair to ask why I placed the Ghost Dance under "women's ceremony," since men participated. But for many peoples, the male population had been decimated fighting the invaders, and women predominated in numbers in the remaining population.

The buckskin painting below shows the dancers, with three people stretched out on the ground in trance. It was painted by a Ute captive living among the Cheyenne, in 1891, and is one of the few Native representations of the Ghost Dance.

Detail of the painting above. The women can be distinguished by the leggings they wear under their skirts. The men wear long flaring leggings which can be easily mistaken for skirts, but have long vertical stripes, like the figure at center left. He and the center woman have their arms raised, and teh woman at right is lifting some object (perhaps a rifle?).

Above, two other Native sketches of the Ghost Dance, among the Comanche and the Lakota. These are from James Mooney's book, The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (published in 1896) Despite its title focused on the Lakota, the book goes into earlier anti-colonial movements, including those of the Delaware Prophet, the Shawnee Prophet, Smohalla in what later became Washington state, and Wovoka himself in Nevada.

The book is richly illustrated, with many pictures of the Ghost Dance, ceremonial regalia, and old-style beds and other things of daily life. And he gives a lot of historical background on various Plains peoples. But the real jewel to me is his transliteration and translation of Ghost Dance Songs from the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Lakota, Comanche, and other peoples. I'm going to share screen caps of some of them. It's tempting to compare them to scriptures, because they are poetic and though simple, profound. But they were songs, so we are missing a large dimension of their beauty: the melody, voices, drums or rattles.

Arapaho song on the sacred Cedar, p 979

Arapaho Thunderbird song, p 968

Arapaho again, musing on misplaced trust and betrayal by settlers, p 961

This song moved me so much when I first saw it, and still does. The loss of something so precious, by conquest.

Thus Says Our Mother, maybe Arapaho, not clear from the text, p 998

This Comanche song appears in Robbie Robertson's song Ghost Dance, which quotes from the songs Mooney recorded, in several places. "We shall live again." "My sister above, she has red paint."

Robertson is Mohawk on his mother's side. Ulali sings backup on this track. If you don't know them, you are in for a treat.

Mother.

Mahk Jchi.

The line My sister above, she is painted, appears in several Caddo songs, like this one.

Turtle is honored in several Algonquian songs, like this one from the Arapaho.

Here's a Turtle song from the Cheyenne, remembering the St Croix river between Minnesota and Wisconsin, their land centuries before they were driven onto the Plains.

One more Ghost Dance dress, which doesn't have an identification, but is made of cotton. These dances continued into the early 1900s, when buckskin was much harder to get.