Ghost Dance Movement Essay

The governmental leaders of the United States of America began implementing Indian policies from its inception. As Euro-Americans they expected all non-whites in the U.S. to assimilate into a Euro-American (Christian) lifestyle, without reciprocation or sympathy to the traditions and history of our native people. Our founding fathers and subsequent leaders of the United States at varying times have used suppression, segregation, aggression, and assimilation to manage what they perceived as an Indian problem, and civilize them. The native peoples of North America have responded to these actions by, at times, complying with the U.S. government and allowing themselves to be relocated to other areas of the country leaving behind their ancestral

Native Americans were not afforded full citizenship in the United States until 1924, therefore they were not afforded the rights of American citizens i.e. religious freedom until then. It wasn’t until 1945, that the Supreme Court held that “Freedom of speech and of press is accorded aliens residing in this country” (Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135, 148). In 1890 the Ghost Dance movement gain momentum within the Lakota. This created concern and fear among many whites in the area. A massacre at Wounded Knee on the Lakota Reservation in South Dakota was a direct result of the Euro- American fears of non-Christian people. Tisa Wegner tells us, “in 1906, Congress supported a view, amending the Dawes Act to postpone citizenship for newly allotted Indians for twenty-five-year period or until they had “adopted the habits of civilized life” (Hoxie 1995:211-238). The Native people then developed secular dance ceremonies which allowed them to continue the practice of dancing and not be perceived as a threat, they did this by having these ceremonies coincide with Euro-American

The religious practices of the Native American population in the U.S. no longer was of concern to the government. Suppression, segregation and aggression was also no longer a policy which the American government wished to pursue, but assimilation still remained a concern. Unfortunately, the assimilation came in the form of once again taking away lands from Native Americans (termination) because reservations were seen as equal to the concentration camps of WWII. Rosier states in his journal article, "They Are Ancestral Homelands": Race, Place, and Politics in Cold War Native America, 1945-1961, that Zuni veterans of “We have served [overseas] in order to save our country, our people, our religion, our freedom of press and our freedom of speech from destruction…We, now in the land of freedom as Americans are faced with [termination policies] which will mean total destruction of all tribes.” The policy of termination clashed with the Native American peoples ' desires to preserve their own native identity, and with their own identity came their own religious practices. Between 1953–1964, more than 100 tribes were terminated and 13,263 Native Americans lost tribal affiliation; this was a loss that could not be regained. Scholars determined that the termination policies had calamitous effects on tribal autonomy and