Bury My Heart

PETER: Starting in the 1740S, end times thinking became fairly common among American Indians in the East. And by the end of the 19th century, doomsday prophecy had spread to the Indians of the West. The Buffalo had all but disappeared, Indian land had been taken, and the Indians, themselves, were forced to live on reservations. The end of the world didn’t seen so far fetched. It was at this time of intense hardship, that in 1889, a Paiute Indian profit named Wovoka began prophesying about the coming of a new world.

JEFFREY OSTLER: This is where the apocalyptic event comes in.

PETER: Jeff Ostler is an historian at the University of Oregon. And he’s written extensively about Wovoka’s prophecies.

JEFFREY OSTLER: We don’t know exactly how he imagined that the new world would occur. But it’s clear that he taught that it would occur through some kind of cataclysmic event.

PETER: Maybe it would occur through fire.

JEFFREY OSTLER: Maybe through a kind of earthquake.

PETER: Maybe through a flood.

JEFFREY OSTLER: Some sources suggest a great snow.

PETER: Wovoka didn’t know what it would be, but he did know that it was going to happen soon.

JEFFREY OSTLER: And it would destroy, or remove, European Americans. And then after that, there would be a renewed world where game would return, ancestors who had died would return to life, and Indian people would be able to live well again.

PETER: Wovoka’s followers prepared for this renewed world with a dance known as the Ghost Dance.

JEFFREY OSTLER: It was a round dance where people would hold hands and they would dance in a circle. And then, after a period of time, some of the dancers would lose consciousness.

PETER: While they were unconscious, dancers would have visions of the new world to come after the apocalypse.

JEFFREY OSTLER: You can read some of these visions, they’re quite remarkable, where somebody says, well, I died, or I lost consciousness, and I was on horseback. And the world was green and not like this dead world that I’m now living in. And then I walked up, I rode up over a hill, and I saw a figure on horseback coming toward me and it was my sister who had died recently. And buffalo were grazing. And so people would have these visions. And then they would awake. And then they would relate them, they would tell them.

PETER: Word started to spread into Wyoming, Colorado, and Montana. But the Ghost Dance had the most profound effect on a tribe from the Dakota’s, the Lakota Sioux.

JEFFREY OSTLER: Somehow or another, we don’t know exactly how, they get wind of this. That Wovoka, somebody out in the West is teaching this wonderful thing.

PETER: Like other plains tribes, the Lakota had relied heavily on the now decimated buffalo. And they had just recently been confined to reservations. Wovoka’s prophecies struck a chord. So the Lakota tribal leaders gathered together and decided to send a formal delegation to see him in Nevada.

JEFFREY OSTLER: You have to realize there’s a railroad network. And there they are, going out there. They’re going to reject this whole world, but they’re going to get out there on trains.

PETER: The Lakota emissaries brought Wovoka’s teachings back to the reservations. And many of the Lakota started doing the Ghost Dance in preparation for the new world. But the dance was illegal on reservations. Practicing native tradition was seen as uncivilized and barbarous. Government officials tried to stop it. They arrested the leaders, and then hoped it would just go away. That’s when things screeched to a halt at Wounded Knee Creek.

JEFFREY OSTLER: By the fall of 1890, the military decided to send troops to suppress the ghost dance among the Lakotas. It was only the Lakotas they sent troops against.

PETER: In late December, the 7th Cavalry came across a band of about 400 ghost dancers led by an Indian named Big Foot. The soldiers surrounded Big Foot’s camp at Wounded Knee Creek.

JEFFREY OSTLER: In the course of disarming Big Foot’s people, a shot rang out. And then it was the 7th Calvary opened fire. And at the end of several hours, there was a death toll of probably 240 to 270 of Big Foot’s people. A horrific slaughter.

BLACK ELK: I did not know then how much was ended.

PETER: Years later, a Lakota Indian named Black Elk reflected on what he saw that day.

BLACK ELK: When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard.

PETER: So we might even say the ghost dancers predicted a new world and they got one.

JEFFREY OSTLER: Yeah.

PETER: Ostler says there’s a bit of a postscript to this story. Clearly, things went terribly for the plains Indians for a long time. Much of their world was destroyed. But if they were hoping for some sort of renewal, well, it might be creeping in, in bits pieces.

JEFFREY OSTLER: Some of the things that the ghost dancers were talking about are occurring. There are more buffalo on the Great Plains than there once were. There’s more Indians. And by many measures, conditions for Indian people are much better than they were in the time of the Ghost Dance and after Wounded Knee. There are serious problems, but when we think of all that is happening in Indian country, in terms of cultural revitalization and language, it’s quite extraordinary, really.

PETER: Special thanks to Jeff Ostler from the University of Oregon for helping us tell this story.

[MUSIC – LENKA, “END OF THE WORLD”]

BRIAN: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back, what do you do if you think the end is near? Do you jump from buildings? Or do you try to make the world a better place? Maybe a little bit of both.

ED: Your listening to BackStory. We’ll be back in a minute.