Either of two group dances associated with a messianic religious movement among Native American peoples of the Southwest and Great Plains in the late 19th century. Ghost dance prophets foretold the imminent disappearance of whites, the restoration of traditional lands and ways of life, and the resurrection of dead ancestors. Nineteenth-century Native American cult. It represented an attempt by Indian peoples in the western U.S. to rehabilitate their traditional cultures. The Ghost Dance arose in 1889, when the Paiute prophet-dreamer Wovoka announced the imminent return of the dead (hence "ghost"), the ousting of the whites, and the restoration of Indian lands, food supplies, and way of life, all of which would be hastened by dances and songs revealed in Wovoka's spiritual visions. The Ghost Dance spread rapidly. It coincided with the Sioux outbreak of 1890, which culminated in the massacre at Wounded Knee, where the "ghost shirts" failed to protect the wearers as promised by Wovoka. The cult soon became obsolete
The religion spread through a majority of the western tribes of the United States, only in the case of the Sioux, owing to local causes, leading to an outbreak
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, or Messiah, religion, which originated about 1890 in the doctrines of the Piute 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
The religion inculcates peace, righteousness, and work, and holds that in good time, without warlike intervention, the oppressive white rule will be removed by the higher powers