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Definition: Ghost Dance from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate(R) Dictionary

(1890) : a group dance of a late 19th century American Indian messianic cult believed to promote the return of the dead and the restoration of traditional ways of life

Ghost Dance

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
American Indian religious revivalist movement that spread through the Plains Indians and other ethnic groups in the 1890s. In January 1889, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka had a vision that the old ways would be restored, the buffalo herds would return, white people would disappear, and the Indians would be reunited with friends and relatives in the ghost world. This vision became the nucleus for the Ghost Dance, in which American Indian peoples engaged in frenzied trance-inducing dancing, believing it would eliminate the whites and leave only the Indians and their ancestors. The movement spread rapidly, creating a fervour and unity among the various ethnic groups that caused fear among white settlers, and which ultimately contributed to the massacre at Wounded Knee after government agents called on the US Army to quell the movement. Roots of the movement The Ghost Dance movement was a reaction to the total defeat of the Plains Indians by the US Army and their confinement to small Indian…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance

From Chambers Dictionary of the Unexplained
A 19th-century plains and western Native American religious movement. The Ghost Dance movement arose in the late 1880s at a time when the plains Native Americans were being persecuted by the US government. It took its name from the dance performed by its adherents; a dance which had its roots in a…
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Full text Article ghost dance

From Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology
The ghost dance remains an important part of Native North American cultural history in part because of the savage butchery of the United States Army on the battlefield at Wounded Knee in 1890. This was the subject of a classic monograph by James Mooney (1861–1921), student of Franz Boas. Mooney’s…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
Sioux Ghost Dance. Philadelphia Publishers Union,...
The Ghost Dance is a religious movement among American Indians that began in 1889. Although this movement is complex and significant in its own right, the term Ghost Dance is inextricably linked to Wounded Knee, South Dakota. It was on December 29, 1890, that the Seventh U.S. Cavalry massacred at…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
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…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
American Indian religious revivalist movement that spread through the Plains Indians and other ethnic groups in the 1890s. In January 1889, a Paiute Indian named Wovoka had a vision that the old ways would be restored, the buffalo herds would return, white people would disappear, and the Indians…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
central ritual of the messianic religion instituted in the late 19th cent. by a Paiute named Wovoka . The religion prophesied the peaceful end of the westward expansion of whites and a return of the land to the Native Americans. The ritual lasted five successive days, being danced each night and on…
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Full text Article Ghost Dance, ca. 1890

From Encyclopedia of American Religious History
An Arapaho Ghost Dance, painted by Mary Irvin...
The Ghost Dance, which spread rapidly across the western states in 1889, is the best-known example of an extensive series of Native American religious movements, in which members of indigenous cultures used ritual and prophetic means to revive their traditional worlds in the wake of conflict with…
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Full text Article GHOST DANCE RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT, 1870

From Handy Answer: Native American Almanac: More Than 50,000 Years of the Cultures and Histories of Indigenous Peoples Full text Article CALIFORNIA
By 1870, a new religious movement called the Ghost Dance swept west from Nevada, predicting the end of the world and promising the return of dead relatives and the game animals. Desperate Natives who had experienced firsthand the appalling widespread death, violence, and starvation found the…
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Full text Article ghost dance

From The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language
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Full text Article Ghost dance

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
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