A Phantom Storm

Sitting Bull, America, and the Ghost Dance
Fall 1890 saw the Ghost Dance ignite across Sioux reservations, offering salvation from the hardships of reservation life. As powerful figures manipulated public sentiment, the revered Lakota leader Sitting Bull became a target of relentless vilification, stoking tensions and eroding indigenous hope.
In the fall of 1890, a new religion swept onto the Sioux reservations like a prairie fire. The Ghost Dance, as it was called, promised that if American Indians would dance and pray, a Messiah would deliver them from the misery of reservation life. The movement was soon trumpeted as a new Indian war in the making by those who refused to see it as the lament of a downtrodden people.

At the center of the controversy was Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota chieftain and medicine man who was relentlessly villainized as “Custer’s assassin.” In reservation life he had become a staunch opponent of fe