ABSTRACT
The Ghost Dance was the largest and most important of a number of revitalization movements that took place among Native North American in the nineteenth century. As with other Native American revitalization movements, the Ghost Dance developed and spread as a response to the catastrophic changes that followed European settlement of the continent. For adherents of the Ghost Dance in the Western Plains, the most devastating of these changes were their humiliating defeat at the hands of the American army, their confinement on reservations, and, in some ways most important of all, the extinction of the bison. For the Plains Indians the Ghost Dance movement was a hope of central importance and the means by which they attempted to change the existing social order so as to improve their lives. Those who sought divine intervention through participation in the Ghost Dance believed that the traditional Indian way of life would be revived, the herds of bison would return, dead ancestors would return to earth, and that the white settlers and soldiers would disappear.
