Explore the story of the Ghost Dance ceremony and American painter Ralph Albert Blakelock with Fawn Ring, director of lectures and performance programs.
The press called it the “Messiah Craze”—a fusion of Native American religion and Christianity that expressed indigenous pride and empowerment in the final years of the 1880s. Its manifestation in the Ghost Dance ceremony aroused the suspicions of United States government and military officials, and drew attention from artists, photographers and ethnographers. After the murders of Big Foot and Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, the Ghost Dance became part of the legend of the vanishing Indian.
