Mormons and the Ghost Dance: a settler myth

Wherever white people experience culture they consider “advanced” among the global majority, conspiracy theories follow. Just like how “Ancient Aliens built the Egyptian pyramids,” the Book of Mormon and it’s Indigenous race theories is a response to the 19th century pop settler-culture white-supremacist idea that white people must have built the Mounds and Temples of this land.

Then there’s U.S. settlers thinking the Ghost Dance was caused by white Mormons.

The Ghost Dance came to Numu leader, Wovoka in vision. He preached, “Do not tell the white people about this. Jesus is now upon the earth.” and that the Ghost Dance would bring a new millennium and with it the end of US westward expansion, a resurgent animal population, the supernatural disappearance of white People, and the resurrection of the dead.
The People would live well again.

“The moon which is now a fire will destroy the whites” - Wovoka

The Ghost Dance grew and the white U.S. grew fearful—so they killed.

Wounded Knee Massacre, 12/29/1890. About 300 unarmed, starving Lakota were murdered by the US Army. This is the largest mass killing in U.S. History, so far.

​Two months prior, Major General Nelson A. Miles said "I cannot say positively, but it is my belief the Mormons are the prime movers in all this. I do not think it will lead to an outbreak.”

"It was at this stage of affairs, when driven to desperation, (that the Indians) were wilting to entertain the pretensions or superstitions of deluded, fanatical people living on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, whose emissaries first secretly appeared among the Indians prior to 1889." - Annual Report of the Secretary of War for 1891, Gen. Miles

The idea of a Mormon conspiracy behind the Ghost Dance did not begin with Gen. Miles and blaming Mormons for “Indian troubles” was no innovation.

They were separatist isolationists living on the wandering “frontier” among Indigenous Peoples for decades, they had weird beliefs and polygamy, and the “Mormon Question” was a common topic in Congress and Presidential campaigns of the time. Oh and Mormons were militantly anti-Fed-Gov (see: Mountain Meadows Massacre, Utah War, and The White Horse Prophecy)

Even though Mormons were the most obvious white-ish group to blame they are only linked to the Ghost Dance through rumor and circumstantial evidence.

During Second Wounded Knee in 1973, Lakota men and women, including Mary Brave Bird, did the ghost dance ceremony on the site where their ancestors had been killed. In her book, Brave Bird writes that ghost dances continue as private ceremonies.

“Despite the US death culture, the Ghost Dance vision is one of life.” - Nick Estes