#US Dept of the Interior

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

U.S. Department of the Interior: On Saturday, October 14, most skywatchers in the U.S. will experience at least a partial eclipse. BUT, from the Oregon coast to the Texas Gulf Coast, where skies are clear, folks will see the full annular eclipse. Also known as the "ring of fire" eclipse, it occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and Earth at its farthest point from our planet.

During an annular eclipse, it is never safe to look directly at the Sun without specialized eye protection designed for solar viewing. To capture this 2017 solar eclipse pictured below, the National Park Service photographer developed the image with two different exposures – one of the eclipsed Sun using a solar filter to protect the camera's sensor and photographer's eyes, while the other was unfiltered and captured the landscape below the Sun.

Photo: Patrick Myers / Great Sand D

[unes National Park and Preserve (2023)

* * * *

“Dawn is gathering. The noon of night has gone. The first gleams of daylight disclose its temperature. Stone takes on color. Treetops are roots of the day yet to grow. The moon, silver necklace from which Venus dangles like a pearl, still sheds its brightness. The abyss is only perspective, location. There will be nests on some branches.” — Homero Aridjis, from Persephone (Vintage, 1986)

[alive on all channels]

[jimstares]

May is Missing & Murdered Indigenous People Month

[dougielombax]

What does the US fish and wildlife service actually DO?!

[revdrjamesjshowersjr]

Wow, what a calling. Bless these wonderful monastic sisters. 'For the sake of their sorrowful passions'!!

So Help Them God!!.. Hoowah, Amen, Ameen, Amun, Amin, Aum..

[hometoursandotherstuff]

Here we have a 1920 church in Jericho, VT that was kinda trashed b/c it's been used as a garden store, of all things. It has nothing even near what a home conversion would have, and they're asking $550K. Look at it and see what you think.

Personally, I'm appalled. I thought it would at least be organized. It's a mess. Look at how water messed up the floor. It's also a hydroponic center.

The Walmart garden dept. is nicer than this. I expected a lovely country store.

Looks like they built that structure. That might have to be torn down. All the stuff on the walls. What will it look like when they move out?

Messy garbage room?

The bathroom.

Buried in here may be what once was the altar railing?

Stairs they built to go up to the structure they made.

It's the office. What sloppy people. This is disgusting.

The view from up here. I wonder what happened to the choir loft. They painted over whatever was on the ceiling with white gloss.

There's a large basement.

All of this stuff. How are they going to clear all of this out?

What's in here? Another messy office.

There isn't one area that isn't loaded with an unorganized mess, and there's too much paper tacked to the walls. This place is too much work to restore and convert to a home, IMO.

This ramp in the back doesn't even look useable.

The building next door is the former rectory, but they don't show the interior.

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/394-State-Route-15-Jericho-VT-05465/2054337508_zpid/?

[floridacracker]

US Dept of the Interior currently has a position available for the guy that shovels coal into the fire on a steam train. Literally

[artielu]

Listen up, y'all.

This is what happens when you have Democrats in the White House. Biden appointed Deb Haaland, an Indigenous woman, to lead the Department of the Interior, which is the federal agency primarily responsible for relations with Native Americans. So, for the first time, the Dept of the Interior was led by a person who is native.

Because elections have consequences and voting MATTERS.

And that Department undertook an investigation into the horrific boarding schools created by the federal government for the purpose of destroying native cultures. And then published its findings.

---

"The federal government today expanded the number of children known to have died in the repressive boarding school system that, for more than a century, pulled Native American children from their homes and communities. The Interior Department also called for billions in federal funding to begin a “healing” process.

The report concludes a three-year investigation that saw, for the first time, the federal government accepting responsibility for its role in creating the system, which included more than 400 schools across 37 states.

“The federal government – facilitated by the Department I lead – took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement."

The report advocates spending at least as much money the federal government spent tearing apart indigenous people to repair the damage it caused. "In other words, investing $23.3 billion back to the tribes, spread out over a long period of time. The report advocates spending on programs such as family reunification, language revitalization, and Indian education – programs intended to address the ways in which the boarding school system wreaked havoc on tribal communities."

---

Whom you vote for in November matters for so many reasons, including this. Harris will continue this work. Trump will ignore it. If you care about attempting to repair the atrocities the US federal government has inflicted on indigenous people, you need to vote blue. You need to vote for Harris and then continue to advocate for indigenous people and other systemically marginalized groups.

Your vote is your voice and your voice matters but only if you actually use it to influence the election.

Vote Harris. Vote blue.

[lizardsaredinosaurs]

You'd be grouchy, too, if you lived in this "breeding center".

Wyoming Toad (Anaxyrus baxteri)

Wyoming

Status: Endangered

After almost going extinct, according to the US Dept. of the Interior, in 2020 the Saratoga National Fish Hatchery "released over 18,000 toads of all life stages (tadpoles, toadlets and adults)! Population numbers in the wild were also good and there was breeding in the wild for the sixth year in a row."

They also just got their own personal $2m ranch last year.

[k00295632]

Project: Movement. Week 4. Thursday, 1/02/24.

Painting: Studio Time.

I did a bit of thumbnailing for what I had in mind and even shot some reference pics in my bathrooms doing different actions/ different positions to help decided with what direction I wanted to take this painting. My initial idea was to create a portrait of my past self looking into the mirror at my current self, reflecting my theme of the movement of time and how much I've changed since cutting my hair for the first time.

I decided to further emphasise the change between my past and future self with colours, duller colours for the past and highly saturated eye catching colours for the future. I had to do some thumbnails for how to balance out the colours, and look at some older works of mine to see how I did it in the past. I settled on using primarily red, yellow, blue, green, and orange as my colour pallet. However, I've never used them in the way I intended to here, so it was certainly a new experience.

I started off by choosing a reference picture and doing a rough under drawing to figure out proportions. When doing my rough sketch I actually taped my phone to the wall and tried to draw from a distance so I could calculate the shapes and proportions as accurately as possible.

I decided that since the interior and exterior of the mirror are very different in colour schemes, I would work on one at a time, I chose to focus on inside the mirror to start off with. Once that was done I began blocking out my main base colours and went about adding shadows. the light shadows helped start the process of shaping the face. It was a very "trust the process" sort of situation.

I knew with the approach I took I wouldn't be able to get away with solid blocks of colour for the hair and shirt, so I experimented with layering different colours to gain different textures. For the hair I tried building shapes with different layers of blues and greens before going in with a dark blue for the darker areas and shadows, I then went in with some red and light green highlights. It was certainly an improvement.

As for the shirt, It was very trial and error, I actually had to repaint over certain areas. I settled with using my light blue for the main shadows on the shirt to add a sense of dept, the translucence of the blue paint on top of the orange worked in my favour. Since blue and orange are on opposite ends of the colour wheel they tend to cancel each other out a bit, resulting in a duller hue of blue which was perfect for the shadows. I went in with greens to blend out the blue at the edges and yellow for highlights, I used bits of red and dark green for creases and wrinkles in the shirt. When I was doing the blue areas, I actually covered large areas at a time and then would drag the back of my hand through it removing a lot of the paint and leaving an interesting texture, similar to a wedge tool shown to us during the tool workshop.

That's all the progress I made for Thursday

[baeddelations]

I think this part of my loathing of seeing this article passed around "i am tw, iam staying in the closet" bc it is a diary entry that was explicitly not supposed to be advice or a rubric. She origanilly aays its just 1 narrative to take in then when it gets past around she says hey this was me venting i didnt intend for anyone to read this.

I think this is the major interest in this piece. A view into the interiority of a tw whos been closeted for 20 yrs and her personal xp growin up then being a closeted tw in a University WGS dept. Some ppl might call this a fetishistic interest in the interiority of this tw, oh how they love poking around in the frankenstein monsters guts, poking his brain to see what horrid mismatched limb will jump.

I think the main reason @autolenaphilia interacted with this is bc this article was passed around by a bunch of transmisogynist who are adpting and pulling together the transmisogyny of jeniffer and her recounting of cismanhating that exists in primarily cisfeminist spaces and by extension radical and queer spaces. Jennifer does not bring up cafab transness or transmasculinity once in this article yet it is cited as inspiration for truther framework.

I do think the way that jennifer talks about not wanting to acquiesce is kinda built on a faulty conjecture which is that if she transitioned she would be able to talk about femininity in these spaces... at one point she says this probably wouldnt be true(mb just for her) but then goes back to the original argumentation on many occasions. This argumentation taken to conlusion posits that it is easier to discourse or even exist in those spaces as a tw than as a cis man that u will be more include and less ridiculed. At the time of this article she had never actually tried out this proposition, so she never got to see how this prop is at least in all the copius amounts of personal and anecdotal xp i have false. But this prop is useful for ppl who want push tw have it easier and that men are reviled for being men. Enter prager xcuse me truthers.

I also hate internalized oppression framework, imo it is an idpol tool used to shift blame from the brainwashed oppressed to som aspirational that oppressive ideology comes naturally to. Is she promoting transmisogynistic ideas? Yah, shes not bad for this but it is why its useful to truthers, and part of why it hurts to read as a tw.

@autogyne-redacted i do think its hard to see point 1, 2, and 5 of y shes not trnsn nd say these arent related to passibility. Repercussion are often contingent with passablity. Movin towards phys transn being dysphoria inducing is connected with what expectations of feminity u hav and how u line up with them(i also xp this). And the gap thing is imo her wishing she could be passable w ease and recognizing she cant so settling and saying its not worth it to try.

I think lena is apply a broader scope of trans xp to jennifers xp i dnt think this is even necessarily harmful and i dnt think shes even saying jen is wrong for it shes saying her words are easy to coopt that they are capering to these tmras which they are however unitentionally. U could also take things ive said in the past and warp them into tmra shit. I fortunately didnt write these things in a medium article. She is handling in other ways and this is wut conv therapy wants... thats what it seems they go for a lot again doesnt mean jen is bad nd lena doest say shes wrong for this. The only thing lena says is she doesnt want this for herself thats not restricting jens autonomy. And that the article and responses made her sick. They made me feel bad too. This isnt necessarily a moral judgement. It could be but idk.

All this is a dissection. I hate it. I wish her vent diary post wasnt being aired, analyzed, and discoursed. Im doing it right now ffs! It makes me want to leave the internet. I hope ppl stop talkn bout it...but they wont bc the corpse of this diary can be a useful weapon against tw so itll keep gettn used.

[todaysdocument]

The Yuma County Water Users Association wrote to the Immigration and Naturalization Service on April 23, 1943, asking that Mexican workers from neighboring Sonora be allowed to stay in the U.S. to help with the harvest. 

Record Group 85: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service

Series: Subject and Policy Files

File Unit: 55854/100H

Transcription: 

[stamps read "SPECIAL" and "VIA WESTERN UNION"]

WUG 26 111

YUMA ARIZ APR 23 148P

EARL H HARISON COMM IMMI AND NAT

DIV DEPT OF JUSTICE

THIS FARMING AREA RAISING ALFALFA FLAX AND OTHER VITAL WAR CROPS SERIOUSLY SHORT OF FARM LABOR BUT SITUATION COULD BE RELIEVED IF MEXICANS FROM ADJACENT SONORA WERE ALLOWED TO HELP IN HARVEST NOW COMMENCING. SOME SONORA MEXICANS HAVE DRIFTED IN DURING THE PAST FEW MONTHS BUT FACE IMMEDIATE DEPORTATION. MEXICANS RECRUITED BY A F S FROM INTERIOR MEXICOS HIGH ALTITUDE AND COOL CLIMATE CANNOT STAND OUT HEAD AND MOST OF THEM HAVE LEFT. BORDER MEXICANS FROM SONORA AN LOWER CALIFORNIA USED TO OUR CLIMATE ARE EXPERIENCED FARMERS. THIS HELP ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY TO HARVEST VITALLY ESSENTIAL WAR CROPS. CAN DEPORTATION BE STAVED TEMPORARILY OR UNTIL AUTHORITY FOR LEGAL ENTRY CAN BE SECURED

YUMA COUNTY WATER USERS ASSOCIATION HENRY FRAUENFELDER PRESIDENT.

FSA

725P.

[Pencil marks reads "/3/6" or "1316"]

[stamp reads "A MESSAGE CENTER P.M. APR 23 (illegible) & NATZ SERVICE DEPT OF JUSTICE" and "SPECIAL"]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The 469-mile Blue Ridge Parkway passes through six mountain chains in the Appalachians in Virginia and North Carolina, connecting Great Smoky Mountains National Park with Shenandoah National Park. The parkway’s 45 mph top speed limit allows visitors to slow down to enjoy the gorgeous colors of the season.

Photo: Philip Varney/US Department of the Interior

[Scott Horton]

* * * *

“The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you’re present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the way places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities...”

― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

[iasmelaion]

Yuletide 2022

I had a most excellent Yuletide! Here is what I received:

Waiting Close the Approach of Morning (2512 words) by agalaxyofroses Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Dracula - Bram Stoker (Novel 1897) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Jonathan Harker/Mina Murray Harker Characters: Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray Harker, Quincey Morris, Abraham Van Helsing, Arthur Holmwood, John Seward Additional Tags: Missing Scene, Coping Mechanisms, Crew of Light Doing Crew of Light Things Summary:

In the week before they depart for Varna, the Crew Light spends the time as best they can.

A perfect missing scene, with lovely prose and insights about the Polycula.

A Beginner's Guide to Octopus Football (2190 words) by Wasuremono Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future - Jon Bois Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Original Characters, Worldbuilding Exchange (Anthropomorphic) Additional Tags: Octopi & Squid, In-Universe Document, Sports Summary:

Excerpts from the Volunteer Orientation Manual of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Stadium, circa 20020: notes on modern immortal octopus culture, etiquette, and their favorite sport.

Octopuses!! :DDDD Playing football!! So clever and adorable.

And here's what I wrote:

careful fear and dead devotion (6038 words) by yasaman Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: We Are Lady Parts (TV) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Amina Hussein/Saira Characters: Amina Hussein, Saira (We Are Lady Parts) Additional Tags: 5+1 Things, First Kiss Summary:

“Guess we still have some work to do on your stage fright,” says Saira, with her usual gruffness.

“Guess so,” says Amina, glum. “I’ll work on it, I swear.”

Saira’s expression goes unaccountably soft. “Didn’t I tell you we were gonna fix this once and for all? We. We’ve still got plenty of things to try, yeah?”

Amina is pretty sure she’s tried all of them, actually. But she’s not about to let Saira or Lady Parts down, so she nods and says, “Yeah, alright.”

Five ways Saira and Amina try to fix Amina's stage fright, and one way that works.

flesh and bone by the telephone (3347 words) by yasaman Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Mystery Flesh Pit National Park - Trevor Roberts Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Additional Tags: Worldbuilding, Documentation, Social Media, Yuletide Treat, Unconventional Format, the calls are coming from inside the mystery flesh pit, 5 Things Summary:

"Though engineered to survive the humid and caustic environment of the Mystery Flesh Pit’s internal anatomy, routine maintenance was required to prevent phones located in the deeper sections of the park from becoming subsumed by natural muscle actions of the pit. Today, it is unknown how many, if any, of these emergency phone stations are still operational, as the United States Dept. of the Interior has barred civilian access to the former park’s many trails." From the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park Archive.

Five documents about the emergency trail phones in the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, from before and after the 2007 disaster.

they say love is a virtue (don't they?) (3233 words) by yasaman Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Scholomance - Naomi Novik Rating: Mature Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Galadriel "El" Higgins/Liesel Mueller Characters: Liesel Mueller (Scholomance), Galadriel "El" Higgins Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Post-Golden Enclaves, Open Relationships Summary:

“We’re not here for you to give me a restaurant review or for us to have a transcendent gourmet experience,” says El, crossing her arms, and Liesel sighs.

“We can multitask: transcendent gourmet experience and a conversation about your marriage prospects,” says Liesel with a blandly sweet smile.

“My what?!” says El, wide-eyed, and then, better than Liesel could even time it, the evening call to prayer sounds out along with church bells, an echoing, holy cacophony of what must be half a dozen different muezzins and bells, the sound bouncing and doubling almost eerily around the neighborhood.

El has more admirers than she thinks she does. Liesel tells her why.

[xtruss]

American Oz: The Lakota Ghost Dance and the Massacre at Wounded Knee

How the American drive to force Indian assimilation turned violent on the plains of South Dakota.

— April 16, 2021 | Louis S. Warren | From the Collection: Native Americans

Native Americans performing ritual Ghost Dance. One standing woman is wearing a white dress, a special costume for the ritual dance, 1890. Photo by James Mooney, an ethnologist with US Dept. of Interior. Alamy

Editor’s Note: When L. Frank Baum and other white settlers arrived in Aberdeen, South Dakota in the 1880s, they were entering land that had been part of the homeland of the Western Sioux or Lakota. On the Standing Rock and Pine Ridge reservations west of Aberdeen, conditions were dire for the over 10,000 Lakota living there. In the following excerpt from God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, Louis S. Warren recounts the Lakota struggle to resist assimilation and survive in the face of violent suppression from the administration of President Benjamin Harrison.

In the west, drought had baked the earth bare. Indian reservations occupied poor land that had little game and few wild plants of any use. In the withering heat, what grass was left by cattle and sheep (most of them owned by white ranchers) quickly shriveled. Scarce game vanished. By 1885, many Indians had turned their hand to farming, but in 1890 their crops wilted. Starvation, that old monster, circled the camps.

It was thus not surprising that some Indians had turned to a new faith. In doing so, Indian believers unwittingly launched upon a collision course with the anxious American public. What swept the West that summer was an evangelical revival that synthesized ancient Indian beliefs with new millenarian teaching. Strange stories made their way from neighbor to neighbor, from one people to the next, stories of distant laughter on the breeze, dead loved ones brought back to life, and an earth again made green and bountiful.

Bison hunting had ceased by the early 1880s, for the animals were nearly extinct. The only survivors of the great herds were living in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, on a few private ranches far to the south or in Canada, and in zoos and traveling Wild West shows. But in 1890, in the midst of the drought, a few of the shaggy beasts appeared suddenly on one of the Sioux reservations in South Dakota. Had the spirits returned their favor? How else could one explain this miraculous event?

Stories like these spread among friends and acquaintances, raising unanswerable questions and inspiring new faith. And all that fall, Indians danced. They danced from the deep Southwest to the Canadian border and into Alberta. They danced from the Sierra Nevada to eastern Oklahoma. They danced in southern Utah, and in Idaho. They danced in Arizona.

In Nevada, a thousand Shoshones danced all night, and as the eastern sky turned pale shouts rang out that the spirits of deceased loved ones were appearing among the faithful. A thousand voices shouted in unison, “Christ has come!,” and they fell to the ground, or perhaps to their knees, weeping and singing and utterly exhausted. Although many had dismissed the springtime talk of a messiah somewhere in the mountains of western Montana, the rumor seemed only to grow over time. From the Southwest to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming and on into the plains of South Dakota, Indians spoke of a redeemer to the north.

Ghost Dance Drum by George Beaver, wood, rawhide and pigment, late 1890s, Fenimore Art Museum. Public Domain

By the fall of 1890, authorities who read the telegrams and heard the reports had become uneasy. Thirty Indian reservations were transfixed by the prophecies of the Messiah, but the teachings had a particularly enthusiastic following among the Lakota Sioux, also known as the Western Sioux. Because of the relatively recent history of US hostilities with these people—the notorious Sitting Bull was learning the new faith—it was there that government agents soon focused their attentions.

It is almost impossible to overstate how vehement officials and other Americans eventually became over the need to break up the dances. Of all the features of the new ritual that garnered commentary, the physical excitement of the dancers received the most attention. The central feature of the Ghost Dance everywhere was a ring of people holding hands and turning in a clockwise direction—“men, women, and children; the strong and the robust, the weak consumptive, and those near to death’s door,” as one observer described them. Lakotas had grafted onto the Ghost Dance some symbols of their primary religious ritual, the Sun Dance. Thus, Sioux believers felled a tree, often a young cottonwood, and re-erected it at the center of their dance circle. On it they hung offerings to the spirits, including colored ribbons and sometimes an American flag. Near the tree stood the holy men, supervising the event and assembling the believers, who began by taking a seat in the circle around the tree. There was a prayer, and sometimes a sacred potion was passed for participants to drink. Then dancers might together utter “a sort of plaintive cry, which is pretty well calculated to arrest the ear of the sympathetic.” Once these preliminaries were completed, the dancers rose and started singing—unaccompanied, without drums or other instruments—and the circle began to turn.

Astonished and disturbed by the enthusiasms of the ritual, some American witnesses were moved to dire warnings. One agent reported that the Indians favored “disobedience to all orders, and war if necessary to carry out their dance craze.” “The Indians are dancing in the snow and are wild and crazy,” hyperventilated the agent at Pine Ridge. Another denounced the actual dance as “exceedingly prejudicial” to the “physical welfare” of the Indians, who became exhausted by it. “I think, “the agent went on, “steps should be taken to stop it.” Fearful that unconscious women might be molested, one white witness at Pine Ridge claimed that women “fall senseless to the ground, throwing their clothes over their heads, and laying bare the most prominent part of their bodies, viz., ‘their butts’ and ‘things.’” Concluded still another, “The dance is indecent, demoralizing, and disgusting.”

Bird's-eye view of a large Lakota camp of tipis, horses, and wagons--probably on or near Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Photographer John C. H. Gabriel, 1891. Library of Congress

For these observers, the dance was a physical manifestation of irrationality, a refusal to be governed in body or in spirit by the codes of Victorian decorum handed down from missionaries. In one sense, at least, this view was substantially correct. For the Lakota and for other Indians, however, the Ghost Dance was both strikingly new—even radical—and reassuringly familiar. Ghost Dancers were searching for a new dispensation, seeking to restore an intimacy with the Creator that seemed to have vanished. And for followers, the religion’s key attractions included the chance to worship in a form that reconstituted Indians as a community and expressed their history, families, and identity—in a word, their Indianness. The Ghost Dance invited believers, as one Sioux evangelist put it, to “be Indians” again.

The real "messiah craze" of 1890 was the fixation of Americans on Indian dancing and their relentless compulsion to stop it, and the root of that craze was this American passion for assimilation, which was, after all, every bit as millennial a notion as the Second Coming itself. What more utopian a dream could there be for a rapidly globalizing society riven by fractures of race, culture and class than that a day would come when differences between people had simply disappeared? So it was that, in a show of hostility to physical exaltation reminiscent of the Puritans, policymakers waged war on Indian dances. In 1882 US Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller issued new orders to suppress “heathenish dances, such as the sun dance, scalp dance, &c.,” in order to bring Indians into line with conventional Christian practice.

The situation was all the more frustrating because it should have been easy. Indians had practically no power. They held no citizenship and remained federal subjects unable to vote. With no political representatives, they depended on appointed officials—reservation supervisors known as “Indian agents”—for their very survival. Dawes and others believed that education, example, and compulsion could turn Indians into good citizens. If Congress would mandate (and Indians agents would follow) a stern policy of assimilation, surely it would “kill the Indian and save the man,” as one prominent assimilationist put it. Thus would Indians enter the fold of the civilized, pointing the way for millions of immigrants and African Americans and preparing the ground for that glorious day when all dark skins would somehow whiten and racial strife would vanish.

The Ghost dance by the Ogallala [sic] Sioux at Pine Ridge Agency, Frederic Remington, Pine Ridge, S. Dakota, 1890. Library of Congress

For Americans, then, the challenge of assimilation was the great social question whirling at the center of the Ghost Dance of 1890. A millennial enthusiasm for assimilating others, as well as a deep anxiety that they might refuse to be assimilated, explains much of what made the Ghost Dance so troubling. To most white Americans, the dance itself was proof that assimilation had failed to dampen the savage impulse and that America’s irresistible conquest might prove resistible after all. In this light, the dances in South Dakota were more than just dances, and more than another Indian uprising. For Americans, something more, much more, was on the line.

Still, well into the fall of 1890, Ghost dances were nothing more than a curiosity, titillating fare for newspaper readers in distant cities. Although the dances had increased in intensity early in the fall, officials on the scene were mostly unconcerned. As late as the first week of November, only one Indian agent in South Dakota had requested military intervention; the others believed that the dance would die out of its own accord. Most local newspapers carried little to no news of the Ghost Dance.

But on November 13, President Harrison ordered the army into the Sioux reservations to shore up beleaguered officials and prevent “any outbreak that may put in peril the lives and homes of the settlers of the adjacent states.” With one-third of the entire US Army descending on some of the most remote and impoverished communities in the United States, the “Ghost Dance War” quickly became the largest military campaign since Lee’s surrender at Appomattox.

The arrival of columns of soldiers panicked the Indians and, in conjuring the possibility of war, terrified many settlers, who until that moment had not felt threatened. After treating the Ghost Dance mostly as a curiosity, the press now sank to new lows, riveting a considerable portion of the nation’s 63 million people with stories about imminent “outbreaks” by bloodthirsty savages—never mind that fewer than a quarter of a million Indians remained in the United States, and only 18,000 of these were Lakota Sioux. Never mind that there were only about 4,200 Ghost Dancers, and that most of them were children, their mothers, and the very old. The New York Times quoted estimates of 15,000 “fighting Sioux,” and others picked up rumors of an impending Sioux “outbreak.” Some even reported that thousands of armed Indians had surrounded the reservation and killed settlers and soldiers.

Sitting Bull by D F Barry, 1883 Dakota Territory, Public Domain

In mid-December, James McLaughlin, the agent at Standing Rock Reservation (some 275 miles north of Wounded Knee), sent the Indian police to arrest Sitting Bull, the most renowned Lakota chief still living. McLaughlin had long harbored a personal grudge against Sitting Bull. Now, since Sitting Bull had allowed Ghost Dances to take place at his camp, McLaughlin hoped to exploit the Ghost Dance tumult to have him removed from the reservation. When the detachment arrived at Sitting Bull’s home at dawn on December 15 and took him into custody, however, some of Sitting Bull’s enraged followers opened fire, and in the conflagration that followed the police shot the famed chief in the head and chest. The killing of Sitting Bull sent waves of panic and fear across the reservation, and when Lakota Indians there and at other reservations heard the news, they began to crisscross the countryside looking for refuge from the troops.

So it was that on December 28 a starving band of Ghost Dancers who had fled their homes on Cheyenne River Reservation surrendered to Colonel James Forsyth’s Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek. The next morning troops upended Sioux lodges in a hunt for weapons. Two soldiers were attempting to seize a weapon from a Lakota man when it discharged. No one was hurt, but it did not matter. The ranks of soldiers opened fire. With four rapid-fire Hotchkiss guns on the edges of the ravine, Custer’s old regiment loosed an exploding shell nearly every second from each of the big guns—and a fusillade of rifle and pistol fire besides—into the mass of mostly unarmed villagers below. Indian men who were not instantly cut down did their best to fend off the troops with a few guns, some knives, rocks, and their bare hands as the ranks of women, children and old people fled up the creek.

Among the Sioux men at Wounded Knee were a handful of the continent’s most experienced close-range fighters, and when the conflict was over, the army did not emerge unscathed. The Seventh left the field with dozens of wounded, and thirty troopers died. The army took thirty-eight wounded Indians with them but left the Indian dead and more of their wounded to the mercy of the Dakota sky. As night fell, winter descended in all its high-country fury. Temperatures dropped far below freezing, and a fierce blizzard howled in from the north. Corpses turned to ice. When soldiers and a burial party returned three days later, they found several wounded Lakotas yet clinging to life and some surviving infants in the arms of their dead mothers. All but one of these babies and most of the others soon succumbed.

Soldiers heaped wagons with the Indian dead, who looked eerily like the haunting plaster casts of the Pompeii victims of Mount Vesuvius, some having frozen in the grotesque positions in which they had hit the ground. Others were curled up or horribly twisted, their hands clawing at the air and mouths agape, each a memorial to the agony of open wounds, smothering cold and the relentless triumph of death. A photographer arrived to take pictures (which immediately became a popular line of postcards).

Big Foot's camp three weeks after the Wounded Knee Massacre with bodies of several Lakota Sioux people wrapped in blankets in the foreground and U.S. soldiers in the background, Dec. 29, 1890. Library of Congress

The gravediggers lowered the bodies of 84 men, 44 women and 18 children into the ground. More had died, but many had been taken by kin or managed to leave the field before dying, perhaps in another camp, or alone on the darkling plain. We can look at old photographs, read crumpled letters and scan columns of crumbling newspaper, but death is final and pitiless, and its tracks soon vanish. We cannot account for all who were killed at Wounded Knee.

Religion is an affair of the heart, but it offers relief and guidance for people living in a hard-edged world. Indians became Ghost Dancers partly in response to changing material conditions that had created an existential crisis. Much of the religion’s allure came from how it addressed a radically shifting material world and helped Indians cope with the Industrial Revolution and its accompanying juggernaut of modernity, the rise of corporate structures to economic dominance in the United States, and the expanding bureaucracy of the state and modern education. The Ghost Dance served the needs of Indians hoping to adjust to life under industrial capitalism in a nation where literacy was key to negotiating courtrooms and the government offices that administered so much of Indian life.

In other words, in the aftermath of American invasion, the Ghost Dance helped believers find ways to negotiate and assert new dimensions of control not only over their own spiritual lives but also over their governance. In this sense, the massacre at Wounded Knee marks a brutal suppression not of naive, primitive Indians but of pragmatic people who sought a peaceful way forward into the twentieth century.

It is testament to its modernity that the religion was not so easily killed. The promise of the Ghost Dance was so great that Indian people carried on its devotions long after Wounded Knee. It survived on the Southern Plains and in Canada well into the twentieth century. In many places, it made lasting contributions to Indian ritual, some of which survive to the present day.

— Louis S. Warren is W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches the history of the American West, California history, environmental history, and U.S. history. His most recent book, God’s Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America. His other books include The Hunter’s Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America and Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show.

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