Ghost dance

[Sarah]

A religious dance of the North American Indians, participatedin by both sexes, and looked upon as a rite of invocation the purposeof which is, through trance and vision, to bring the dancer intocommunion with the unseen world and the spirits of departed friends.The dance is the chief rite of the Ghost-dance, or Messiah, religion,which originated about 1890 in the doctrines of the Piute Wovoka, theIndian Messiah, who taught that the time was drawing near when thewhole Indian race, the dead with the living, should be reunited tolive a life of millennial happiness upon a regenerated earth. Thereligion inculcates peace, righteousness, and work, and holds that ingood time, without warlike intervention, the oppressive white rulewill be removed by the higher powers. The religion spread through amajority of the western tribes of the United States, only in the caseof the Sioux, owing to local causes, leading to an outbreak.