GHOST

See also:

• DANCE
• DANCE (Fr. danse; of obscure origin, connected with Old High Ger. danson, to stretch)

DANCE  , an American-Indian ritual dance, sometimes called the Spirit Dance, the dancers wearing a white cloak . It is connected with the doctrine of a Messiah, which arose in Nevada among the Paiute Indians in 1888 and spread to other tribes . A young Paiute Indian medicine-man, known as Wovoka, and called Jack Wilson by the whites, proclaimed that he had had a revelation, and that, if this ghost dance and other ceremonies were duly performed, the Indians would be rid of the white men . The movement led to a sort of craze among the Indian tribes, and in 1890 it. was one of the causes of the Sioux outbreak . See J . Mooney, 14th Report (1896) of Bureau of American Ethnology .