The Ghost Dance

Wonder Woman meets The Chief

The Chief :

He sees Ghosts.

[Secure area] 

(The Doctor reads the last entry in The Notebook.) 

CHELA: 

Well? 

The Chorister : It's a reference to 

‘The Great Mind's Eye’.

CHELA: 

And it was the last thing Dojjen wrote before he —

The Chorister: Before he what…? 

CHELA: 

Now give it back to me. 

The Chorister: Before he WHAT….? 

CHELA: 

…before he Danced 

The Dance of The Snake.

There is an ancient Indian saying 

that something lives only as long as 

the last person who remembers it. 

My People have come to trust 

Memory over History. 

Memory, like Fire, 

is Radiant and Immutable 

while History serves 

only those who 

seek to control it, 

those who douse 

The Flame of Memory 

in order to put out 

the dangerous Fire of Truth. 

Beware these men, for they are dangerous themselves and unwise.

Their False History is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek The Truth.

MICHAEL PATRICK HEARN, WRITER: 

The great American Dream turned out to be a nightmare for these people. 

And Frank Baum was out there witnessing this. 

And all of this is expressed 

in the opening chapter of 

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

"When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere."

LOUIS WARREN, HISTORIAN: 

One of the most telling moments 

in The Wizard of Oz is right at 

the beginning with the description 

of Aunt Em and Uncle Henry 

as old before their time, 

as unable to imagine happiness.

"Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke."

LOUIS WARREN, HISTORIAN: 

Baum in many ways is saying that this Western dream 

seems to have hit a wall. 

It’s a place of great disappointment 

for many of the people who 

had invested their lives in it.

NARRATION: 

On the Standing Rock and Pine Ridge reservations west of Aberdeen, conditions were even more dire for the over 10,000 Lakota living there. 

And with access to only meager government rations, many families were on the verge of starvation. 

In the middle of this unfolding apocalypse, a new religion known as The Ghost Dance began to spread through many western tribes. 

They believed The Dance, which preached a defiant message of Hope, would wash away 

the white settlers and 

return the land to 

its original state.

PHILIP J. DELORIA, HISTORIAN: 

It's a regenerative religious practice. 

It’s not people yelling and screaming. 

You do this dance until you 

sort of fall into a vision state, 

and you fall down out of the circle, 

and you have a vision, 

and people come and 

take care of you, and 

other people 

keep dancing. 

White Americans see this and 

they think that The Ghost Dance 

is the prelude to an 

armed uprising.

NARRATION: 

Desperate to keep his Aberdeen dream afloat, Frank blasted rival newspapers for ginning up 

a "false and senseless scare," 

fearing that headlines screaming 

of "Indian uprisings" would 

drive settlers away. 

"After two years of successive crop failures," he wrote, "comes the Indian scare, and 

the consequence is 

we are getting 

a very bad name."

EVAN SCHWARTZ, WRITER: 

A lot of businesses were going under and the economic collapse in South Dakota was threatening his very concept of home. 

He invested so much of himself there that it was almost unthinkable that everything would collapse.

NARRATION: 

President Benjamin Harrison 

ordered his Secretary of War 

to suppress The Ghost Dance, by force if necessary. 

On December 15, 1890, 

Lakota Chief Sitting Bull was shot 

and killed on the Standing Rock Reservation 

during a botched arrest for his alleged support of The Ghost Dance. 

When news reached Aberdeen, one hundred and fifty miles away, the townspeople feared retaliation.

LOUIS WARREN, HISTORIAN: 

It creates a response 

of panic among white people. 

Newspaper editors begin to demand 

federal protection in case thereís what they call an outbreak.

NARRATION: 

Baum's newspaper ran wire reports 

warning of imminent reprisal. 

Caught up in the mass hysteria and 

watching his Aberdeen efforts 

spiraling into failure, Frank’s usually optimistic rhetoric changed drastically. 

In an editorial, he praised Sitting Bull, but described the remaining Lakota people as a ìpack of whining cursî and called for a vicious ethnic cleansing.

“The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent,”Baum asserted, “and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians.”

SHARON HARTMAN STROM, HISTORIAN: 

Baum thinks that the extermination 

of Native Americans is inevitable. 

His view of tolerance comes out of the milieu that he is in. 

It’s really about middle-class white people getting along well.

NARRATION: 

The US Army dispatched troops to disarm and arrest a group of Lakota, including followers of Sitting Bull. 

Within days of these orders, the US Seventh Cavalry massacred as many as 300 Lakota men, women and children at Wounded Knee Creek.

Frank responded again. “Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.”

PHILIP J. DELORIA, HISTORIAN: 

What Baum says in the editorials tells us exactly how Americans are seeing Indian people. 

Thereís no mercy, no quarter, no sympathy. It is a definitive and defining statement of intense racial animosity. 

And I think Baum is capturing, perhaps, some of his own ambivalence, but he is channeling a major, and important, and deadly current of American thought.

SALLY ROESCH WAGNER, WOMENíS STUDIES SCHOLAR: 

I donít know how to understand Frankís reaction other than to understand that an "either-or" interpretation of history is a lie, 

that we're "both-and."

 L. Frank Baum carried that, that poison of racism in him that I carry, 

that we all carry as settlers.

NARRATION: 

The drought, the despair, and the foreclosures continued. Ad sales dropped and subscriptions dried up, forcing Baum to abandon his newspaper and make plans to leave Aberdeen. His western venture had turned into another failure.

DOROTHY: "But how do I start for Emerald City?" Glinda: "It's always best to start at the beginningóand all you do is follow the Yellow Brick Road."

GREGORY MAGUIRE, WRITER: Dorothy goes into a land in which magic spells are part of the apparatus of governance. 

THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939) - DOROTHY: "Follow the yellow brick road?

GREGORY MAGUIRE, WRITER: And most of what she achieves she achieves without recourse to the magic. She comes with her true grit. She just puts one foot in front of another along the Yellow Brick Road to achieve what it is that she needs to do.

DINA MASSACHI, AMERICAN STUDIES SCHOLAR: There is a real American value of being self-reliant, and you see that with Dorothy. Dorothy really set the stage for little girls getting out of the house and going on adventures the way that boys do.

MARIA E. MONTOYA, HISTORIAN: She goes on what is quintessentially the great American quest to find the place that will bring her happiness, will bring her the things that she needs.