GHOST DANCE
The ghost dance was peaceful, but the whites thought of it as the signal for a great Indian uprising. They asked the army for help, and in the end many unarmed ghost dancers, mostly women and children, were killed at Wounded Knee. We Indians think that the white people were afraid of the ghost dance because they had a bad conscience, having taken away half of the remaining Indian land just a few years before. People with bad consciences live in fear, and they hate most those whom they have wronged.
Told by George Eagle Elk at Parmelee,
Rosebud Indian Reservation,
South Dakota, 1969