They took their land and way of life.
Brought disease, poverty, and strife.
Shrunk their world,
For progress.
Forced on plots of land,
No water, no grass, no game.
Guardians who stole,
And sometimes killed,
For profit.
Stolen children learned to read,
Their own tombstones.
Kill the spirit, save the man.
They died like sheep,
At Sand Creek, the Washita, Camp Grant,
and a hundred other loathsome places.
Forsaken by Waken Tonka,
And the Jesus of the whites,
Lost without hope.
Then came a holy man.
Wovoka would teach them the dance,
That brought the old ways back,
The buffalo, the freedom to roam.
All they had to do was dance,
In sacred shirts that made them-
Bulletproof.
The dance spread like a prairie fire.
The Shoshone, the Cheyenne, the Sioux,
Danced for dead warriors,
And lost children.
Nervous whites,
Their faces blanched in fear,
Called in the cavalry.
Custer’s Seventh,
of course.
The Hotchkiss guns barked.
Five times, then barked again, and again.
Death songs rang over the crimson snow.
Then silence fell,
Over that frozen ground.
It was no one’s fault,
But their own.
A sad triumph.
The end of an era.
Their stories not told.
And when they come for you,
And tell YOU, you can’t be YOU,
Will you cower and comply,
Or will you become,
A Ghost Dancer?
LDT August 27, ‘26
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