Becoming More Inconvenient

THE FIRST INDIANS TO APPEAR before a motion picture camera danced in a short vignette called Sioux Ghost Dance (1894). There’s no evidence that what was filmed for this, one of the first of Thomas Edison’s series of “actualities,” was actually a Ghost Dance. Whether or not it authentically shows what it claims to depict, it has been nevertheless immortalized in celluloid and thus in film history.

What’s true is that Indian dancing was strictly forbidden at the time. Exceptions were made, however, for entertainment and ethnography—in other words, for white pleasure and study. The dancers filmed were performers in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, who were forbidden to dance or wear traditional dress in the comfort of their own communities but were allowed to do so for the amusement and money of white audiences in Europe and the United States.

And the Ghost Dance, the spiritual movement that encouraged its followers to break the law by dancing, was considered especially dangerous; it prophesied the return of land and the ancestors back to the Indigenous. In 1890, the United States deployed half its standing army to crush that dream, killing hundreds of dancers at Wounded Knee four days after Christmas. Before the dancers could be captured on film, first other Lakota people had to die.

From 1887 to 1906, the Wild West shows staged thousands of mock Indian battles. Custer’s Last