What do Macklemore and Wounded Knee have in common?
Quick recap: Macklemore says free Palestine on stage at an Ed Sheeran concert. Zionist billionaire Robert Kraft colludes with stadium owners to get Macklemore kicked off the tour. Let’s go back 137 years and you tell me if you see parallels.
The Ghost Dance was a Native American religious movement that spread rapidly across the western United States in 1889 and 1890, during a period when Indigenous nations were experiencing dispossession, confinement to reservations, destruction of the buffalo economy and aggressive assimilation.
Its central figure was Wovoka, a Northern Paiute spiritual leader from Nevada. During a vision, Wovoka taught that Indigenous people should live peacefully, behave morally and perform a ceremonial round dance. He taught that a transformed world would restore the dead, renew the earth and reunite Indigenous people with their ancestors.
Among the Lakota, the movement exploded. Some Lakota adherents wore what became known as Ghost Shirts.
This frightened federal authorities. Does that sound like Robert Kraft shitting his pants?
In November 1890, Indian agents requested military assistance, reporting that Indians were dancing and were “wild and crazy.”
Thousands of US troops were deployed around Lakota reservations. Tragically, at least 150 Lakota people were killed at Wounded Knee. Many of them were children.
The Ghost Dance allowed an Indigenous religious and social movement to spread across enormous distances without newspapers, radio, internet or cellphones. The dance brought people together. The songs transmitted the teachings.
And Robert Kraft and his Zionist friends are afraid that the free Palestine movement will spread the same way the Ghost Dance spread.
The United States tried to suppress the Ghost Dance. They sent in the Army. They killed Lakota people at Wounded Knee. But they couldn’t kill the idea.
More than a century later, people still remember the songs, the dances and what they represented. And maybe that’s what powerful people still don’t understand.
You can take away someone’s stage. You can silence their microphone. You can even use violence against them. But once an idea takes hold in millions of people, you can’t kill it.
The Ghost Dance survived. And I don’t think Free Palestine is going anywhere either.
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