THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT

Ghost Dancers danced past exhaustion, and often lay on the ground in a trance, their skin shivering, for days at a time.  When they regained consciousness, they told of the distant stars they had visited, and of the long-dead friends and relatives they had talked to.  Sometimes they brought back white, grayish earth – a piece of the morning star – as proof.  Desperate as it was, the Ghost Dance did not originally have violent implications, but among certain tribes (the Sioux in particular) it soon acquired them.  Indians often painted symbols of the dance on muslin shirts, and some began to say that these paintings made the shirts bulletproof.

Frazier/Plains