Details

Object type

shirt

Title

Ghost Dance Shirt

Culture/School

Native North American; Plains Indian; Lakota

Place Associated

North America, South Dakota, Cheyenne River Reservation (place of manufacture)

Date

1998

Materials

undyed cotton, buffalo hide, red clay, ring-necked pheasant feathers

Dimensions

overall: 900 mm x 530 mm x 380 mm

Description

This modern Lakota Ghost Dance Shirt is made of coarse undyed cream cotton with a triangular section around the neck rubbed with red clay. It has fringing along the bottom, cuffs, epaulets and around the edges of the red triangle. The shirt has been decorated with two ring-necked pheasant feathers at the sides and with ring-necked pheasant feathers and a strip of buffalo hide at the neck.

The shirt is a replica of an original Ghost Dance Shirt given back to the Lakota people of South Dakota by Glasgow City Council in August 1999. It was formally presented to Glasgow at a public hearing in November 1998 attended by the Lakota descendants of survivors of the massacre at Wounded Knee at Pine Ridge, South Dakota on 29th December 1890

In 1892, the Kelvingrove Museum obtained a 'collection of Indian Relics' from George C. Crager, interpreter for the Lakota performers at the Buffalo Bull Wild West Show in Dennistoun. Crager claimed that these objects had been taken from the site of the massacre of hundreds of Lakota men, woman and children, in its immediate aftermath. The assemblage included a Lakota Ghost Dance shirt, removed from the body of a fallen Lakota warrior who had worn it to protect him from enemy bullets. In 1999 the Sacred Ghost Dance Shirt or Wacipe Ogle Wanagi was returned to the Lakota following Glasgow City Council's approval of a repatriation request from the Wounded Knee Survivors Association.

Marcella LeBeau, a descendant of the Lakota warrior Rain-in-the Face, was Secretary of the Wounded Knee Survivors Association and was involved in the negotiations for the return. In honour of Glasgow's work, she made this modern Ghost Dance Shirt. She used Treaty Cloth, ring-necked pheasant feathers from the South Dakota Plains and a buffalo hide strip and red clay from the Cheyenne River Reservation. Her son Richard LeBeau prepared the buffalo strip as well as the pheasant feathers. The original shirt is decorated with eagle feathers, but these are now strictly reserved for sacred ceremonial use by indigenous people of the US only. The clay was donated by Bronco LeBeau, Director of the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation's Cultural Preservation Programme.

ID Number

A.1998.9

Location

Kelvingrove Cultural Connections