Prophecy and Fulfillment: The Ghost Dance and the End of Whiteness

The U.S. Census Bureau has forecasted that whites will no longer be the majority demographic in America by the year 2044. That seminal date is only 18 years away. ​America is in the crucible of Regime Change. This will only be the 2nd Regime Change in America. The first was when the Red Man was outpopulated by the White Man. There are many extant manifestations of the present Regime Change. The election of Barack Obama and the subsequent reactionary rise of Trump and MAGA being the most salient evidence of the Sturm and Drang of Regime Change.

​America is witnessing the archipelago of whiteness. As of 2026, nine states are majority minority (viz., whites constitute less than 50% of the population). Other states will soon flip in domino-like fashion. The U.S. has already crossed the Rubicon with regard to its 18-and-under demographics. This tipping point was reached in 2020 when children from minority groups outnumbered white children for the first time in American history. Next year in 2027, the age group of 18-29 will transition brown. And in yet another sobering and unprecedented data point that adumbrates Regime Change, in 2025 births of minority children were greater than that of white babies for the first time ever.

Taken together, these data and observations deliver a message clinched in an iron fist; that Regime Change is inevitable, ineluctable, and inexorable. Resistance is Futile. Regime Change is a freight train, hurtling forward and crushing beneath its huge iron wheels everyone and everything in its path. Such cataclysmic change! Who knew?

Wovoka. Wovoka knew. And so did all of Indian Country. Indeed, the end of whiteness was the prophecy of the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance was given to the Northern Paiute spiritual leader, Wovoka, in 1889. Wovoka received the dance in a vision during a solar eclipse. This vision entailed the resurrection of the Paiute dead, the end of whites, and a renaissance of the Paiute people. Wovoka taught his people how to perform the circular Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance emphasized clean living, an honest life, and the imminent return of the dead (hence the Ghost name). However, the prophecy of the dance foretelling a resurrection of tribal power and end of whiteness gave it great appeal to other tribes eager to cast off the hegemony of the federal government.

The Ghost Dance spread like wildfire across Indian country. This was an era of the so-called Closing of the West and where Native peoples had been “conquered” and banished to hardscrabble and remote reservations. The tribespeople were effectively prisoners of war confined to de facto internment camps. They were completely dependent upon meager government rations. The Ghost Dance offered hope, renewal, and a return of Native dominion.

The Lakota eagerly adopted and practiced the Ghost Dance. However, this new and unfamiliar dance instilled great fear in their overlords, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Whites were afraid the Indians were going on the warpath. The agents of the BIA were convinced that Sitting Bull was behind the popularity of the dance. Thousands of U.S. Army troops were deployed to the Standing Rock reservation to intimidate and keep the Indians in line.

The BIA ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull on December 15, 1890. A melee ensued and Sitting Bull as well as seven of his followers were fatally shot. Eight BIA police were also killed. Only two weeks later on December 29, 1890, about three hundred Lakota men, women, and children were massacred at Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. Many of those slaughtered were wearing Ghost Dance shirts. These shirts were believed to be imbued with strong medicine to ward off bullets.

As a result of these highly publicized twin tragedies and the ineffectual shirts, the Ghost Dance quickly declined in popularity across Indian Country. It still survives in attenuated form among a number of tribes including the Caddo in Oklahoma. Nevertheless, the prophecy of the Ghost Dance lives on. Indeed, the prophecy is being fulfilled; the end of whiteness is near.

While it is axiomatic that Regime Change is at hand, its salient implications remain to be seen. Clearly there is an emerging plurality of ethnic, racial, and identity groups. The degree to which these groups splinter, fractionate, or coalesce will be driven by circumstance or aligned interests in pressing political/economic issues.

The definition of what it means to be an American certainly will be modified or transformed. America has a long history of proudly cloaking itself in the mantle of a melting pot. In reality, America has always been a homogeneous society with a fiat of conformity to whiteness. With a plurality of ethnic groups, perhaps a true American melting pot will manifest.

During this gauntlet of Regime Change, whiteness has become less of a color and more of a Frankensteinian  amalgamation of polity and religious cult with appendages of xenophobia towards those who haven’t guzzled the Kool-Aid. Whiteness entails a religious fervor of divinely ordained domination and omnipotence in the social order and in the halls of power. Yet shifting demographics and greater plurality increasingly renders whiteness flaccid. Indeed, not so long ago it was Native Americans who were forcibly assimilated into whiteness. Now it is whiteness that stands at the threshold of assimilationist extinction. Wovoka’s divinely inspired vision and prophecy is being effectuated.

In the fall of 1811, the Shawnee chief and warrior Tecumseh (also Mvskoke Creek) visited the ancient Mvskoke tribal town of Tuckabatche then located on the Tallapoosa River in Alabama. Tecumseh addressed a Grand Council of Creek Indians including several whites. Tecumseh gave a passionate speech attempting to convince the Creek warriors to join his Indian confederacy in their fight against the U.S. in the Great Lakes region. His request was denied.

An angry Tecumseh declared that when he returned to Ft. Detroit, he would stamp his feet on the ground three times and the houses of the Creeks would shake, shutter, and fall. He also proclaimed that the waters of the Great River (viz., the Mississippi) would flow backwards. The 1811 New Madrid earthquake occurred two months later. The houses of the Creeks shook, shuttered, and fell. The Mississippi River flowed backwards.

Geologists would aver these events happened because of shifting tectonic plates. But perhaps it was because Tecumseh fulfilled his prophecy by stamping his feet three times at Ft. Detroit causing the Creek houses to fall? Similarly, demographers will point to any number of causal factors that have engendered the end of whiteness. But perhaps the end of whiteness in 2044 is simply the fulfillment of the prophecy of the Wovoka and the Ghost Dance.

Sour Sofkee is a column written by Native author and historian J.D. Colbert (Muscogee Creek, Chickasaw, Cherokee and Citizen Potawatomi) under the pen name Fus Yvhikv ("Singing Bird"). He writes across a broad variety of topics to include such genres as op/eds, comedy, fiction, political satire, history, and current events. His pen name is in homage to Alexander Posey who wrote under the pen name Fus Fixico ("Heartless Bird") and the Sour Sofkee column name honors William E. Moore (Mvskoke) who wrote a Mvskoke Dialect column for the Tulsa World in the 1930s which was titled Sour Sofkee.