This is a pretty interesting little film from the Edison Company, and is among the various films they made of Buffalo Bill's performers. Basically, it's a performance of the Sioux Ghost Dance, or at least a bit of it. Historians won't want to pass this up, and because of the fact these Indians are not actors. Here, Edison filmed real live Native Americans in real costumes, which is lucky for us so we can watch it today. On the con side, however, the picture is pretty contrasty. It's hard to watch the dance and the Natives dark skin doesn't help. I'm not sure why the result was so contrasted but at least we can still see the dance. Nothing special by today's standards or ground-breaking at all but it remains a good record of a time long gone.

The world's first filmmakers William Heise and W.K.L. Dickson film members of Buffalo Bill Cody's traveling performers. These Native-Americans do a small portion of what is supposed to be a Sioux Ghost Dance.The group is crowded on stage, with both children and adults doing the dance. There is no word as whether this is an authentic dance from actual Sioux culture or if it is an invention by Cody to fill seats at his shows. Not much is actually shown in the short clip, but it is the first known representation of Native-Americans, real or otherwise, in cinema, so it is noteworthy for that alone.

. . . or at Thomas Alva Edison's East Orange, NJ, Black Mariah Tinseltown forerunner. Why not brainwash the American public via ZERO DARK THIRTY that the well-documented ruthless indiscriminate non-stop torture of hundreds of random minority people (like the guy murdered in the Oscar-honored TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE) turned up one guilty guy who blabbed something which allowed SEAL Team 6 to interrupt Usama Bin Laden's late-night porn choking session, shoot him in the face, and ditch him in the Pacific (though all the evidence proves this just did NOT happen, and all the American tax dollars spent to torture family men taxi drivers to death was just more government waste)? Edison waited about as long after the assassination of Sitting Bull and the machine-gunning of a couple hundred women and children of his extended family as the ZERO people waited after the SEAL team raid to come out with this anti-Lakota propaganda. First, he insulted them by cramming the Black Mariah film studio beyond its capacity, leaving the braves with not enough room to turn around, let alone ghost dance. What follows is a necessarily fake "performance," shot haphazardly, met to assure the Eastern public, "Hey, buy some train tickets and buy some camping gear: if this is all those Injuns can muster up, itz safe to go back West, young man, woman & child!"

this short, 22-second film is another one of edison's black maria studios' motion picture camera experiments, this time heise and dickson immortalize fully war-painted American natives performing the mystical ghost dance.the film itself is quite dark, you can barely see what's going on. ironically the ghost dance, as far as i understand, was a native American ritual/religion to separate the natives from the white man, his alcohol, weapons and _technology_. 'sioux ghost dance' was shot five years after, according to the story, wovoka's peyote induced vision where he saw the future evils of white man and the second coming of Christ, who (surprise surprise), came in wovoka's shape. as the word spread, the lakota came to meet him and learn the ghost dance. the most fanatic followers of the cult, big foot and his band, mostly women and children, got slaughtered by whites at wounded creek in 1890, only two weeks after the arrests where the lakota chief sitting bull was shot in the head by the lakota police during a gunfight between the police and the ghost dancers, an event precipitating the wounded creek massacre.