This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The Ghost Dance teaching Wovoka gave in 1889 reached the Lakota in 1890, where its adoption alarmed federal Indian agents and became entangled in the events leading to the December 1890 killing of Sitting Bull and the Wounded Knee massacre, an outcome Wovoka's own teaching of peaceful renewal had not envisioned or called for.
That tragedy did not end Wovoka's own life or his standing among the nations who had adopted his teaching. He continued to be consulted by delegations from many nations for decades afterward, living until 1932, more than four decades past the violence at Wounded Knee that his teaching is often remembered alongside.
The distance between those two facts, a religious teaching of nonviolent renewal and the massacre that followed its spread to the Lakota, is part of what makes Wovoka's own long subsequent life significant, he remained a living figure whom other nations continued to seek out and consult, rather than a name remembered only through the events of a single tragic winter in 1890.
Wovoka lived until 1932, more than seventy six years after his birth in Mason Valley in 1856 and over four decades past the events at Wounded Knee. That long remaining life meant the man behind the vision was still reachable, in person, by the same kind of delegations that had once carried his teaching outward in 1889 and 1890, so the Ghost Dance's origin never receded into a purely historical or legendary past during his own lifetime; it stayed tied to a living teacher for decades after the tragedy at Wounded Knee had already passed into memory.