The Ghost Dance shirt was a by-product of the Ghost Dance ritual. That ritual was a community prayer to encourage the return of the buffalo and the disappearance of the white population. A Paiute prophet Wovoka, who hoped to convince the government to treat native peoples more fairly, inspired the Ghost Dance. 

In a vision Wovoka was told by God to encourage people to dance long and hard to bring back the traditional way of life. As the dance became popular among the western Plains Native Americans in the 1880s, the idea of a protective shirt developed.

The shirts were usually made of muslin; some were sewn with sinew and were painted with symbols that represented and appealed to the spirit world for protection. The shirt in this exhibition has a large bird, probably an eagle, shooting power from his claws and beak. The waving lines represent power lines down the sleeves of the shirt. The front of the shirt has a buffalo head and four hooves. The return of the buffalo, which the government had systematically killed to near extinction, was a major goal of the Ghost Dance ritual. A Lakota Sioux probably made this shirt around 1890.