The Cherokee also had their own prophecies, visions and Ghost Dance movement, which was written about in The American Indian Quarterly by Michelene E. Part of the Ghost Dance movement was a belief that ancestors would return from the spirit world once the new world began. “You can read some of these visions, they’re quite remarkable where somebody says ‘I died or I lost consciousness and I was on horseback and the world was green and not like this dead world that I’m now living in, then I rode up over a hill and saw a figure coming toward me and it was my sister who had died recently,’” Ostler said on the show. Ostler explained on the show titled, Apocalypse Now & Then: A History of End-Times, how during the Ghost Dance people would lose consciousness and have visions of the new world. “It would destroy or remove European Americans and then after that there would be a renewed world where game would return, ancestors who had died would return to life and Indian people would be able to live well again.”

“We don’t know exactly how he imagined the new world would occur but it’s clear that he taught that it would occur through some kind of cataclysmic event…maybe through a kind of earthquake…some sources suggest a great snow,” said Jeffrey Ostler, a historian at the University of Oregon who has written about Wovoka’s prophecies, during a show on Back Story Radio. He was also the leader of the Ghost Dance movement, which was danced to help prepare for the new world.

The Northern Paiute had Wovoka, a religious leader who was born around 1856 and predicted the coming of a new world. “Now we think that when the end comes the earth will be destroyed by fire and not one upon it will escape for all the earth will be enveloped in flames and all those who refuse to believe in Gai’wiio’ will be in it,” reads section 77 from The Code of Handsome Lake. Handsome Lake predicted the world would end by fire in the year 2100. The Hopi aren’t alone when it comes to prophecies about how the world will end either.Ībenaki storyteller Joseph Bruchac pointed to Handsome Lake, a 19th century Seneca prophet whose predictions are presented by anthropologist Arthur Parker in The Code of Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet, published in 1913. Very soon after this, the ceremonies of my people will cease.' “And this is the Ninth and Last Sign: You will hear of a dwelling-place in the heavens, above the earth, that shall fall with a great crash. “This is the Eighth Sign: You will see many youth, who wear their hair long like my people, come and join the tribal nations, to learn their ways and wisdom. “This is the Seventh Sign: You will hear of the sea turning black, and many living things dying because of it.

The lost maps prophecy