Sun Dance [further Considerations]

SUN DANCE [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS]. The Plains Indian Sun Dance is typically a ceremony of about twelve days duration. Three to four days of this period consist of the dance itself, danced by men (and, increasingly, women) who commit themselves to a self-sacrificing discipline of abstinence from both food and water throughout the dance. Typically, the four days before the dancing are set aside as a period of preparation and purification and the four days following are set aside for a series of ceremonies that bring the whole to a close.

The historical tradition was to hold the Sun Dance in an elevated place, usually on a plateau. With the advent of the reservation era and federal prohibitions against observing the ceremony, the sites were often moved to sheltered and hidden places in physical depressions in the landscape where the ceremony could avoid easy detection.

The Sun Dance in the contemporary period has functioned as a stimulus for the growing traditionalist movement in many tribal communities, and it continues to be appealing to many non-Indians who are disenchanted with their own religious traditions. To the regret of many Indian leaders and scholars, this same attraction has influenced a transformation of Native American traditions toward a certain mimicry of the religious traditions disavowed by their white adherents. The relatively famous (or infamous) Lakota Sun Dances can attract hundreds of dancers, all ready to go to the tree and offer their flesh for the piercing rite. At the same time there are a plethora of other Sun Dances held that are so small as to render them invisible in the non-Indian landscape.

Enormous commitments of resources and time are always a factor in the ceremony. Even the smallest Sun Dance requires the sustained efforts of a variety of people: to cut timbers and leafy coverings for the shade arbor for supporters; to cut wood and then tend the fire day and night for the duration of the ceremony; to collect the necessary "medicines" needed to sustain the dance and provide healing to those who come; to provide and prepare the food to feed the people; and to complete a great variety of other detailed tasks.

In most tribal traditions, the ceremony can be completed with the fulfillment of a commitment by a single dancer, the tree, and a single singer. In reality, while the number of dancers may have always been small historically, the full number of participants regularly included the whole of a tribe's community in these various supporting roles. Lakota peoples, for instance, would congregate annually in the Black Hills for the Sun Dance as a ceremony that brought together all of the disparate bands. In the modern world it has become commonplace for as many as a hundred or more to commit to dancing this strenuous and demanding ceremony.

The Sun Dance is traditionally a men's ceremony. The single most characteristic feature is the sustaining of life or, as Lakota people often say, "That the people might live." The blood that flows in the piercing rite of many tribal traditions marks the ceremony as a male rite. Indeed, this sacrifice has been characterized as men's attempt to gain some sense of equality with women and their natural life-giving character signified by the monthly flow of blood in menstruation. If women bring new life into the community, men contribute to the maintaining of life through the Sun Dance ceremony.

While much of the professional literature misrepresents the piercing as self-torture or self-mutilation, for Indian communities it is always seen as a personal sacrifice offered on behalf of the people. In any event, participants invariably report that the piercing itself is not the most difficult aspect of this demanding ceremony, but rather comes as a climactic resolution that brings relief to the tension of one's prayers. The real focus of the ceremony is always the prayers of the dancers.

Many Sun Dance leaders emphasize strongly that, like all other key ceremonies, the Sun Dance ought always be done according to the direction of a particular vision given to someone in a particular time and place. Hence, each Sun Dance is a discrete phenomenon. One constant in all tribal variants is that there is a tree. Everything else is based on the particular vision and can vary from tribe to tribe and from one Sun Dance leader to another within a tribe.

Many tribes continue to practice a form of the Sun Dance that is still a tribal ceremony. That is to say that the tribal community sponsors only one Sun Dance each year and that it is a ceremony performed by and for the tribe as a whole. The ceremony held at Ethete, Wyoming, is an example. A high percentage of the Northern Arapaho population is involved, and the tribe's government extends certain privileges to those who are principal participants. These ceremonies function in the modern world as spiritual events that provide social cohesion for the tribe.

Other tribes, particularly the Siouan group of Lakota and Dakota, have engaged in a substantial transformation of their ceremonial life and its intent. One could argue that these tribes have moved towards the individualization represented by missionary Christianity. As such, these Sun Dance ceremonies tend today to proliferate into individual and family events that can even be seen as competing with one another for adherents. These ceremonies form around specific spiritual leaders, and many are increasingly open to anyone, Indian or non-Indian, who will make the personal commitment to a particular spiritual leader.

Ultimately, the proliferation of Sun Dances on Lakota reservations reflects back the denominational variety of missionary religion, which has historically functioned to divide Indian communities and to break down tribal cohesion by introducing Western religious choice and the paradigm of denominationalism. It can also be argued, of course, that traditional Lakota culture allows for the making of these sorts of leadership choices. While leadership was hereditary, it was always possible for any members of a band or group to follow another leader should they decide that they disagreed with the direction of leadership.

In any case, the contemporary result has been that there is no longer a "Lakota" tribal Sun Dance; instead, more than two dozen Sun Dances have been reported at the Oglala reservation at Pine Ridge over a single recent summer, with a similar number at the neighboring Rosebud and Cheyenne River reservations. The shift, however, has become more pronounced as Lakotas and Dakotas have invited more and more non-Indians as participants into their tribal ceremonial rites.

Holler, Clyde. Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism. Syracuse, N.Y., 1995.

White, Phillip M. The Native American Sun Dance Religion and Ceremony: An Annotated Bibliography. Westport, Conn., 1998.

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