Native American Indian Sun Dance

The sun dance is the best known and most dramatic of North American Indian ceremonies. The sun dance ceremony and religion is an important part of both Native American and American history.

The Sun Dance ceremonies practiced differently by several Native American tribes, but many of the ceremonies have features in common, including fixed gazing at the sun while dancing, blowing of eagle bone whistles, fasting and sometimes, self torture.

The ceremony was the most spectacular and important religious ceremony of the Plains Indians of the 19th- century North America, ordinarily held by each tribe once a year usually at time of the Summer Solstice.

Most notable for early Western observers was the piercing many young men endure as part of the ritual. Frederick Schwatka wrote about a Sioux Sun Dance he witnessed in the late 1800s:

Each one of the young men presented himself to a medicine-man, who took between his thumb and forefinger a fold of the loose skin of the breast—and then ran a very narrow-bladed or sharp knife through the skin—a stronger skewer of bone, about the size of a carpenter's pencil was inserted. This was tied to a long skin rope fastened, at its other extremity, to the top of the sun-pole in the center of the arena. The whole object of the devotee is to break loose from these fetters. To liberate himself he must tear the skewers through the skin, a horrible task that even with the most resolute may require many hours of torture.

In fact, the object of being pierced is to sacrifice one's self to the Great Spirit, and to pray while connected to the Tree of Life, a direct connection to the Great Spirit. Breaking from the piercing is done in one moment, as the man runs backwards from the tree at a time specified by the leader of the dance. A common explanation, in context with the intent of the dancer, is that a flesh offering, or piercing, is given as part of prayer and offering for the improvement of one's family and community.

The Sun Dance last from four to eight days starting at the sunset of the final day of preparation and ending at sunset. It showed a continuity between life and death - a regeneration. It shows that there is no true end to life, but a cycle of symbolic and true deaths and rebirths. All of nature is intertwined and dependent on one another. This gives an equal ground to everything on the Earth.

The Sun Dance were practiced by the Arapaho, Arikara, Cheyenne, Crow, Gros, Ventre, Hidutsa, Sioux, Plains Cree, Plains Ojibway, Sarasi, Omaha, Ponca, Ute, Shoshone, Kiowa and Blackfood tribes. The rituals varied from tribe to tribe.

Though only some tribe’s Sun Dances include the piercings, the Canadian Government outlawed some of the practices of the Sun Dance in 1880, and the United States government followed in 1904. The Sun Dance ceremony is now again fully legal and is still practiced in the United States and Canada. Women do not pierce their skin in the same manner as men. A woman's piercing is in her upper arm, and an eagle feather is attached until the piercing is removed. Some men do not do pierce at all, such as the Shoshone in Wyoming. They may pierce if they desire to. A Sundancer must commit to dancing for four years, for the four compass directions.