Sun Dance
Based on Wikipedia: Sun Dance
Imagine dancing for four days straight. No food. No water. The summer sun beats down on the Northern Plains, and you haven't slept more than a few minutes at a time. Wooden skewers pierce the skin of your chest, connected by leather thongs to a massive cottonwood pole at the center of a circular lodge. You lean back against that tether, pulling, dancing, praying—until finally your skin tears free.
This is the Sun Dance.
It sounds brutal, perhaps even horrifying to modern sensibilities. But for the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains—the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Cree, and others—it represents something profound: the ultimate gift you can offer to the Creator and your community. Not punishment. Not masochism. A prayer written on the body.
The Purpose Behind the Pain
The Sun Dance confounds Western assumptions about religious practice. Christianity has its martyrs, certainly, and Catholicism its flagellants. But the Sun Dance isn't about suffering for suffering's sake, and it isn't about individual salvation. The dancer endures for the people—for the survival of future generations, for the renewal of the world itself.
Black Elk, the renowned Oglala Lakota holy man whose visions shaped twentieth-century understanding of Plains spirituality, explained it to the scholar Joseph Epes Brown: "Here underneath you I shall offer up my body and soul for the sake of the people. For the good of the people it must be done."
The key word there is "offer." This is sacrifice in its original Latin sense—to make sacred. The dancer doesn't suffer pain; the dancer gives pain, transforms it into something holy.
At the center of every Sun Dance lodge stands a cottonwood tree, carefully selected and ceremonially felled. This tree becomes what scholars of religion call the axis mundi—the world center, the cosmic pillar connecting earth to sky, the mundane to the divine. The circular lodge built around it, typically with twenty-eight posts arranged in a ring, mirrors the lunar cycle and the shape of the universe itself. Everything in the ceremony operates on multiple levels simultaneously: physical and spiritual, individual and communal, temporal and eternal.
What Actually Happens
The ceremony unfolds over several days, though the exact duration and practices vary among nations. A year of preparation precedes it—not just logistical planning, but spiritual readiness. Those who pledge to dance spend months in prayer, consulting with elders, participating in sweat lodge purification ceremonies.
When the time comes, dancers enter the sacred circle having already begun their fast. No food. No water. For the next three to four days, they will dance around the central pole from dawn to dusk, sometimes longer, blowing eagle-bone whistles, their movements synchronized to the thundering of a traditional drum.
The piercing—and this is crucial to understand—doesn't happen to everyone, and not all nations practice it. But for those traditions that do, it represents the climax of the dancer's vow. An elder inserts wooden skewers through small folds of skin on the chest or back. Leather thongs connect these skewers either to the sacred pole or to heavy objects like bison skulls. The dancer then pulls against this tether while continuing to dance, sometimes for hours, until the skin finally gives way.
The anthropologist Alice Kehoe observed that dancers "embody the strength of their people" through this ordeal. They're not just praying—they're physically manifesting the community's endurance, its willingness to sacrifice for what matters.
The Diversity of Practice
It's a mistake to speak of "the" Sun Dance as if it were a single, uniform ceremony. Different nations developed their own variations over centuries, each reflecting local traditions and spiritual understanding.
The Plains Cree, for instance, practice what they call the Thirst Dance. Fasting and exhausting physical movement around the sacred pole remain central, but piercing doesn't occur. The sacrifice lies in the sustained denial of water under the summer sun—a form of suffering that anyone who has experienced serious dehydration will recognize as genuinely extreme.
The Shoshoni similarly emphasize prolonged fasting and the physical trial of dancing to the point of collapse. Vision seeking through exhaustion replaces flesh offering, though the underlying theology remains the same: the dancer gives up bodily comfort for spiritual communion.
Even among nations that practice piercing, variations abound. Some attach the thongs to bison skulls that the dancer drags behind him. Others suspend dancers from the central pole itself. The specific form matters less than the intention behind it.
The Colonial Assault
The governments of Canada and the United States spent a century trying to destroy the Sun Dance. Understanding why tells you everything about what the ceremony meant—and threatened.
By the 1880s, both nations had effectively confined Indigenous peoples to reservations. The bison herds that had sustained Plains cultures for millennia were nearly extinct, deliberately slaughtered as a weapon of conquest. Traditional political structures had been dismantled. Children were being forcibly removed to residential schools designed to, in the infamous phrase, "kill the Indian, save the man."
But Indigenous spiritual life persisted. And the Sun Dance represented something particularly dangerous to colonial authorities: a massive annual gathering where scattered bands came together, reaffirmed their identity, and practiced a religion that had nothing to do with Christianity.
In 1883, the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs issued regulations banning "the sun-dance, and all other so-called feasts." Canada followed in 1895, amending its Indian Act to outlaw "any celebration or dance of which the wounding or mutilation of the dead or living body of any human being or animal forms a part." Anyone who participated—or even encouraged others to participate—faced imprisonment.
Notice the careful wording. The law targeted specifically those practices involving physical sacrifice. You could argue this showed humanitarian concern for preventing self-harm. You would be wrong. The same governments showed zero concern for the grinding poverty, malnutrition, and disease ravaging reservation populations. What they objected to was Indigenous people maintaining their own relationship with the sacred.
Underground and Endurance
Here's what the colonial authorities never quite grasped: you can't legislate belief out of existence.
The ceremonies continued. Sometimes secretly, held at night or in remote locations away from the prying eyes of Indian agents. Sometimes with official permission secured through negotiation or bribery. Sometimes in modified forms that technically complied with the law—no piercing, but everything else intact.
The Cree and Saulteaux, the historical record shows, held at least one ceremony every single year from 1890 onward, somewhere on the Canadian Plains. Decades of active suppression couldn't break the chain of transmission.
There's something profound in this persistence. The Sun Dance isn't performed for audiences. There's no benefit to continuing it in secret except the practice itself. Those who maintained it through the persecution years did so purely from conviction—because the ceremony meant something real, accomplished something real, in their understanding of how the world works.
Canada finally dropped its prohibition in 1951. The United States passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978—remarkably late, when you consider that the First Amendment supposedly guaranteed religious liberty from the nation's founding. (This inconsistency illuminates exactly how American law actually functioned regarding Indigenous peoples.)
Revival and Protection
With legal barriers removed, the Sun Dance experienced a powerful revival in the latter twentieth century. But this created a new problem: appropriation.
Non-Indigenous people began showing up at ceremonies. Some came with genuine respect and honest curiosity. Others treated sacred rites as exotic experiences to consume, spiritual tourism for the New Age market. Worse still, self-proclaimed "shamans"—almost always non-Indigenous—began conducting their own "sun dances," charging fees, mixing in elements from various traditions they half-understood, and selling something that looked like Indigenous spirituality while having nothing to do with it.
In 1993, representatives from forty different Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota bands gathered for "Lakota Summit V" and unanimously declared war—their word—against "exploiters of Lakota spirituality." The language of their declaration is striking:
Sacrilegious "sundances" for non-Indians are being conducted by charlatans and cult leaders who promote abominable and obscene imitations of our sacred Lakota sundance rites. We hereby and henceforth declare war against all persons who persist in exploiting, abusing, and misrepresenting the sacred traditions and spiritual practices of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota people.
A decade later, in 2003, the Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe—a position of profound spiritual authority among the Lakota—formally asked non-Indigenous people to stop attending Sun Dances entirely. Traditional leaders from the Cheyenne and various Sioux nations issued supporting proclamations banning non-Indigenous participation from that point forward.
This might seem exclusionary from a Western perspective accustomed to churches that welcome all comers. But consider the context. These are people whose ancestors were murdered, whose languages were beaten out of children in government schools, whose ceremonies were criminalized for nearly a century. The Sun Dance survived all of that. Now they were watching their sacred rites turned into commodities, stripped of meaning, and sold to tourists. "If the non-Natives truly understand this purpose," the 2003 proclamation stated, "they will also understand this decision."
The Theology of Sacrifice
Why does any of this work? What's the spiritual logic behind offering flesh to ensure the people's survival?
Different practitioners would explain it differently, and outsiders should be cautious about systematizing what is ultimately a lived tradition rather than a textual theology. But certain themes recur.
The scholar Fritz Detwiler has argued that the willingness to sacrifice physical comfort creates a "moral community" rooted in reciprocity. You give, so that others may receive. You endure, so that the world may continue. This isn't transaction—paying a god for favors—but relationship. The Creator gave life; the dancer gives something of that life back.
Ella Cara Deloria, a Dakota Sioux scholar writing in the mid-twentieth century, emphasized that these practices "signified not punishment, but the ultimate offering—of one's own body in thanks or petition." The body is the most intimate thing you possess. It's the only thing you truly own. To offer your body is to offer everything.
The Lakota artist and scholar Arthur Amiotte points to intergenerational responsibility. Dancers suffer "for the survival of the future generations to come." The ceremony looks backward to ancestors who maintained it through persecution and forward to descendants who will need the world to keep functioning. The individual dancer becomes a conduit, a link in a chain stretching across time.
There's also something happening that Western categories struggle to capture: the restoration of balance, the renewal of cosmic order. The Sun Dance typically occurs around the summer solstice, the hinge of the year, when days stop lengthening and begin their slow decline toward winter. The ceremony ensures that this cycle continues—not automatically, but through conscious participation. Humans aren't passive observers of nature but active participants in maintaining it.
What We Cannot See
Most Sun Dance cultures forbid filming or photography during ceremonies. Few authentic images exist, and this is intentional.
"When money or cameras enter," many First Nations people explain, "the spirits leave."
This prohibition frustrates the documentary impulse of modern culture, our assumption that everything should be captured, preserved, made available. But it reflects a fundamentally different understanding of what sacred means. Some things are diminished by being watched. Some knowledge is only valid when transmitted properly, person to person, within the appropriate relationships. The ceremony isn't a performance to be consumed but an act to be participated in.
When the Kainai Nation in Alberta permitted filming of their Sun Dance in the late 1950s—producing the documentary "Circle of the Sun" in 1960—it caused significant controversy. The decision was made for preservation purposes, an acknowledgment that the ceremony had nearly been destroyed and might yet be lost. But many viewed it as a violation nonetheless.
This means that much of what outsiders think they know about the Sun Dance comes from anthropological accounts, historical records, or the testimony of Indigenous scholars willing to share limited information. We're looking at the ceremony through layers of mediation, catching glimpses rather than seeing the whole.
Perhaps that's appropriate. Some things aren't meant for everyone. Some knowledge has to be earned.
The Living Tradition
The Sun Dance continues today, practiced annually in numerous Indigenous communities across the United States and Canada. It survived colonization, criminalization, and a century of active suppression. It survived the near-extinction of the bison, the destruction of the old way of life, the forced assimilation programs designed to eliminate Indigenous culture entirely.
Young men still fast from food and water. They still dance for days around the sacred pole. In traditions that maintain the practice, they still undergo piercing, still offer their flesh for the people.
What does it mean that this ceremony persisted through everything that was done to destroy it? At minimum, it demonstrates that the Sun Dance addresses something real in human experience—a need for sacrifice, for communal renewal, for embodied prayer that words alone cannot satisfy. The colonial authorities were right to fear it, in their way. Here was something they couldn't control, couldn't understand, couldn't assimilate into their framework.
Here was proof that other ways of being human were possible.
And here that proof remains, dancing still, in the long summer light.