Sundance.

Once again before Grandfather Sun, Tunkashila, the ceremony has come together. As they have for sixteen years, on these wondrous plateaus of the southern Black Hills of the northern Great Plains, Uncle Joe American Horse, traditional chief and former tribal president; his brother David American Horse; Grandma Beatrice Long Visitor Weasel Bear; respected headwoman Loretta Afraid of Bear; respected Pipe Carrier Tom Cook; and the American Horse/Afraid of Bear tiospayes (families) receive brothers and sisters of the many directions.

The purpose is to pray—by dancing, by receiving each other in a good way. In a properly isolated place, where wild horse herds roam relatively free, a ceremonial arbor open to the Four Directions is flanked by a large shade on poles and a dozen large tipis. This is home for four and more days to dancers there to don the ceremonial skirt, red-tied bracelets of prairie sage on ankles and wrists, crown of sage tied in red cloth, dual eagle feathers (spikes are favored) placed on the head; set to carry the ceremony as dancers of the sun. Below—“downstairs”—a second plateau a half-mile away is camp for some two hundred family supporters of specific and groups of dancers, where more tipis and tents, an occasional RV, and many trucks and cars circle around a communal kitchen, staffed completely by volunteers— cooks and helpers.

There are many Sundances each summer, perhaps fifty or more just at the Oglala–Lakota reservation of Pine Ridge, hundreds, maybe thousands, across the Northern and Southern Plains, many more during sun-appreciation ceremonies throughout the hemispheric Native Americas. While foundational precepts and structures are manifested wherever Native peoples salute or celebrate the sun, each Sundance has its history, its specificity of culture and practice over its own ceremonial trajectory.


Read the rest at The National Museum of the American Indian.