Sun Dance

Common features

Not every nation holds the Sun Dance in the same way, but certain things recur. Dances and songs have come down across many generations. A traditional drum is used, and a sacred fire burns. Prayers are made with a ceremonial pipe. Those who will dance give up food and water beforehand. In some places the ceremony includes piercing of the skin and long trials of physical endurance. Plants are gathered and prepared for the day: the Lakota pick Artemisia ludoviciana, white sage, and work it into bracelets. The whole event draws in members of bands that otherwise live and decide separately.

Banned and kept

After European colonisation, both Canada and the United States passed laws aimed at Indigenous cultures, pressing people toward Christianity and Anglo-American ways. The Sun Dance was among the ceremonies shut down. From 1882 into the 1940s, Indian agents, on their superiors' orders, interfered with dances across the Canadian plains. An 1895 change to the Indian Act banned any celebration or dance in which a person or animal was wounded; taking part, helping or encouraging it could bring imprisonment. How strictly the law was enforced is unclear. Nations kept dancing, quietly or in secret, some with an agent's leave, some without piercing. Canada dropped the ban on flesh-wounding in 1951. In the United States, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was passed to safeguard Native religious practice.

Variations between nations

Piercing is not universal. Nearly every community stresses endurance and offering instead. The Plains Cree hold a Thirst Dance, in which people go without water and move strenuously around the sacred pole but no one is pierced. Among the Shoshoni, the emphasis falls on long fasting and seeking through exhaustion. The Cree and Saulteaux have also held a Rain Dance, which shares elements with the Sun Dance, at least once a year somewhere on the Canadian plains since 1890. The Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho are the nations most often described as including piercing. Manitoba archival photographs show ceremonies being held from at least the early 1900s.

Guarding the ceremony

In 1993, Lakota, Dakota and Nakota nations gathered as the Lakota Summit V, with some 500 delegates from 40 bands. Their declaration named exploiters of Lakota spirituality, including charlatans and cult leaders who staged imitations of Lakota rites. A decade later the keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe asked those who are not Native to stop attending; Cheyenne and Sioux bundle keepers and spiritual leaders stood with him, closing the sacred altars and the Seven Sacred Rites to outsiders from 9 March 2003. Many communities keep cameras away from ceremony and prayer, holding that spirits leave once money or filming arrives. In the late 1950s the Kainai Nation in Alberta let their dance be filmed for its preservation, released in 1960 as Circle of the Sun.

How Sun Dance is kept

Whole communities plan for a year or more. One leader, or a small group, carries the ceremony, with many elders advising. Family and friends set up camp around the dance ground and pray for those taking part. Dancers fast from food and water before they begin. They dance around a central pole, often a cottonwood, inside a circular arbour, going for several days and nights. Among the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho, skewers pass through a fold of skin on the chest or back, and thongs tie these to the pole or to a weight such as a buffalo skull. The dancer pulls against the cord until the skin gives way.

When and where

The Sun Dance is held once a year in many Native communities in Canada and the United States, and runs over several days and nights. No date is shared by all nations.

The ceremony belongs to the Plains cultures of Canada and the United States. It is strongest among nations such as the Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Plains Cree, Saulteaux and Blackfoot. The Kainai Nation in Alberta dances it. In 1995 a dispute over dancing on unceded Secwepemc land became the Gustafsen Lake standoff.

What Sun Dance means

People who dance describe the fast and the piercing as an offering rather than a punishment. The anthropologist Alice Kehoe writes that dancers carry their people's strength in their bodies. The centre pole stands for the axis mundi, the world's middle, joining earth and the sacred, and the round lodge raised around it mirrors the universe, its 28 posts often read as lunar cycles. Fritz Detwiler sees a moral community formed by the willingness to give up comfort, and Arthur Amiotte says dancers suffer for generations still to come.

Questions people ask about Sun Dance

See also

Holy WeekThe solemn seven days leading to Easter, recalling the final week and Passion of JesusNovenaA nine-day Christian prayer tradition for petitions, feasts, or mourning.Kol NidreAn Aramaic declaration of vow annulment that opens the Yom Kippur evening service in Jewish synagogues.SigdAn Ethiopian Jewish holiday of covenant renewal, fasting, and longing for Zion

Good reading and sources

• Encyclopaedia BritannicaArticle

• Sun Dance on WikipediaEncyclopedia
• More photos on Wikimedia CommonsPhotos and video
• Wikidata recordOpen data

It may contain mistakes. Traditions differ from one family, village and community to the next, and the people who keep them know them best. If something is wrong, tell us. Last refreshed 2026-10-05.