Like many other aspects of Indian life and culture, the Sun Dance has evolved since the first European observers described it in the early nineteenth century. When the anthropologist Robert Lowie completed his overview of Plains Indian culture in 1954, he concluded that some twenty of the region's tribes maintained or once participated in a religious ceremony known as the Sun Dance.
The format of the Sun Dance has always varied from community to community. Nevertheless, there are certain features of the dance that many tribes share, although they attach different levels of significance to each. Often, the dance must be initiated by an individual sponsor, someone who takes a vow in the hope of being relieved of a worry, or being blessed in the coming year. It is almost always performed in the late spring and early summer, near the time of the summer solstice. Most Sun Dances begin with the erection of a circular lodge or corral around a solemnly chosen and cut central pole. During the next three or four days, periods of dancing, accompanied by singing, drumming, or whistling, are interspersed with periods of rest and meditation. Dancers do not eat or drink during the three or four days of the dance, although some do chew on bear root to keep their mouths moist. Toward the end of the Sun Dance, participants experience visions and receive blessings.
Early European witnesses to the Sun Dance were repulsed by some tribes' practice of self-mortification in the ceremony. Male dancers had their breasts or backs skewered and tied to a central lodge pole. Dancing and straining against the ropes, they eventually tore loose from the skewers that held them fast. Through this ritual, participants literally suffer on behalf of their community and call upon the Creator to pity and assist them in the fulfillment of their vows. This aspect of the ritual was the principal reason federal officials prohibited it between the end of the Plains wars and 1935. Despite the ban, however, many tribes continued to hold the Sun Dance surreptitiously in remote areas of their reservations or to enact it without its objectionable features.
For many Indians today, the use of modern technology (cars, tents, loudspeakers) does not take away from the solemnity or integrity of the Sun Dance, which has always been undergoing transformation. Whether they have reinvigorated the ritual (as the Lakotas have done), adopted it anew (as many Great Basin groups have done), or called it back into being after having lost it as a result of government prohibitions (as the Crows have done), it provides a central focus for community devotion and renewal.
