Ritual dances

The dance of the sun

The sun dance, the most important ritual in the region, reflects the role of the sun as a creative force and source of power in the mythology of the plains, which is preserved, modified, among some peoples.

The tribe meets once a year, usually at the beginning of the summer, to honor their beliefs with a series of ceremonies, songs, and other rites. The center of the celebration is the dance of the sun, a ritual performed by those seeking to obtain spiritual power in front of the tribe, which forms a wide circle around a pole, a symbolic bond between the higher and lower worlds.

The dancers move around the pole, sometimes for whole days, until they finally disappear into a frenetic state or complete exhaustion. Some dancers inflicted wounds on themselves, as tearing the flesh represents liberation from the constraints of ignorance.

The Survival of the Sun Dance

White observers were scandalized by self-flagellation in the 19th century, so it was banned in 1881. This was a hard blow for the Plain Indians because they believed that the dance of the sun would be ineffective without this essential element and the world would not be renewed. Many Indians throughout the following years devoted themselves to performing public sun dances for the entertainment of the whites and simulated drilling meat with harnesses.

Others celebrated it in secret, such as the traditional drilling. Guards were placed at a certain distance to warn of the arrival of white officers.

Although the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 allowed for drilling again, the full renaissance occurred in the 1960s due to the rise of Indian militance. Today, sun dance is practiced in most of the indigenous reserves of the plains and in some urban areas.

The Cheyene Sun Dance is a creation of Indian artist Dick West. The dancer hangs from the leather strips that hold him from the chest in the sun dance shelter. The tension of the leather strips increases with the bison skulls subjected to their back.

The Dance of Spirits

The Dance of the Spirits, which originated among the paiutes, was the most popular and widespread of all the millennial movements. The movement never formed as a single movement, but rather as a collection of very similar revitalization cults derived from the same source. A common feature of all of them is a circular dance in which the dancers, in a state of sleep, contemplate their deceased loved ones.

More than a tenth of the Paiute population died of diseases in 1870. In the Fish Lake Valley, in the present Utah state, a wovoka, also known as the "time doctor", dreamed that he had the ability to bring back the souls of the recently deceased, thanks to his alleged ability to control rain, earthquakes, and other natural phenomena. According to his dream, to it, it was necessary to paint and perform circular dances. This wovoka became Wodziwob, a paiute word for an old man, a healer or a doctor. During the dancers' rest, Wodziwob arrived at a time when he assured to visit the deceased, who assure him that he would soon return with his loved ones. Wodziwob's fame spread to California, the Great Basin and the Plateau, mainly thanks to the work of another physician of the time, Tavibo. However, Wodziwob declared in 1872 that he had been deceived by an evil witch-buh, which prompted a rapid end to the Dance of the Paiute Spirits.

Tavibo's son, who had also received medical training at the time, reintroduced the Dances of the Spirits and became Wovoka.

Wovoka learned Christianity, worked at a Mormon ranch and was named Jack Wilson in English. During his illness on January 1, 1889, Wovoka had a moment in which he claimed to have visited the land of the dead, where God had asked him to preach peace. According to Wovoka, the natives could see the deceased during the circular dances and visit the ancient world of the traditional Indians. He urged the Indians not to fight and even asked them to adopt white customs to promote peace.

Many rural communities sent envoys to Wovoka. Each community adjusted its message to meet its own needs. The Lakota version had Christian influences and was more revolutionary than its model. The Lakots believed that Wovoka was the son of the Great Spirit, who had risen from the dead after being murdered by the white. A cloud of fire would wipe out the whites over time, the dead and the bison would return and start a new world. Many Lakotas, as elsewhere, wore special Dancing of the Spirits shirts, thinking they protected them from bullets.

The U.S. Army used the spread of the Dance of the Spirits as an excuse to disarm all indigenous communities in the meadows. During one of these operations in Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in December 1890, troops killed 200 Lakotas. Wounded Knee is for Indians a reminder of how the whites ended the Dance of the Spirits and native culture in general.

The religious and healing dance of the Chippewa

For the Chippewa, summer was the season of village life. In the spring, when people gathered in the villages for the Midewiwin, or Healing Dance, it was celebrated again in the fall, before the groups separated due to winter hunting.

The most important collective religious ritual of the Chippewa, the Midewiwin, included many ancient elements, especially the origin myth about Wenebojo, a cunning cultural hero, a part of which was told during the ceremony. The dance was exclusively for the initiated members. The application for participation in Midewiwin could be motivated by illness or even the death of a close family member; or it could be Motivated by a dream indicating the duty to join that group. A person could reach different levels of initiation by repeating that dance several times.

Although Midewiwin rituals vary by community, the typical representation consisted of a parade around the cabin-medicine in the opposite direction of the clock, accompanied by drums and chants. The ceremony reached its peak when some selected members of the group "shoot" the new initiate magic, directing his healing skins and supposedly injecting small white shells into his body.