The Sun Dance — Sacrifice for the Renewal of the World
The Lakota Sun Dance (Wiwanyag Wachipi — 'Looking at the Sun Dance') is the most sacred of the seven rites — a four-day ceremony of collective sacrifice in which dancers pierce their flesh and dance tethered to the Tree of Life, offering their pain for the healing of all beings.
The Sun Dance was suppressed by the US government from 1883 to 1934, yet it continued in secret — evidence of its centrality to Lakota life. Dancers fast from food and water for four days. On the third or fourth day, the most committed dancers are pierced through the chest muscles with wooden skewers attached by thongs to the sacred cottonwood tree. They dance, blowing eagle bone whistles, looking directly at the sun, pulling against the piercing until the skin tears free. This is not masochism but sacrifice — the offering of one's most intimate possession (one's body and its pain) for the benefit of the community and all living beings. The Sun Dance is a planetary prayer conducted through the medium of human suffering, offered freely.
I offer my body to Wakan Tanka so that my people may live.
Anthropologist Raymond DeMallie describes the Sun Dance as the most complete embodiment of Lakota theology — a ceremony in which cosmology, ethics, sacrifice, community, and physical reality are woven into a single annual enactment.
The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account