This research project focuses on the Sun Dance, an Indigenous ritual particularly associated with Siouan people, as a site of cultural expression where multiple, often conflicting concerns, compete for hegemonic dominance. Since European contact the Sun Dance has been variously practiced, suppressed, reclaimed, revitalized, and transformed. It has also evoked strong sentiments both from those that sought to eradicate its practices as well as those who have sought its continuance. In spite of a period of intense colonial repression, during the last three decades the Siouan form of the Sun Dance has become one of the most widely practiced religious rituals from Indigenous North America and the number of Sun Dances held and the numbers of people participating has grown significantly. How has the Sun Dance ritual endured in spite of a lengthy history of repression? What is it about the Sun Dance that evokes such powerful sentiments? And, how do we account for the growth of the Sun Dance.
I argue that the current growth and practice of the Sun Dance must be considered within the context of colonialism; a central focus of this dissertation. I identify the complex and messy ways that individuals mediate the inequitable power relations that shape colonialist interactions, as well as the way they interpret these social spaces. One of the hallmarks of power is the way that it works to conceal its processes and produce invisibility. This project seeks to uncover the concealed processes and the invisible, which continue to shape the contemporary Sun Dance practice. Each section of this dissertation, which is provisionally divided to attend to four eras of contact, is attentive to the ways that the Sun Dance ritual has been shaped by the historical conditions of colonialism that “in the past banished certain individuals, things or ideas, how circumstances rendered them marginal, excluded or repressed.”
Representation is one of the critical forces of the colonial project. In spite of the tremendous volume of published works on the Sun Dance, there has been relatively little attention paid to the material effect of the circulation of either the representation of this practice or the lived experiences of those participating. This project historicizes representations of the Sun through textual, archival, and ethnographic research and demonstrates that Native interventions in these productions of knowledge have been largely concealed and underrepresented.
The dissertation reveals multiple layers of concealment that go beyond the obfuscation of Native contribution. In each historical era, a Native contributor is brought to the fore: George Sword, Ella Deloria, the Medicine Men’s Association, and Elmer Running. Each has contributed significantly to the way we think about Sun Dance today. By tracing these contributors, I show that Native contributions and interventions were not monolithic; rather there was a wide range of approaches used to negotiate and mediate the lived experience of colonialism, which in turn shaped their own engagement with and interpretation of the ritual.