Sun Dancing and Subordination - Essay

Sun Dancing and Subordination

No nation on earth can rule a Sun Dancer that gets it, let alone a whole community of people with that  commitment. I mean, there’s a reason the ceremony was outlawed, even in a land that was founded on religious freedom, even among a supposedly conquered people without wealth, significant land or weapons.

Why can’t a Sun Dancer be ruled, you ask?

Well, I didn’t say that. I said a Sun Dancer that gets it can’t be ruled. There’s a difference. There are plenty that don’t, but more on that later. A true Sun Dancer is full of love and self-discipline. He serves others with aplomb and understands and even welcomes sacrifice. But what really sets the Sun Dancer apart is this: pain is not really an issue for him. He’s been to the edge physically. More importantly, he’s been beyond it. He understands that when discomfort comes and it is beyond his ability to handle, it simply means it’s time to give the pain away to higher powers. I mean, it’s one thing to say that, but it’s quite another to practice it. The Sun Dancer has this ability because he has practiced it over and over in other ceremonies in which he participates many times per year such as the inipi ceremony, wherein superheated stones are brought into a small enclosure. Water is then poured on them, creating a sauna like none you’ve ever experienced. It can get more than uncomfortable in there, but the practice is to give that discomfort to the stones, to something older and wiser in many ways than oneself. Of course this “giving away of pain” is metaphorical… at first. I mean, a new guy sitting in there can’t think of anything other than “when is the guy running this thing going to open the door and cool it off in here?” Eventually he learns that when the advice is given to give the discomfort away, he actually has the power to do that. And he sees that the stones themselves, the oldest “beings” on the planet, have been “set apart” or “ordained”, so to speak, to take his pain in this instance – and in accordance with the typical Universal Law of Balance, to give wisdom in exchange for it. The man finds that there is an interaction and a unique purification that happens in this process and in few other places or ways.  He learns that to feel pain is inevitable, but that suffering is optional. Those are cute words fit for any refrigerator magnet or Burning Man bumper sticker, but when practiced over and over in ceremony they take on real meaning. In the yoga studio or on the meditation mat as well, there are people that take this couplet seriously. But the difference is that one can always fudge that yoga move just a little to make it bearable, or cut that meditation a few minutes short. But in the inipi lodge as in life, relief as he would define it is largely out of the supplicant’s control. He knows the goal is to stay there until the round is finished and that others are dependent upon his doing so, as all are suffering in the heat together and opening the door changes the rhythm of the round (of which there are four in a typical inipi ceremony). In staying through the round and through his discomfort, he learns that just like in our lives, much of what causes his pain is out of his immediate control and that it can be a blessing dependent on the way he approaches it. From repeated experience he learns what to do when things get “too hot to handle”. Moreover, his ability to be comfortable in extremes of temperature - and life – expands. What bothers someone not so practiced doesn’t even register in the mind of this man. Why? Because he knows from experience that in the giving away of – or disidentification with - pain, the Divine is always, always, always there.     

The Sun Dance is, for me, the pinnacle of this interplay between discomfort and divine connection. A four-day fast from food and water (although chokecherry tea or water as “medicine” may or may not be administered at the Chief’s discretion), coupled with piercing by the men or “flesh offerings” by either men or women, make this ceremony unique in the sheer volume of pain that can be experienced. And for Sun Dancers that do NOT “get it”, this is the extent of their experience. They suffer, they feel different for a while, but then they return to their normal lives, routines and habits bearing the trophies of their “toughness.” But when this is NOT the extent of the experience, the voluminous discomfort allows for new levels of trust in Deity to occur. He can come to realize that he is ALWAYS held, ALWAYS fed, ALWAYS able to feel Unity with The Great Mystery whenever he is able to disidentify with the discomfort of the moment. He realizes that he is not always in control of his circumstance, but he is always in control of how he approaches it. He realizes that in his extremity, or outside of it, to feel this Connection with Deity is what he treasures the most, and he re-orders his life in order to be better equipped to feel it the other 361 days of the year.       

So… if a Sun Dancer cannot be ruled, how is it that the Sun Dance nations of the Northern Plains are a dominated culture?

This is easy to explain but hard to write, and very, very critical of the temporarily dominant culture in which we find ourselves. I am convinced that the only way to rule a Sun Dancer is to break his spirit. How is it that a person as I have described can have his spirit broken? Well, he would have to be convinced that his prayers and connection are either worthless or be presented with greater deprivation than he in his humanity can withstand. In the case of the Lakota and indeed, most indigenous people worldwide, both were true at the time of their breaking, at least to an extent. The Native Americans were force-fed the religion of the conquerers, Christianity. They were told to abandon their beliefs and ceremonies and accept the new doctrines or they would be persecuted. This persecution could take the form of sexual, physical, verbal and emotional abuse to enforce their “conversion.” But that was not the first step. The first was to deceive the naturally trusting natives into believing that co-habitation with the invaders was possible on the land upon which they depended for survival. When the food supplies were cut off and retaliatory attacks upon illegally encroaching settlers were punished with whole villages being wiped out, a sense of fear hitherto unknown to the Lakota was introduced; and fear is always the greatest barrier to well-being, including spiritual. This fear became unbearable among the Sun Dancing nation when they saw their elderly, their women and children starve and freeze to death in the harsh northern prairie winters. The pinnacle atrocity at Wounded Knee in the 1890’s, wherein hundreds of unarmed Native American men, women and children were executed in a gully by the US Calvary, was the final straw. By then, the great Lakota leaders, namely Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, had already been killed. Once fierce warriors Red Cloud and Spotted Tail had been “made over” into “white men” and given their own reservations. I believe that it was the inhumanity coming from other humans proclaiming manifest destiny and the Will of God that the Lakota encountered that broke them. I’m convinced it wasn’t the brutality. To be sure, the Lakota were acquainted with that from their longtime interaction with their enemies, namely the Crow, Blackfoot and Snake tribes. But they did not destroy winter food stores, or desecrate the sacred sites of their foes. The target was never the “helpless ones”; the women, children and elderly of their communities. Nor was their primary objective always to kill, but often to show their bravery in the face of death by “counting coup”, which could be as simple as feints upon their horses in front of a superior force, or by touching their enemy in the midst of a heated battle and riding away. The invading US forces did not think this way; their objective was dominion of all the land and peoples upon it as their religion supposedly mandated. Their method was to inflict as much death as possible upon anything standing in their way, man, vegetable or animal, enriching themselves in the process. In the end, it was the fact that the Lakota were unable to match this level of depravity and ruthless warfare coupled with a technological and numeric disadvantage, that broke the spirits of the Sun Dance nations.

Today, the Sun Dance has been resurrected through the efforts of a new generation of Lakota spiritual leaders such as Lame Deer, Pete Catches, Black Elk, Martin Highbear and others. Rising from the aftermath of the Wounded Knee standoff in the mid-1970’s, the Sun Dance has left the reservations and, in the direct fulfillment of multi-tribal prophesy, has been taken to all nations. I see the ceremony as a valid way to heal the earth and her people and to stem the tide of the death-addicted culture that has laid claim to her. It will happen as quickly as the Dancers themselves are healed of their personal and generational wounds, and they walk in such a way as to draw others’ eyes to their own Creator within whatever path they may choose to walk.

MY prayer is that this time we stand together as Dancers under the Sun. This time, we do not allow enemies of Life to dominate and control. This time, we turn control over to Creator and fight on a different level, that of Spirit, of Light and Life. If we do so, this time, the world will truly see that there is no way to rule a Sun Dancer.