Sun dance

Yesterday I was moved to inquire about the sun dance of native Americans, said to involve days and nights of dancing, fasting and thirsting.

For once, wikipedia was not very helpful. But then my eye lighted on my book mark for DPLA, the digital public library of America, something I have known about for a while, but have not made much use of. See reference 1.

On this occasion it did the business, with the search term 'sun dance native americans' turning up a lot of old photographs of said dance, but also what turned out to a very informative paper, written at Princeton over half a century ago. Clicking on the catalogue entry took me to a rather old-speak version of the paper in some affiliated collection, but asking google gets me to a pdf copy, all 96 pages of which have now been downloaded. See reference 2.

First impression was that it is terribly hard to recover tribal practices of this sort, heavily infiltrated as they are by time, Christian missionaries, new agers and rather self-conscious revivals. But Shimkin has a good go. While google streetview contributes the view of the Wind River Basin included above, taken near Shoshoni, in Wyoming. An area in which wikipedia tells me oil was discovered in 1884.

Second impression was that the dance did indeed involve days and nights of dancing, fasting and thirsting, but it also involved sleeping and tobacco. The dancers, mostly, I think, young men, were not expected to keep it up for the duration, although I think you did get more status in the tribe the longer you kept going. There was also a pain angle, one which the missionaries did their best to eliminate.

Perhaps telling that wikipedia was much stronger on oil flavoured geology than it was on ethnography.

PS: the name 'Sundance' does seem to be loosely related. Not that common, but we do have the Sundance Kid and the Sundance Film Festival.

Reference 1: https://dp.la/.

Reference 2: The Wind River Shoshone Sun Dance - D. B. Shimkin - 1947.