Paper short abstract:

This paper explores traditional Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) ceremonial life as it evolved from public performance, through a ban on religious expression in 1883, to several sun dance "reenactments" in the 1920s, and finally the revitalization period of the 1960s and 1970s.

Paper long abstract:

Traditional Lakota (Western [Teton] Sioux) ceremonial life was and is dynamic, idiosyncratic, and anti-dogmatic. It is individualistic, fueled by personal experience and innovation, and largely revelatory or vision-based. Lakota religious ceremonies were banned by the United States federal government in the early 1880s. The last public sun dance of the nineteenth century was held in 1883 at Rosebud Reservation. After the ban, Indian agents and Indian police kept close tabs on ceremonial doings, and if a Lakota was caught practicing his religion he could be punished in various ways, from having rations withheld to imprisonment. Permission for public rituals was occasionally granted in some special cases, such as victory dances for Lakota soldiers returning from World War I. In the late 1920s mock sun dances, perceived by many as reenactments of the past, were held on Pine Ridge and Rosebud at the behest of then-President Calvin Coolidge and the Indian agents. This resumption of public ceremonies was tentative but gained momentum after the influential 1928 Merriam Report and the subsequent passage of the Wheeler-Howard Act, popularly known as the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) in 1934, which encouraged (the revival of) native cultural practices. By the 1960s and 1970s a full-blown revitalization movement was sweeping through Lakota country that combined elements of the past with practical necessity and present realities to forge a new vision of Lakota tradition for the twentieth century and beyond.