What is the significance of the sun dance

Ghost Dance Youtube video. Anela, Haley, and I compared the different dance rituals that we researched and found many common themes between them. The similarities that we found between the Hoop dance, Hawaiian Hula, Maori Poi balls, and the Lakota Ghost and Sun dances were that they all contained the symbol of the circle, consisted of some type of storytelling, conveyed a certain point, acted as a way of passing down information and tradition from generation to generation, and had the mediation of the government at one point in time.

Dance can be seen as a ritual in many different ways. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Notify me of new posts by email.

Indigenous Religious Traditions. Skip to content. On the final day, different versions of the same dance took place. The Sun-Gaze Dances symbolized capture, torture, captivity and escape, and involved self-torture. Dancers enjoyed prestige from that time on.

The Sun Dance was an emotional experience and an opportunity to renew kinship ties, arrange marriages and exchange property. The Indian Act of banned a number of traditional Indigenous ceremonies, dances and festivals, including the Sun Dance.

While some communities continued to perform the ceremony in secrecy, others upheld the prohibition in fear of government persecution. The pass system and other policies of assimilation helped to enforce the Indian Act and prevent Indigenous peoples from gathering in large groups.

In , amendments to the Indian Act no longer prohibited celebration of the Sun Dance. Some Indigenous societies continue to perform the Sun Dance. In , World Council of Elders, a non-profit organization, established the International Sundance, which gathers Indigenous communities primarily from across Canada, the United States and Australia to perform the sacred ceremony.

See also Indigenous Elders in Canada. Search The Canadian Encyclopedia. The individual dancers, however, danced for their personal wishes, praying for better future, for their family members or friends, or wishing to determine their place in the universe.

The ceremony itself used dance routines and songs that were passed on from generation to generation to new tribal members, with some of the participants choosing to perform feats of endurance, piercings of the skin, and personal sacrifices on behalf of the community. Musical instruments were almost always confined to the set of drums and ceremonial pipes that were played during the entire time of long and often grueling dance that lasted for better part of a day and into the night, most commonly with dancers circling a central pole often decorated to represents a ceremonial totem.

Not all members of the tribe danced sun dance. Younger and more fit members prepared for the dance for days, feasting in the open areas in and around the villages or camps, preparing to offer their personal sacrifice of endurance to the sun, while other members of the tribe supported the dancers by organizing the dance with preparations often lasting even entire year.

Settler communities and later modern civilization never managed to properly examine origins, traditions, and forms of this dance because Indian culture expressly forbids dancers, tribal members, tribal doctors and chieftains of publicly speaking about it and filming of the dance is forbidden.