Two religious matters attach to this grouping and both are live. The Sun Dance, in its various forms among the different nations, was banned in the United States and Canada from the 1880s, enforced through the withholding of rations and through criminal prosecution, and was practised in secret for decades. In the United States the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 was the formal end of the policy. The dance is held today, and how it should be described, who may attend and what may be photographed are decisions belonging to the nations and the individuals who hold it.
The 1993 Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, adopted at Lakota Summit V, states one such position plainly and is catalogued in this atlas. The Ghost Dance is the second. It spread across the Plains from the teaching of the Northern Paiute prophet Wovoka in 1889, and the response to it ended at Wounded Knee Creek on 29 December 1890 in the killing of some three hundred Lakota, mostly Miniconjou and Hunkpapa, by the Seventh Cavalry. The atlas writes that history in full and does not reconstruct the ceremony. Both cases show the same pattern, in which a religion was first suppressed by law and then, once it was safely historical, taken up as material by people with no connection to it. The nations concerned have been explicit about the second as well as the first.
Sources The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890James Mooney with Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota SpiritualityLakota Summit V