A Ceremony Banned, Then Restored

The sun dance's history since the late nineteenth century is inseparable from the history of United States federal suppression of Lakota and wider Plains Indian religious practice: the ceremony was formally banned under federal policy from 1883 into the 1930s, part of a broader campaign against Native American religious practice enforced through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Lakota communities that continued the rite did so at real legal and physical risk, sometimes maintaining it in modified or partially hidden forms through the period of prohibition. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 provided formal federal legal protection for the ceremony and other Native religious practices considerably later, and the sun dance has continued and in some respects strengthened since, remaining a living, actively practised ceremony among Lakota and other Plains communities rather than a historical curiosity, though many communities restrict outside observation and participation, reflecting the same concerns about appropriation and correct context that inform how this atlas approaches Lakota religious material more generally.