Sun Dance

The Sun Dance is a major religious ceremony of many Plains Indigenous peoples, including the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Blackfoot. Held in summer around a central pole, it involves fasting, prayer, dancing and, among some nations, ritual piercing, as an offering for the renewal of the people and the world. The US and Canadian governments banned or restricted it from the 1880s, but it continued in secret and is again widely practised.