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The Sun Dance

The Sun Dance. The Native American tribes who practiced sun dance were: The Arapaho, Arikara, Asbinboine, Cheyenne, Crow, Gros, Ventre, Hidutsa, Sioux, Plains Cree, Plains Ojibway, Sarasi, Omaha, Ponca, Ute, Shoshone, Kiowa, and Blackfoot tribes. Their rituals varied from tribe to tribe. .

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The Sun Dance

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  1. The Sun Dance The Native American tribes who practiced sun dance were: The Arapaho, Arikara, Asbinboine, Cheyenne, Crow, Gros, Ventre, Hidutsa, Sioux, Plains Cree, Plains Ojibway, Sarasi, Omaha, Ponca, Ute, Shoshone, Kiowa, and Blackfoot tribes. Their rituals varied from tribe to tribe.

  2. The Sun Dance was the most spectacular and important religious ceremony of the Plains Indians of 19th-century North America. • Held by each tribe once a year during the Summer Solstice. • Can last from 4 - 8 days

  3. The Dance showed continuity between life and death - regeneration. • It shows that there is no true end to life, but a cycle of symbolic and true deaths and rebirths. • All of nature is intertwined and dependent on one another. This gives an equal ground to everything on the earth. • The tree represents the center of the world, connecting the heavens to the earth.

  4. The sun dance was the major communal religious ceremony: • The rite celebrates • Renewal • Spiritual rebirth of participants and their relatives. • Regeneration of the living earth with all its components • The ritual, involves sacrifice and supplication to insure harmony between all living beings. • Continues to be practiced by many contemporary native Americans.

  5. The Performance: • Depending on the tribe, the dancers may go through self-inflicted torture. • The gift of one's own body is seen as the highest form of sacrifice. • Dancers would have pieces of bone or wood skewered into their skin tied to the sun-pole. • They would then tug and pull until the skin broke free. • The whole object of the devotee is to break loose from these fetters. • To liberate himself he must tear the skewers through the skin.

  6. This self-inflicted torture has also come to symbolize rebirth. • The torture represents death, and then the person is symbolically resurrected. • The sun dancer is reborn, mentally and spiritually as well as physically, along with the renewal of the buffalo and the entire universe.

  7. Some tribes perform the ritual as a rite of passage, and a vision quest – where the young warriors will hang from the skewers for several days.

  8. After the dancers all tear free, or after four days, the Sun Dance ends. • The dancers are laid down on beds of sage to continue fasting and to recite their visions to the priest. • These visions may hold new songs, new dance steps, or even prophecies of the future. Whatever the outcome, the overall feeling for everyone present is of renewal and balance, the relationships between people and nature once again reaffirmed.

  9. Should the Canadian government have banned the practice? Was the banning purely for the self-preservation of the aboriginal tribes?

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