A powerful story of one man's redemption through the Lakota Sun Dance ceremony. • Written by the only white man to be confirmed as a Sundance Chief by traditional Lakota elders. • Includes forewords by prominent Lakota spiritual leaders Leonard Crow Dog, Charles Chipps, Mary Thunder, and Jamie Sams. The Sun Dance is the largest and most important ceremony in the Lakota spiritual tradition, the one that ensures the life of the people for another year. In 1988 Michael Hull was extended an invitation to join in a Sun Dance by Lakota elder Leonard Crow Dog-- a controversial action because Hull is white. This was the beginning of a spiritual journey that increasingly interwove the life of the author with the people, process, and elements of Lakota spirituality. On this journey on the Red Road, Michael Hull confronted firsthand the transformational power of Lakota spiritual practice and the deep ambivalence many Indians had about opening their ceremonies to a white man. Sun Dancing presents a profound look at the elements of traditional Lakota ceremonial practice and the ways in which ceremony is regarded as life-giving by the Lakota. Through his commitment to following the Red Road, Michael Hull gradually won acceptance in a community that has rejected other attempts by white America to absorb its spiritual practices, leading to the extraordinary step of his confirmation as a Sun Dance Chief by Leonard Crow Dog and other Lakota spiritual leaders.

The Native American activist recounts his evolution into a political organizer, his trial and conviction for murder, and his spiritual journey in prison. In September of 2022, twenty-five years after Leonard Peltier received a life sentence for the murder of two FBI agents, the Democratic National Committee unanimously passed a resolution urging President Joe Biden to release him. Peltier has affirmed his innocence ever since his sentencing in 1977—his case was made fully and famously in Peter Matthiessen’s bestselling In the Spirit of Crazy Horse—and many remain convinced he was wrongly convicted. A wise and unsettling book, Prison Writings is both memoir and manifesto, chronicling Peltier’s life in Leavenworth Prison in Kansas. Invoking the Sun Dance, in which pain leads one to a transcendent reality, Peltier explores his suffering and the insights it has borne him. He also locates his experience within the history of the American Indian peoples and their struggles to overcome the federal government’s injustices. Edited by Harvey Arden, with an introduction by Chief Arvol Looking Horse, and a preface by former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Praise for Prison Writings “It would be inadequate to describe Leonard Peltier’s Prison Writings as a classic of prison literature, although it is that. It is also a cry for help, an accusation against monstrous injustice, a beautiful expression of a man’s soul, demanding release.” —Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States “For too long, both Leonard’s supporters and detractors have seen him as a metaphor, as a public figure worthy of political rallies and bumper stickers, but very rarely as a private man who only wants to go home. I pray this book will bring Leonard home.” —Sherman Alexie, author of Indian Killer

As agency physician on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1896 to 1914, Dr. James R. Walker recorded a wealth of information on the traditional lifeways of the Oglala Sioux.

Zitkala-?a (Red Bird) (1876?1938), also known as Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was one of the best-known and most influential Native Americans of the twentieth century. Born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation, she remained true to her indigenous heritage as a student at the Boston Conservatory and a teacher at the Carlisle Indian School, as an activist in turn attacking the Carlisle School, as an artist celebrating Native stories and myths, and as an active member of the Society of American Indians in Washington DC. All these currents of Zitkala-?a?s rich life come together in this book, which presents her previously unpublished stories, rare poems, and the libretto ofThe Sun Dance Opera.

A fictionalized history of fourth-century Irish monks describes their spirituality and their influence on other areas of the world.

Celebrates a great summer day of childhood near and in a river.

About 1875 the Crows abandoned their own Sun Dance, but they continued to carry out other traditional rites despite opposition from missionaries and the federal government. In 1941, Crow Indians from Montana sought out leaders of the Sun Dance among the Wind River Shoshonis in Wyoming and under the direction of John Truhujo, made the ceremony a part of their lives. In The Shoshoni-Crow Sun Dance, Fred W. Voget draws on forty years of fieldwork to describe the people and circumstances leading to this singular event, the nature of the ceremony, the reconciliation’s with Christianity and peyotism, the role of the Sun Dance as a catalyst for the reassertion of Crow cultural identity, and the place the Sun Dance now holds in Crow life and culture. Voget’s description includes photographs and diagrams of the Sun Dance.

Drawing on Indigenous methodologies, this book uses a close analysis of James R. Walker’s 1917 monograph on the Lakota Sun Dance to explore how the Sun Dance communal ritual complex – the most important Lakota ceremony – creates moral community, providing insights into the cosmology and worldview of Lakota tradition. The book uses Walker’s primary source to conduct a reading of the Sun Dance in its nineteenth-century context through the lenses of Lakota metaphysics, cosmology, ontology, and ethics. The author argues that the Sun Dance constitutes a cosmic ethical drama in which persons of all types – human and nonhuman – come together in reciprocal actions and relationships. Drawing on contemporary animist theory and a perspectivist approach that uses Lakota worldview assumptions as the basis for analysis, the book enables a richer understanding of the Sun Dance and its role in the Lakota moral world. Offering a nuanced understanding that centers Lakota views of the sacred, this book will be relevant to scholars of religion and animism, and all those interested in Native American cultures and lifeways.