Shared Practices
The Sun Dance is a common ceremony amongst Native American Plains Indians; the practice varies amongst tribes although many share similar rituals with the Blackfoot Sundance ceremony. In general, the ceremony lasts from 4 days to eight days. After all of the preparations are completed, the ceremony begins at the onset of sunset. The meaning of the Sundance is complex and nuanced but it is largely representative of the cyclical rebirth of life and Earth. The ceremony makes use of a sweat lodge and a medicine lodge with the tribe arranged in a circle around them.
At the start of the ceremony, women from the tribe travel together to a tree and remove its branches. The next day, the tree will be symbolically killed by a group of warriors that attack it, then relocated and erected in the middle or the dance area; once there, the skull of a buffalo is attached, it is oriented so that it faces in the direction of the sun. Next, the medicine lodge is constructed with the Eagle Nest crested at the “fork” or the place where the poles that make up the lodge meet. Eagles are sacred to the Blackfoot tribe and this positioning is symbolic of that. The religious portions of the ceremony will take place within this lodge. Then, the sweat lodge is used to gather and pray for the sick; ironically, the medicine lodge was used for public meeting and gathering.
The Kiowa and Blackfoot both have a strong emphasis on medicine bundles. The Blackfoot had a larger focus on small personal medicine bundles, which could be used for personal ritual and could be easily carried on a person, but they also had medicine bundles that could belong to the entire tribe . The Kiowa have ten large tribal bundles that were a great source of power for the tribe and it was a great honor to be the keeper of one of these bundles, and the keeping of medicine bundles might be passed on through specific families.
Some greater differences between tribes has to do with how powers or spirits are viewed. The Lakota have The Great Spirit known as Wakan Tanka who is worshiped as a deity, while the Kiowa have a concept called dwdw (dawdaw) or power that is from every thing in nature. They hold the sun as the source of all life, and they hold rituals to draw the dwdw from the sun, or bison, or whatever source of dwdw the individual wishes to draw upon. The Blackfoot also hold the sun as a central figure of power, but their practice is somewhere between the Kiowa with no deities, and the Lakota with their Great Spirit.
While both the Lakota and Kiowa participated in the Ghost Dance movement, their rituals and beliefs surrounding it and death in general were very different. Both believed that the spirit of a loved one could stay nearby, but the Lakota had a ritual that helped the spirit move on and helped the family manage their mourning. The Lakota believed that the Ghost Dance would bring back the spirits of the dead, who would help the Lakota force out the Americans from their land and bring back the buffalos. The Kiowa on the other hand, were very afraid of ghosts. When a family member died, their belongings would be burned or buried and the family would move out of the tipi that had been shared. The main Ghost Dance movement was to bring back the spirits of the dead to fight alongside living warriors against the Americans, something the Kiowa were very suspicious about participating in. However, in a four year period in the 1890s, more than four hundred Kiowa children died of disease and the Kiowa perspective on Ghost Dance changed a little. While they did not try to harness the power of the spirits of the dead, they did practice a ceremony very like a Sun Dance in which the dancers would try to induce visions of the dead so that the Kiowa could visit with their recently deceased. Sometimes peyote would be used in conjunction with the Ghost Dance to aid in gaining a vision.