Cosmology and Moral Community in the Lakota Sun Dance

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p>