The Sun Dance is an annual, multi day communal ceremony held by many Plains nations of North America, generally timed around the summer solstice, and it stands among the most important surviving religious ceremonies of the Plains cultural area, involving extended fasting, prayer, drumming and singing by the whole gathered community around pledged dancers who undertake the ceremony's most demanding commitments, in some nations' forms including physical sacrifice, as an act of prayer, thanksgiving and renewal for the people as a whole rather than for the dancers alone. It is a closed ceremony belonging to living Indigenous religious traditions, held by Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Blackfoot, Crow, Kiowa and other Plains nations each according to their own particular protocols, and its specific ritual content, songs and internal procedure are not published here or generalised for outside audiences, in keeping with the tribes' own stated position, articulated forcefully by Lakota spiritual leaders in formal declarations opposing the commercial and unauthorised use of Lakota ceremony by outsiders. What can be said from the outside is the ceremony's broad shape and significance, drawn from published ethnography and legal history, and its documented history of suppression and recovery in the United States and Canada, not a description of ritual procedure, which belongs to the nations that hold it.