The 1994 Sun Dance

This past summer, my daughter, my lady Sovannahry Em, our friend Shane DuBray and I were hanging out by a lake in the Black Hills. Shane led the way to a cliff overlooking the water. It was a loooong way down—probably fifty feet. Without much hesitation, Shane dove in, came out and asked Sovannahry if she wanted to jump. Being insane, she said yes, so Shane showed her how to safely clear the rocks. My daughter and I looked in disbelief as she dove in too. She later repeated the jump once more. Shane in the meantime kept diving in and out like it was nothing. Maybe it’s because I’m a wimp, but it was hard for me to fathom how he could be so nonchalance about the whole thing. Then, I saw the Sun Dance scars on his chest and back, and remembered. Just a week later, he was going to Sun Dance again. For those who are unfamiliar with what that entails, he would spend four days dancing under the summer sun while abstaining from food AND water, and… being pierced with wooden skewers tied to a rope which is tied to a tree. He’d then proceed praying and dancing until it’d be time to pull and rip the skewers off. In light of this, of course jumping from a fifty-foot cliff was child’s play for him.

Thinking about it brought my mind back to a summer of 29 years earlier, when I first attended a Sun Dance, and the trajectory of my life radically changed.

It was the summer of 1994. I was 20 years old, and as lost as I could be.

Two years earlier I had moved from Italy to the United States. For the first year or so, I had a blast. I thrived on the novelty of going to college in a different continent, experiencing a new culture, and enjoying the unbeatable Southern California weather. When the initial high wore off, things got dark. Very dark.

For months I had developed what I thought were deep connections only to realize they were little more than passing acquaintances. For my personal (naïve) standards, Italian culture didn’t put enough emphasis on friendship. So, you can imagine my shock moving to the US. I was unprepared for the loneliness and alienation typical of American life, where work and hustling are much higher on the priority list than social relationships. I don’t think I ever experienced a degree of mind-numbing loneliness like I did at that time. Add to this that my mother was very sick and doctors couldn’t figure out what was going on. The result was that sadness filled my days—the kind of sadness that even the California sunshine couldn’t chase away. As Nietzsche put it, “The frost of loneliness makes me shiver.”

My gloomy mood became severe enough that I took a leave of absence from school and returned to Italy. Darkness followed me there too. It was clear I didn’t belong there anymore. My Italian friends couldn’t see it or, if they did, they didn’t know how to help me. I felt like I was screaming but no one could hear me. I didn’t know what to do. Every day I sunk a little deeper in the quicksand. In the midst of this, I managed to fall for a stunning woman… who happened to be the girlfriend of one of my best friends. In a highly predictable sequence of events, I contributed to wrecking their relationship, and hurt everyone involved. I still feel terrible about it to this day. In the meantime, the walls kept closing in. And I ruined everything I touched.

By the time the summer of 1994 rolled around, I made my way back to US for what I thought was a short vacation before packing up all my things and returning permanently to Italy. Not that I had any idea about what I’d do in Italy. I had no prospects of any kind and no path to get out of the pit that held me prisoner.

My mother, who seemed to be getting better from whatever had ailed her, asked me to go on a road trip to visit some Lakota friends of hers in South Dakota. One of them ran a Sun Dance on the Cheyenne River Reservation, and invited us to attend. I had been to sweat lodges and pipe ceremonies, but only knew of the Sun Dance from what I had read in books. And what I read made the whole affair sound odd. Unlike other Lakota ceremonies that can be done whenever one feels like it, the Sun Dance is a once-a-year event organized by a whole community. More importantly, unlike other Lakota ceremonies whose appeal and internal logic are immediately clear, the Sun Dance is rough business. It’s one thing to read about the notion of sacrificing to pray for the welfare of your family, your community and, on a larger level, for everything that exists. It’s a whole different story to actually go through something so physically extreme.

Like many other Native ceremonies, the Sun Dance had been outlawed by the government in the late 1800s. In the ‘land of the free’, Native people could go to jail for practicing the ‘wrong’ religion well into the 1900s. You say freedom of religion is enshrined in the Bill of Rights? Well, yeah… I guess Congress felt freedom of religion only applied to those religions they liked. It wasn’t until 1978 when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed. Until then, the Sun Dance had survived illegally, with people practicing it deep into the hills, away from the eyes of the law.

Despite being less than clear about the whole thing, my mother (see picture below), my friend Eric and I squeezed into a tiny car and drove for three days until we arrived at Cheyenne River. The Sun Dance grounds were in the middle of nowhere on the reservation. It was not the kind of place where someone stumbles by chance. The closest town was at least 20 miles away. There were no stores anywhere. Just grassland as far as the eye could see. It was the day before the Sun Dance was set to begin. Perhaps 300 people between family and friends were gathered to support about 60 dancers. Nearly everyone was Native, and despite the kind smiles that greeted us, it didn’t take me long to begin feeling out of place.

Luckily, just a few minutes after our arrival, they called for all the men to go help cut a tree that had been pre-selected as the one to be used for the ceremony. This process was more complicated than it sounds, since the ritual required for the tree not to touch the ground. So, after a few hits with the ax, everyone would push the tree back and forth until placing it against another nearby tree, and from there slide it on everyone’s shoulders and carry it back to camp. Things weren’t destined to go smoothly, though. As we were pushing, the tree gave out faster than anyone expected. I got caught by surprise and couldn’t get my hand out fast enough. My fingers were crushed between the falling tree and the support tree. Realizing what was happening, everyone immediately pushed and I squeezed my hand free. It was a bloody mess, and one finger in particular looked horribly mangled. Most of the skin had been scraped off, and the bones looked broken in a couple of different spots. Somebody took off their shirt and wrapped it around my finger.

Here's where the first weird thing happened. As I walked back to camp, I felt no pain. Considering the state of my hand, the pain should have been through the roof. Instead, I just smiled and joked around like nothing had happened because, in truth, I felt nothing. There were no hospitals anywhere for miles, and I didn’t think a hospital visit would do much for a broken bone. A doctor would disinfect it and put it in a splint, and that would mostly be it. Well… we could do that with a first aid kit where we were without having to leave.

In an odd kind of way, that was the best thing that could have happened to me in that moment. The accident gave many people an excuse to initiate conversation to check up on me. It was the bloodiest but most perfect icebreaker possible in a context in which I had felt out of place.

The Sun Dance itself… I hesitate to put into words what I saw and felt. Something clicked and what had made little sense when I had only read about it somehow made perfect sense when I was in the presence of it. There were plenty of beautiful, moving moments but I feel like my attempts to capture them in words would do them no justice.

On the first or second night there, a young Lakota woman pulled me aside to hint that her friend was into me. As it turns out, her friend was insanely sweet and beautiful, but also shy to a level that outdid any previous definition I had of shyness. We flirted for a few days in the most awkward but endearing way possible. Given how awful we were at that game, things between us remained very PG, but I treasure her memory to this day along with a piece of art she had created and gifted to me.

In the days following the Sun Dance, I camped in the Black Hills. I had never been there before and fell in love with the place. It’s one of my two or three favorite places on earth. I can’t quite explain why, but I feel home there.

By the time we made it back to California, my whole attitude had shifted. Somehow, the Sun Dance had lifted whatever had been weighing me down for the previous year. Outwardly, nothing had changed, but I felt very differently. I started the semester in college, still thinking I’d quit halfway and return to Italy. Things didn’t pan out that way. I was in such a good mood that my energy was contagious. Thanks to this, I managed to cast a spell on a wonderful woman in one of my classes and in no time, we were in a relationship. Shortly thereafter, I dove into martial arts practice with a previously unknown level of dedication. I still had hardly any friends, but martial arts offered me a path that helped me stay sane. And being in the good graces of a lovely lady did wonders for my soul. Had it not been for the Sun Dance, I doubt any of this would have happened. I’d have returned to Italy, and my whole life would have taken a very different turn.

Incidentally, after the swelling went down, against all logic my finger looked to be in one piece—which was beyond bizarre considering how badly broken it had been. Within a few weeks the skin grew back and you couldn’t even see any injury had taken place.