Wi

Wi, the sun, is recorded in the Walker ethnographic system as one of the four Superior gods forming the foundation of Lakota cosmology alongside Skan, Maka and Inyan, and stands as the deity most directly honoured through the sun dance, wiwanyang wacipi, the central annual ceremony of Lakota religious life and one of the most significant communal rites across the Plains Indian world more broadly.

The sun dance, traditionally held around the summer solstice, involves days of preparation, fasting, prayer and, in its most demanding traditional form, physical sacrifice by pledged dancers who gaze at the sun while dancing around a sacred pole, an act of communal and personal renewal, thanksgiving and prayer for the wellbeing of the people that has continued, in modified and in some communities restored traditional forms, into the present day despite a long period during which United States federal policy actively banned the ceremony. Wi's honour through this demanding rite reflects a broader pattern in Lakota religious thought in which the sun's life-giving power is met with reciprocal sacrifice and endurance from the community, rather than approached through petition alone.

The sun dance's history since the late nineteenth century is inseparable from the history of United States federal suppression of Lakota and wider Plains Indian religious practice: the ceremony was formally banned under federal policy from 1883 into the 1930s, part of a broader campaign against Native American religious practice enforced through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Lakota communities that continued the rite did so at real legal and physical risk, sometimes maintaining it in modified or partially hidden forms through the period of prohibition. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 provided formal federal legal protection for the ceremony and other Native religious practices considerably later, and the sun dance has continued and in some respects strengthened since, remaining a living, actively practised ceremony among Lakota and other Plains communities rather than a historical curiosity, though many communities restrict outside observation and participation, reflecting the same concerns about appropriation and correct context that inform how this atlas approaches Lakota religious material more generally.