I wish I had a photo or video to demonstrate what occurs during a Sun Dance, but there were no cameras allowed at the ceremony. The best I can do is reconstruct it to the best of my memory, with the help of the incomplete information that I got from talking to participants and audience members.

The ceremony itself took place within the circle formed by the ring-shaped arbor. A series of stakes driven into the ground and a gate with white flags tied to it delineated the space that non-dancers could not cross. In the center of the circle was a large effigy of a tree constructed of logs, with flags of white, red, and green tied all over. Five men sat around the tree. Wooden shoots had been forcefully driven through the flesh of their chests, and those shoots were tied to ropes which bound them to the tree. Those men were to remain there all day, each and every day, without food and water, for four days.

Several times a day, the dancing would begin. The men in the circle would stand, as would the audience members. Other dancers, both male and female, would file out of a walled off area of the arbor and begin a shuffling dancing, waving fans made out of what appeared to be eagle feathers at the men in the center. Some of them would blow on reed whistles as well. The men bound to the tree would dance, as would many of the audience members. Singers and drummers off to one side in the arbor would provide the beat. Every once in a while, everyone, bystanders in the arbor included, would raise their hands to the sky in praise of the tree, the symbolic giver of life.

The leader of the dancers from the arbor was a middle-aged man whose chest bore the scars of being one of the previous fasters. He would lead the others through a shuffling dance past and around the tree, each of them brushing it with their fan. Meanwhile, children would run around the perimeter of the inner circle, offering a bucket of burning cedar to each audience member so that they could bless themselves with it.

After the round of dancing had concluded, everyone would return to their previous positions and sit down again. Then Paul, the leader of the ceremony, would rise from his position in the arbor to speak. His microphone, and the sound system it was connected to, which ringed the arbor, was one of the few concessions to modernity I saw during the ceremony. The fasting men in the center wore white gym socks beneath their moccasins.