The setting is the high rugged plateau of North Dakota where each summer Sundancers gather to reenact a ceremony that was given to the people of the northern plains so far in the past there are no written records. Dancing With The Sun is a collection of prose adapted from the author’s journals compiled over a twelve year period at the Sun Dance on the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Reservation, Fort Berthold, North Dakota. It is a deeply personal and spiritual book filled with the rich imagery of the sacred Dance, the Sweat Lodge, the Vision Quest, the power of dreams, the attachments of friends, hope, courage, and characters who thrill, dismay and sometimes shock. Most of all it is a book about the land, a saga of place in the American landscape with a lovely and troubled history that serves as a reminder that one’s past and place of birth leave an indelible stain on each of us.
The book is organized into 5 sections, each section covering a particular aspect of the Sun Dance ceremony. Hanblechia (crying for a vision), Inipi (sweat lodge), Mitakuye Oyasin (all my relations), Wiwanyang Wacipi (they dance gazing at the sun),and Toksa Akhe (I’ll see you again someday). .
It is North Dakota, a kingdom of grass, rocky outcroppings, willow groves, and worn out boots turned upside down on fence posts. It is where the razor-breath of winter is never far away and has no love for summer. Cows are dark spots on the horizon, and the wind blows as much as in Kansas. There in the red – skirted majesty of the Sun Dance the people tell their tales.
Mike Joseph relates how he smoked his pipe with the Dali Lima. Foolish Boy describes the Native American Church ceremony. Leland Dubois the Smoke Jumper speaks about forest fires. Richard from Canada laughs about the white guy when hunting who shot his own horse. Allen White explains how he played a savage in a movie. Lloyd Elm tells about the haunted masks of the Long House. Paul Goodiron enlightens with his stories of Swift Boats in Vietnam. Adam of the Missing Children describes riding a bike across America.
The stories are haunting, powerful, poignant, and sensual, brooding tales of the modern West. Laying down sentences like trail dust, Rickard writes with insight and compassion about the fragility of Native lives, the tragedy of disappearing towns, howling-dog winters, and depressing drought. Like a pebble tossed into a pond, Rickard journeys outward from the center of his universe into wider and wider peripheries, constantly searching, a restless nomad who transcends his own culture without abandoning it, leaves but never forgets his beginnings.
Dancing With the Sun is a grand and glorious Western landscape written by an artist, historian, philosopher and poet who experienced most of the 20th century. A compelling and compassionate odyssey where all come together in the sun-bleached bones of the dance.
