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This article discusses time-binding from the point of view of the Lakota Sun Dance tradition, an American Indian spiritual tradition that has endured in the (post)modern United States. The Sun Dance, a renewal ceremony of the Great Plains that was practiced by approximately twenty tribes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was officially outlawed by the United States government in the 1880s. Despite this, and with eventual legalization of the ceremony, the Sun Dance never completely died out. The ceremony was transmitted through the oral traditions of families and clans. Several books co-authored by Lakota elders and white scholars in the twentieth century also played a role in the preservation and dissemination of Lakota traditions (Black Elk and Brown 1953; Black Elk and Neihardt 1932; Fools Crow and Mails 1979; Lame Deer and Erdoes 1972; Walker 1917). In the 1970s, the Sun Dance experienced a major renaissance with the Lakota-style Sun Dance becoming the most widely shared version. I became familiar with the Sun Dance while earning my M.A. in philosophy and religion in the 1990s. After attending my first Sun Dance in 1996, 1 decided to write my thesis on the ceremony, its resurgence, and the complexities of intercultural communication between Native and non-Native participants (Hallowell 2001).
The impetus for this article was the 2009 "Across the Generations" Institute of General Semantics conference at Fordham University where I was slated to give a talk on time-binding and the Lakota Sun Dance. I was fortunate to be able to make a good portion of the conference but, due to circumstances beyond my control, I had to depart early and missed my talk. A few months after the conference, Lance Strate suggested that I publish a written version of my talk. I have taken what was originally designed to be given as an example of traditional Lakota oration with some explanation and commentary, and adapted it to essay format. Of course, there are costs and benefits to such translation. I offer my thoughts here as a prolegomenon, not a coda. The following words are meant to be heard, but I hope that the reader may still intuit a sense of the words' feeling in print. I begin this address with a Lakota vision quest four directions...