Prayers and Prayer Ties

Part of preparing to dance the Sun Moon Dance is making prayer ties. Before the dance, the chief of the dance lets the Dancers know how many they should make. It’s usually a number in the hundreds. One dance chief told me that the first time she danced she was told to make 1,000 ties. I’ve never done that many, but it takes a while and I often start several months before the dance. This year the call was for “at least 12” so I haven’t felt much pressure and I was doing a bunch of other things too get ready for the dance.

But what is a prayer tie? It is a physical representation of prayer, a little like rosary beads except that you are making them as you go rather than just counting them with your fingers.

You make a little string of pouches. I think of them as little poppets because the look like little dancing dolls in my mind. We use them to decorate the place where we will be sleeping during the dance. They sometimes feel to me like little angels watching over me. I was originally told to wrap them around a piece of cardboard as I made them but over the years I decided that the gadget you use for winding up an extension cord works better. The ties are made in the colors of the Medicine wheel and they represent different sorts of prayers for the different directions of the medicine wheel. One time the dance I go to had just hosted an international conference and some distant people stayed to dance. Some of them added blue and green (sky and earth) to the four traditional directional colors I am accustomed to.

Getting ready to make prayer ties. String, squares of cotton cloth, my spool for winding, and tobacco. This year I found I had all my supplies stored away. Other years I start by cutting a whole bunch of squares with a rotary cutter.

You start by putting a little pinch of tobacco into one of the squares of cloth. You breathe a prayer into the tobacco. Sometimes I speak my prayer. More often I think it while breathing into the square.

You gather up the edges of the fabric square.

Then I tie three half hitches around the bundle to seal it coses and leave a running tail for the next bundle. I’m not sure if three is necessary or symbolic. Or if anyone but me uses three. Two would work. I use three.

in past years I developed a pattern of tying my ties in groups of sixteen. Four groups of four. That was initially for the practical reason that if you tie in groups of one per color you lose track too easily. If I tie in groups of sixteen it’s easy to keep a running tally of how many groups I have tied. Each color represents a different type of prayer focus, and with four sets of four I found myself praying outward from myself: a prayer for me, a prayer for family, a prayer for my country, a prayer for the world. I found I sometimes varied the groups in the middle but I maintained the pattern of praying outward.

But this year the call is for at least twelve which implies to me that I should work in groups of three per color. I’d like to work two groups of twelve at a time. Playing out from myself that gives me myself, my fellow dancers, my church. Second group my country, the world, the cosmos with family slipping in from time to time in the midst. What I find is that to pray effectively for the second group I have to have just done the first group. So if I’ve only had time for twelve ties, I start back over with group one. Just me. Just the way I’m trying to pray these this year.

Each color has a different set of symbols on the medicine wheel. So yellow is for vision, but also new beginnings, babies, the spiritual. It is the color of the east in the version of the wheel we use at this dance. White is the color for the south. It is the place where visions are tested, the place of emotions, the place of the teenager. Also, for reasons I don’t know, the place to pray for travelers. Black is the color of the west. This is the place of the adult, the place where visions are enacted, the place of physical healing and physical strength. Adults are people who do what needs to be done. It is the place of the worthy enemy, of physical testing. Finally red is the place of God’s provision, of gratitude, of receiving the gifts that come from having taken a vision around the wheel. It is the place of teachers and mentors and ancestors. It is the place of completion and rest but also of gathering strength to begin again. It is the place where visions that will be received in the east beginning to be birthed.

I was considering writing out samples of what sort of prayers I pray but I think this is enough for this post