Sundancing: the Great Sioux Piercing Ritual takes the reader into the experience of the Sun Dance through photographs, drawings, and color paintings. The book also includes a complete account of the Sun Dance in the words of Frank Fools Crow, the renowned Sioux holy man and Ceremonial Chief of the Teton Sioux, and other dance participants. In July of 1974,Thomas Mails was invited to attend the Sun Dance Ceremony at Rosebud Sioux Reservation and allowed to take unlimited photographs and make detailed accounts. After this, Chief Eagle Feather, intercessor at Rosebud, became a principal informant for Mails, along with several Brule people. The medicine men at Rosebud and Pine Ridge invited Mails to return in 1975 to photograph and record unlimited data concerning every phase of the entire four-day Sun Dance together with all preparations for the Dance. Sundancing is the culmination of all these experiences, as well as his interviews with Fools Crow. As reported by one Sun Dance participant in the book: `On the third day of the dance, Titus and I were pierced.... I lay down on the buffalo hide and the dancers faced me, blowing their whistles and dancing while I prayed with the Peace Pipe. When Titus was cut, I helped him up and then put a stick through his skin to hold the rope. Titus danced and pulled on the rope until the stick broke loose.... I pulled for quite a while before mine broke too, and the flesh offering was finished. Titus and I will both pierce as long as we are alive and the Indian language and culture are alive.`