Taime (Tai-me) is the most sacred object of the Kiowa and the living focus of their great summer ceremonial, the Sun Dance or K'ado. Described by Mooney as a small human figure about two feet high, carved of dark green stone, robed in white feather-down and ermine and hung with strands of blue beads, it was kept wrapped in the eleventh tribal medicine bundle and unveiled only when the Sun Dance lodge was raised, where it stood at the western side facing the dancers. The Kiowa regarded the Taime as sharing in the divinity of the Sun, mediating between the people and the sun's power. Mooney records that the image came to the Kiowa about 1770 from an Arapaho man who had obtained it from the Crow; its keeper held a hereditary office of great sanctity. Though the Sun Dance was suppressed in the late nineteenth century, the Taime remains a revered tribal treasure.