A second and, for documenting Lakota ritual practice specifically, more systematic record came from the ethnographer Joseph Epes Brown, who interviewed Black Elk in 1947 and 1948 and published the results as The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux in 1953. The book sets out seven rites in turn, among them inipi, the sweat lodge, hanbleceya, the vision quest already catalogued in this atlas as a Discipline, and wiwanyang wacipi, the sun dance.
This atlas records the documented existence and general outline of these rites as Black Elk himself described them for publication, not ritual instruction, and the most restricted elements of rites such as the sun dance remain closed to outside description regardless of what any published summary includes. Black Elk's account, given by a named individual with his own religious authority and recorded by name, sits differently from an outsider's field report, which is part of why Brown's book has held the place it has in the study of Lakota religion for seventy years.
Brown's introduction to the book situates his own role as recorder and translator rather than author, a framing later scholarship on Native American religious texts treats as significant: the book presents itself, and is generally read, as Black Elk's own account rather than an outside ethnographer's interpretation of Lakota belief.