Maka, the earth, is recorded as one of the four Superior gods in the Walker ethnographic system, standing as the source and mother of all growing, living things and forming the necessary complement to Skan's sky and Wi's sun within Lakota cosmology's foundational structure, an earth whose fertility and stability the people's continued survival directly depends on. Devotion to Maka runs through Lakota religious practice at both the most solemn ceremonial level and the most everyday level: formal rites including the sun dance and the sweat lodge, inikagapi, are understood as conducted in direct physical and spiritual relationship with the earth, while individual prayer often involves direct physical contact with the ground itself, kneeling or placing the hands on the earth, as an embodied expression of relationship with Maka rather than an abstract, purely verbal address.
The Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyasin, "all my relations" or "we are all related", commonly used to close prayers and ceremonies, reflects the broader Lakota theological principle that Maka's earth and everything it sustains, plants, animals and people together, form one interrelated family rather than a resource external to human concern.