Lakota Religion

Wakan means sacred, or possessed of power that is not ordinary. Wakan Tanka is usually translated Great Spirit, which pulls it toward a single creator god, or Great Mystery, which is closer. In older Lakota usage it functions as a collective: the sum of the sacred powers, sixteen of them in the accounts recorded from Oglala holy men, grouped in fours, including Wi the sun, Skan the sky or motion, Maka the earth and Inyan the rock. Whether this is a pantheon, an aspectual unity, or a system tidied up by its recorders is a genuine scholarly argument, sharpened by the fact that Christian influence had been present for generations before anyone wrote it down.

The canupa, the sacred pipe, is the central object. Lakota tradition holds that it was brought by White Buffalo Calf Woman, who appeared to two scouts, instructed the people in its use and in the rites, and departed as a buffalo calf. The bundle she is said to have left is kept by a hereditary keeper of the Sicangu Lakota and has not been made a public object. Smoking a pipe binds what is said over it; the smoke carries words, and a pipe is opened to seal an agreement, to begin a ceremony, and to make a request.

Mitakuye oyasin, all my relations, closes prayers. It is a kinship statement, not a sentiment: it asserts that the speaker stands in obligation to animals, to the dead, to the powers and to the ground, in the same idiom used for cousins. Lakota kinship terminology is elaborate and the religious vocabulary borrows it wholesale.

A wicasa wakan or holy man is not a priest of a congregation. Authority comes from vision, from apprenticeship to another holy man, and from results, and it is not conferred by any institution. There is no Lakota church, no orthodoxy and no central authority to settle disputes, which is why practice varies between communities and between families.

The rites usually listed as the seven of the Lakota are the sweat lodge, inipi, a purification in a domed lodge with heated stones; the vision quest, hanbleceya, crying for a vision, undertaken alone and fasting on a hill; the Sun Dance, wiwanyang wacipi, the great summer ceremony of sacrifice and renewal; the making of relatives, hunkapi; the keeping and releasing of the soul of a dead person; the girls puberty rite, isnati awicalowan; and the throwing of the ball. Yuwipi, a curing ceremony conducted in darkness by a bound practitioner, is not on that list but is widely practised.

That list has a history. It was set out in The Sacred Pipe, published in 1953 by Joseph Epes Brown from conversations with Nicholas Black Elk, and the sevenfold arrangement may owe something to the shape of the book. Black Elk is also the source, through John Neihardt, of Black Elk Speaks of 1932, the most influential book ever published about Lakota religion and one whose reliability is actively disputed. Neihardt worked through an interpreter, shaped the material into literature, and omitted entirely that Black Elk had been a baptised Catholic catechist since 1904 who spent decades instructing others in that faith. Some scholars read him as a traditional holy man whose Catholicism was survival; others as a sincere Catholic whose Lakota material Neihardt romanticised by stripping the Christianity out. The transcripts, published later, support neither reading cleanly.

What is not described here is not an oversight. Sun Dance practice involves flesh sacrifice and vows, and detailed accounts of it, along with accounts of yuwipi and of the vision quest, have repeatedly been published against the wishes of the people who hold them. Lakota authorities have issued declarations objecting to outsiders conducting these ceremonies and to their sale. Elements are restricted by design: some knowledge belongs to a bundle keeper, some to a family, some only to those who have been through the rite. A full description available in a book or online is not evidence that it was ever meant to be there.

He Sapa, the Black Hills, sit at the centre of Lakota religious geography. Sites within them, among them Bear Butte, Wind Cave and Devils Tower, carry origin narratives and are used for vision quests and ceremony now. The hills are not a symbol of the Lakota homeland; specific ceremonies are conducted at specific places in them and cannot be relocated.

The United States recognised Lakota title to the hills in the Fort Laramie treaty of 1868. Gold was confirmed there by the Custer expedition of 1874, miners came, the government failed to keep them out, and after the war of 1876 Congress attached Lakota title to their rations: the agreement of 1877 taking the hills was signed by a fraction of the adult men, where the treaty had required three quarters.

In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, decided in 1980, the Supreme Court held that this had been a taking of property requiring just compensation, and upheld an award that with interest then stood at around 106 million dollars. The Lakota have refused to draw it. The fund is still held by the United States and has grown past a billion dollars. Refusing it keeps the claim to the land open, and accepting it would extinguish that claim.

This is the clearest available case of a religious claim that a court can only mistake for a property claim. The compensation remedy assumes the injury was economic and can be repriced. The Lakota position is that the hills are the place where certain things must be done, and that no sum substitutes for the place. Related disputes follow the same shape: Bear Butte, a state park where ceremony competes with tourism and nearby commercial development, and Devils Tower, where a voluntary June climbing closure respecting ceremony has been challenged in court by climbers.

The broader pattern holds across Indian country. Federal law protects belief and expression well, and access to particular ground badly, and it is particular ground that most of these traditions require.