Isnati Awicalowanpi (Lakota Buffalo Ceremony)

James R. Walker, a physician who worked among the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge in the early twentieth century and recorded ceremonial knowledge directly from holy men and elders, set down a detailed account of the isnati rite in the material later published as Lakota Belief and Ritual. At the onset of a girl's first menstruation, a special tipi is raised and she is secluded within it for four days, a number carrying deep significance throughout Lakota ceremonial life, under the close guidance of an older female relative or a respected woman chosen for the role.

Within the tipi the girl is instructed in the skills and conduct expected of an adult Lakota woman, including quillwork or other handwork, food preparation and the moral bearing she will be expected to keep for the rest of her life. A holy man conducts ceremony on her behalf during this period even though he does not enter the women's space himself, invoking White Buffalo Calf Woman and praying for the girl's health, fertility and good character. The four days close with the girl's emergence, a community feast, and often a giveaway in which her family distributes gifts in her honour, a public act that both celebrates her and obligates the community's continued regard for her.

White Buffalo Calf Woman is the figure who, in Lakota tradition, brought the sacred pipe and taught the people how to pray; Joseph Epes Brown's account of the seven rites of the Oglala Lakota, recorded from the elder Black Elk, places the girl's puberty rite among a small set of ceremonies she is understood to have established, alongside the sweat lodge, the vision quest and the sun dance. Isnati Awicalowanpi is therefore not a stand-alone folk custom but one part of a connected ceremonial system that Lakota religious life holds together as a whole.

The ceremony continues today as a living practice among Lakota communities and, in related forms, among other Plains nations, taught and conducted by those who hold the ceremonial knowledge within those communities rather than reconstructed from published ethnography. Some elements of how the rite is conducted are not shared outside the community that practises it, and this account, drawn from published academic sources, describes its structure and significance rather than claiming to record everything a family or a holy man today would do. Families today often adapt the ceremony's length or setting to the demands of school and work while keeping its core structure intact, a pattern of accommodation without abandonment that runs through many living Lakota ceremonies rather than being unique to this one.