A Living Tradition of the Great Plains
In the Black Hills of what is now South Dakota, there is a cave called Wind Cave — Maka Oniye, "the breathing earth." From this cave, according to the Lakota, the first people emerged. The Buffalo Nation came up first, followed by the human beings, and together they entered the world above, which was already old and beautiful and waiting. The Black Hills — Pahá Sápa — are not merely a landscape of religious significance. They are the origin point, the navel, the place from which all Lakota life proceeds and toward which all Lakota prayer returns.
Into this world came, perhaps three centuries ago, a being of overwhelming radiance — a young woman of surpassing beauty, dressed in white buckskin, walking toward two hunters on the plains. One looked at her with desire and was destroyed. The other looked at her with reverence and was saved. She was White Buffalo Calf Woman — Ptesáŋwiŋ — and she carried in her hands the sacred pipe, the čhaŋnúŋpa, and the knowledge of seven sacred rites through which the Lakota people would maintain their covenant with Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery that underlies all things. She spent four days among the people, teaching and blessing. When she left, she walked to the south and rolled over four times — turning first black, then brown, then red, then white — and departed as a white buffalo calf back into the mystery she had come from. The keeper of her pipe stands in that same covenant today: Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth holder in an unbroken lineage.
I. The Name and the Tradition
The Lakota are one of the three great divisions of the people known in English as "Sioux" — a term derived from an Ojibwe word meaning roughly "enemy" or "snake," imposed from outside and still contested. The Lakota's own name for themselves is a version of the word meaning "allies" or "friends": Lakȟóta, sometimes rendered Teton Sioux to distinguish them from their Eastern relatives the Dakota (Santee Sioux) and the middle group the Nakota (Yankton and Yanktonnai Sioux). The three divisions together form the Oceti Sakowin — the Seven Council Fires of the Great Sioux Nation — the political and ceremonial confederacy that has governed the people since long before European contact.
The Lakota themselves are divided into seven bands: the Oglala, the Brulé (Sicangu), the Hunkpapa, the Miniconjou, the Sans Arc (Itazipacola), the Two Kettle (Oohenupa), and the Sihasapa (Blackfoot Sioux). Historically a people of the eastern woodlands and Great Lakes region, the Lakota migrated westward onto the Great Plains in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, acquiring the horse from Spanish colonial trade networks — a transformation that made them the preeminent military and hunting power of the Northern Plains by the early nineteenth century. Their religion grew in conversation with the land they moved through, shaped as much by the vast sky, the buffalo herds, and the Black Hills as by older traditions carried from the east.
The Lakota numbered approximately 170,000 enrolled tribal members across multiple reservations in the early twenty-first century, with the largest populations at Pine Ridge (Oglala), Rosebud (Brulé), Standing Rock (Hunkpapa and Sihasapa), and Cheyenne River (Miniconjou and Sans Arc) in South Dakota and North Dakota. Their religion is not a museum artifact. It is practiced daily in sweat lodges, around altars, in the homes of grandmothers lighting cedar, in the ceremonial grounds where the Sun Dance is held every summer.
II. Wakan Tanka — The Great Mystery
At the theological center of Lakota religion stands the concept of Wakan Tanka (Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka) — usually translated "Great Spirit" or "Great Mystery." Both translations are partial, and the Lakota tradition itself holds that Wakan Tanka ultimately exceeds human naming.
Wakan means sacred, mysterious, powerful — the quality of something that exceeds ordinary categories and participates in the sacred. Tanka means great. Together they name not a singular anthropomorphic deity so much as the all-encompassing field of sacredness that permeates and sustains the universe. The nineteenth-century ethnographer James R. Walker, working extensively with Oglala religious specialists at Pine Ridge, documented a Lakota theological account of sixteen wakan powers organized into four groups of four, collectively constituting Wakan Tanka. These include cosmic powers — Wi (the Sun), Skan (the Sky/Motion), Maka (the Earth), Inyan (the Stone) — celestial beings — Hanwi (the Moon), Tate (the Wind), Whope (the Feminine Mediator), Wakinyan (the Thunder Beings) — spirit forms — Tatanka (the Buffalo), Hunonpa (the Bear), the Four Winds, the Whirlwind — and the four aspects of the human soul.
This is a sophisticated theological structure, though Walker's systematization has been questioned by later scholars as partly his own imposition on more fluid oral traditions. What is not in question is the centrality of wakan as a category and of Wakan Tanka as the name for the supreme sacred principle. Ella Cara Deloria, the Yankton Dakota scholar whose fluency in the Dakota language and close relationships with religious elders made her one of the most reliable ethnographic sources of the early twentieth century, emphasized that wakan was not a doctrine one held intellectually but a reality one moved through — an atmosphere in which prayer, ceremony, and daily life were all immersed.
The sacred is not sequestered in temples or restricted to professionals. It is everywhere available to those who know how to attend: in the rising of the sun, in the behavior of animals, in the flight of an eagle. The Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ — "all my relations" — expresses this sense. All beings are relatives. All life forms are related through the unifying presence of wakan, and with that relatedness comes reciprocal obligation. The hunter who kills a buffalo thanks the buffalo, acknowledges the sacrifice, and honors the relationship. The person who gathers medicinal plants addresses them before taking. The world is not resource but community.
III. White Buffalo Calf Woman — The Foundation Narrative
The central foundation narrative of Lakota religion — attested across all seven bands and central to ceremonial life — is the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman (Ptesáŋwiŋ, also rendered Ptesan-Wi or Ptesán-Wiŋ).
In a time of famine and spiritual need, two hunters were sent out by their chief to seek food. On the plains they saw a figure approaching in a radiant mist — a young woman of extraordinary beauty, dressed in white buckskin, carrying something. One of the hunters looked at her with desire. She — recognizing the quality of his gaze — looked at him, and a cloud of lightning and mist covered him; when it cleared, only bones remained. The other hunter looked at her with reverence and awe. She told him to return to his people and prepare for her coming — build a special tipi, purify the people, gather them to receive what she would bring.
She came, and for four days she remained with the Lakota people, teaching them the seven sacred rites and presenting them with the sacred pipe — the čhaŋnúŋpa. The pipe itself embodied the teaching: the bowl, made of red stone (catlinite, from the sacred quarry in Minnesota called Pipestone), represents the Earth, the Buffalo, the female principle; the wooden stem represents all that grows from the Earth; when the two are joined and smoke rises, it carries the prayers of the people upward to Wakan Tanka. To smoke the pipe in ceremony is to be joined with all of creation in the act of prayer.
When she departed, she walked southward and rolled over four times. Each time she rolled, she transformed — from white buckskin woman to black buffalo, to brown buffalo, to red buffalo, to white buffalo calf — enacting in her body the sacred colors of the four directions and the unity of all beings. The white buffalo, extremely rare in nature, remains to this day the most powerful sacred sign available to the Lakota people. When white buffalo calves have been born in recent decades — at farms and ranches in Wisconsin and elsewhere — Lakota religious leaders have traveled to honor them and pray.
The sacred pipe given by White Buffalo Calf Woman has been kept in an unbroken chain of keepers at Green Grass, South Dakota on the Cheyenne River Reservation. The nineteenth keeper is Arvol Looking Horse, born 1954, who has become an international spokesperson for Indigenous spiritual rights and planetary ecological concern.
IV. The Sacred Pipe — Čhaŋnúŋpa
The čhaŋnúŋpa (also rendered chanupa, "sacred pipe") is the central material and ritual object of Lakota spiritual life. Every ceremony begins with the pipe. Every significant communication between the human world and the sacred realm is mediated through the pipe.
The pipe is not a symbol of something absent. It is understood as a living thing, a sacred entity with its own being, that participates actively in prayer. When the bowl (Earth) and stem (Sky) are joined, the pipe becomes whole; it must not be carelessly handled, disrespected, or used for ordinary purposes. Pipes are wrapped and put to rest when not in use. The keeper of a pipe — whether a personal pipe, a family pipe, or a community pipe — accepts a serious spiritual responsibility.
The ritual of the pipe involves specific protocol: filling the bowl with tobacco (and often a mixture of other plants, traditionally kinnikinnick — bearberry — as well as sage, cedar, and sweetgrass), offering the pipe to the six sacred directions in a specific order. The Lakota recognize six directions: West (where the rain comes from, the direction of endings, associated with the Thunder Beings), North (purification, strength, the white of winter), East (new beginnings, light, peace), South (growth, warmth, the renewal of summer), the Sky above, and the Earth below. The center — the person praying, the fire, the sacred space — is the seventh point at which all these powers converge.
Smoke rises as a visible form of prayer. When it ascends, it carries intention toward Wakan Tanka. The sharing of the pipe among participants in a ceremony creates a bond of truth and sincerity — the historical basis for the phrase "smoking the peace pipe," which, though now a cliché, reflects the genuine Lakota understanding that the pipe creates community and commits its users to honesty.
V. The Seven Sacred Rites
White Buffalo Calf Woman brought seven sacred ceremonies — collectively understood as the means by which the Lakota maintain their relationship with Wakan Tanka and the sacred order. These rites were most fully documented by the holy man Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa, 1863–1950), who dictated the rites to anthropologist Joseph Epes Brown in the late 1940s — published as The Sacred Pipe (1953).
Inipi — The Sweat Lodge. The purification ceremony — the foundation of all other ceremonies, performed before entering any sacred practice. The lodge is a small dome built of bent willow branches, covered with hides or blankets, large enough for a small group to sit in a circle around a central pit. Heated stones (grandfathers, tunkaŋ) are brought in from a fire outside; water poured on them creates steam; the lodge fills with heat that purifies the body, opens the mind, and creates the conditions for prayer and revelation. Inipi means "to live again." Each sweat lodge ceremony is a death and rebirth.
Hanbleceya — The Vision Quest. The individual seeking guidance goes alone to a remote hilltop or sacred place, fasting from food and water, for up to four days and nights. Wrapped in a blanket, holding the pipe, oriented to the six directions, the seeker remains in prayer and vigil — awaiting whatever communication Wakan Tanka may send through the natural world: the appearance of an animal, a wind, a dream, a voice. The vision quest is not a retreat from life but a concentrated intensification of the permeability to the sacred that is always present. Everything that appears is potentially significant. A reputable wicása wakȟáŋ (holy man) interprets what was received and integrates it into the seeker's path.
Wi Wanyang Wacipi — The Sun Dance. The central communal ceremony of the Lakota religious year — held in summer, lasting multiple days, involving the whole community. The Sun Dance is simultaneously a sacrifice for the people's wellbeing, a thanksgiving, a renewal of the covenant with Wakan Tanka, and a demonstration of the connection between individual suffering and collective healing. Certain aspects of the Sun Dance are restricted knowledge, not for public disclosure; what can be said is that the ceremony involves a sacred cottonwood tree erected at the center of the ceremonial grounds — the living axis connecting Earth and Sky — around which dancers move and pray in extended periods of fasting and physical intensity. The ceremony belongs to the whole community: while the dancers undergo their particular forms of sacrifice, the community surrounds them with prayer, drumming, and support.
The Sun Dance was banned by the US federal government in 1883 and not legally restored until the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978. Across nearly a century of prohibition, the ceremony was maintained in secret — attesting to its absolute centrality to Lakota life.
Hunkapi — The Making of Relatives. The adoption ceremony, through which individuals or groups are formally made relatives — creating bonds of kinship as real and binding as biological family. The ceremony expresses the Lakota conviction that Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ — all my relations — is not merely a phrase but a practice to be enacted. Kinship can be created, not only inherited.
Isnati Awicalowanpi — Coming of Age. The ceremony marking a girl's first menstruation, her entry into womanhood, her assumption of the spiritual power associated with the female body. The ceremony honors the young woman, prepares her for her responsibilities, and connects her to the lineage of women before her.
Tapa Wankayeyapi — The Throwing of the Ball. A ritual game with cosmological significance, in which a ball (representing Wakan Tanka) is thrown in the six directions and caught by players. The ceremony enacts the difficulty of maintaining connection to the sacred amid the chaos of existence — the ball is thrown and not everyone can catch it.
Nagi Gluha Pi — Keeping of the Soul. A mortuary ceremony in which a portion of the deceased's soul is ritually kept within the community for a year before being released. The ceremony ensures the proper transition of the dead and maintains the connection between the living and the ancestors.
VI. The Sacred Hoop — Cosmology and Vision
The concept of the sacred hoop — cąglešká wakȟáŋ in Lakota — names the circle that organizes all of life: the camp circle of tipis arranged around the central fire, the circle of the seasons, the round of the four directions, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth. The hoop is not merely a symbol but an organizing principle: all life is circular, relational, and continuous.
Black Elk's great vision — received at age nine and the central experience around which his entire life was organized — showed him the sacred hoop of his own people as one of many hoops that together formed a single great circle: all nations, all peoples, related and connected. At the center of this universal circle grew a single magnificent tree in full bloom — the tree of life — sheltering all beings beneath its branches. The vision was both cosmological and prophetic: it showed what the world was, and what it could be, and what was being destroyed by colonization. The tree had withered in Black Elk's own lifetime. His entire spiritual effort — and the effort of the ceremonies he kept and transmitted — was toward its flowering again.
The hoop implies hocoka — the center. Every ritual space is oriented around a center: the sacred fire of the sweat lodge, the cottonwood tree of the Sun Dance, the altar of the vision quest. The center is the point where the six directions converge, where Earth meets Sky, where the human world meets the sacred world. Every ceremony is a re-centering — a remembering of where the center is, and returning to it.
The Buffalo (tatanka) stands at the center of this cosmological world in a way that no non-Lakota observer can fully appreciate without holding the fullness of what the buffalo was: food, shelter, tools, clothing, the ground of the economy, the first and greatest gift of creation. The Buffalo Nation and the Human Nation were understood as relatives, mutually dependent, the buffalo offering themselves in sacrifice and the people honoring that sacrifice through thanksgiving and ceremony. When the US Army systematically exterminated the great buffalo herds in the 1870s and 1880s — reducing sixty million animals to near extinction within a decade — it was not merely an economic attack on the Plains nations. It was a theological catastrophe: the destruction of the covenant partner, the erasure of the living evidence that Wakan Tanka's generosity could be trusted.
VII. Black Elk — Voice of the Vision
Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa, 1863–1950) is the most widely known Lakota religious figure in the Western world, and his story is inseparable from the history of how Lakota religion became visible to non-Lakota audiences.
Born into an Oglala family of recognized spiritual lineage — his father was Black Elk the Elder, a medicine man; Crazy Horse was his second cousin — Black Elk received his great vision at age nine during a serious illness. The vision, lasting twelve days in the spirit world, showed him the six Grandfathers of the six sacred directions, gave him the sacred powers associated with each direction, and showed him the tree of life, the sacred hoop of all nations, and the task that lay before him: to restore what was being destroyed. He spent the next seventy years trying to understand and enact that vision — first as a warrior (he was at the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876 and present at Wounded Knee in 1890), then as a healer and holy man, then in a period of Catholic practice and catechesis, then — in old age — in a return to his Lakota ceremonial responsibilities.
His encounter with the poet and ethnographer John G. Neihardt in 1930 produced Black Elk Speaks (1932) — dictated through his son Ben Black Elk as interpreter, shaped by Neihardt's considerable literary gifts, and received for decades with indifference before being discovered by a generation of readers in the 1970s who found in it something their own tradition could not give them. Black Elk Speaks became one of the most widely read spiritual documents of the twentieth century. It also became a source of significant controversy: Lakota scholars and Black Elk's descendants have noted that Neihardt's shaping of the material omitted Black Elk's Catholic practice, emphasized tragic elements, and translated a complex interior life through a literary and editorial filter that was not Black Elk's own.
DeMallie's scholarly edition The Sixth Grandfather (1984) published the original stenographic transcripts of the Neihardt interviews, allowing readers to compare what Black Elk actually said with what Neihardt published — a gap that is illuminating without invalidating either document. The Sacred Pipe (1953), dictated to anthropologist Joseph Epes Brown in 1947–48, is closer to a catechetical text in Black Elk's own voice, organized around the seven sacred rites and less mediated by a co-author's literary aspirations.
Black Elk was received into the Catholic Church and spent years as a catechist, a fact that complicates simple narratives about his identity. How he held together his Catholic practice and his Lakota ceremonial life — or whether he experienced them as contradictory — is a question his descendants and scholars continue to explore. What is clear is that in his final years, he returned explicitly to his Lakota ceremonial responsibilities, and that the vision he received at age nine remained, through all the complications of his long life, the central organizing fact of his existence.
VIII. The Historical Wound — Fort Laramie, Wounded Knee, and the Destruction of the Plains Way
The encounter between the Lakota nation and the expanding United States was a sustained catastrophe.
The Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) — negotiated after Red Cloud's War, in which the Lakota under Red Cloud forced the US military to abandon a string of forts along the Bozeman Trail — established the Great Sioux Reservation, comprising the western half of present-day South Dakota. The Black Hills (Pahá Sápa) were explicitly included within Lakota territory and guaranteed against white settlement "forever." The treaty was the most favorable the Lakota ever negotiated, and the United States began violating it almost immediately.
In 1874, Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer led an unauthorized military expedition into the Black Hills, confirmed the presence of gold, and published his reports. The gold rush followed. The US government pressured the Lakota to sell; the Lakota refused. In 1876, the Great Sioux War broke out. Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn on June 25, 1876 — where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors under Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and others annihilated the Seventh Cavalry — was the last major Lakota military victory. Within a year, Crazy Horse had been assassinated at Fort Robinson; Sitting Bull had fled to Canada. The US unilaterally seized the Black Hills in 1877.
The Ghost Dance movement of 1889–90 — a pan-Indigenous religious revival promising that prayer and ceremony could restore the buffalo, resurrect the dead, and roll back the colonial world — spread rapidly through the reservation system as a response to the desperate conditions of the 1880s: starvation, the Dawes Act's forced division of communal land, systematic destruction of traditional culture in government boarding schools. The US Indian Service saw the Ghost Dance as a military threat. In December 1890, Sitting Bull was killed by Indian police. The Miniconjou band led by Spotted Elk (Bigfoot), ill and fleeing toward Pine Ridge, was intercepted by the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee Creek. On December 29, 1890, the soldiers opened fire on the disarmed or disarming camp. At least 153 Lakota were killed — tribal estimates run higher — including many women and children. The mass grave at Wounded Knee became the defining symbol of the Lakota historical wound.
Federal policies across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries systematically attacked the structures that transmitted Lakota religion: the reservation system confined people to small territories cut off from traditional sacred sites; the boarding school system removed children from families and forbade the Lakota language; the 1883 "Courts of Indian Offenses" explicitly prohibited the Sun Dance and other ceremonies. For nearly a century, the transmission of Lakota religious knowledge was criminalized. That it survived at all — maintained in secrecy, in the memories of elders, in the persistence of families who kept what they could — is itself a testimony to the resilience of the tradition.
The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in Minneapolis in 1968 and driven substantially by Lakota activists, reclaimed the explicit political and spiritual assertion of Lakota sovereignty. The occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 — seventy-one days of armed standoff — made Wounded Knee once more a site of resistance and international attention. The American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 finally restored legal protection to Native American ceremonies. NAGPRA (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, 1990) began the long process of returning sacred objects and human remains from museum collections to the communities they came from. The struggle for the Black Hills — which the Supreme Court in 1980 ruled had been illegally seized and awarded a compensation of $106 million (now worth considerably more with accumulated interest) — continues: the Lakota have consistently refused the money and demanded the land. The compensation account sits uncollected.
IX. Contemporary Practice and Aquarian Significance
Lakota religion is practiced today by people who know themselves to be the heirs of catastrophe and survival. The ceremonies are alive. The Sun Dance is held at multiple locations every summer, led by recognized ceremony leaders, attended by communities from across the Lakota nation and by allied non-Lakota participants who have built genuine relationships of respect with specific communities. The sweat lodge is practiced widely — on reservations, in cities, wherever Lakota people live. Pipe keepers carry their responsibilities with full seriousness. The language — once nearly extinguished by the boarding school system — is being actively revitalized through immersion programs, academic partnerships, and the decisions of individual families to raise children in Lakota.
The Standing Rock protests of 2016–17 brought Lakota and allied Indigenous spiritual and political concerns to global attention: the Dakota Access Pipeline's proposed route crossed the Missouri River just upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation, threatening the water supply and crossing through what the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe identified as sacred land. The camps that gathered at Standing Rock — drawing Indigenous peoples from hundreds of nations and supporters from around the world — were explicitly organized around ceremony: every morning began with prayer; every decision was made in relation to the traditional value of protecting the water for future generations. The confrontation at Standing Rock was simultaneously a political protest, a legal dispute, and a religious event.
The intersection of Lakota spirituality with the broader Aquarian phenomenon is complex and requires care. Lakota religion is not a New Age offering. It is a specific tradition, embedded in specific communities, transmitted through specific lineages of teachers and ceremonial knowledge. The widespread appropriation of Lakota forms — vision quests for profit, sweat lodge ceremonies run by non-Lakota practitioners, "shamanic" workshops with no lineage — has been a sustained harm, sometimes a life-threatening one (a 2009 sweat lodge ceremony run by a New Age motivational speaker in Arizona killed three participants). Lakota leaders, including Arvol Looking Horse and the Lakota Summit on Sovereignty (1993), have explicitly and formally prohibited the commercialization of their ceremonies.
And yet — the resonance between what Lakota religion offers and what the disenchanted world seeks is undeniable. The experience of radical relatedness to the natural world, the practice of ceremony as a technology for maintaining that relationship, the understanding that all beings are kin, the insistence that prayer is not optional but constitutive of a good human life — these speak to a hunger that the dominant Western tradition has systematically produced and failed to satisfy. That hunger is the Aquarian condition. How non-Lakota people respond to it — whether by appropriating forms stripped of their context or by acknowledging that the living traditions of Indigenous peoples are not available for export — is one of the defining spiritual and ethical questions of the present age.
The flowering tree that Black Elk saw at the center of the sacred hoop of all nations: it belongs to the Lakota vision, but it shelters everyone.
Colophon
This profile was researched and written as an ethnographic introduction for the Good Work Library's Living Traditions collection. Primary academic sources consulted include: Raymond J. DeMallie, The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt (1984); Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953, recording 1947–48 interviews); Ella Cara Deloria, Speaking of Indians (1944); Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red: A Native View of Religion (1973); Raymond Bucko SJ, The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge (1998); and James R. Walker, Lakota Belief and Ritual (ed. DeMallie and Parks, 1980). The tradition is living and politically active. Ceremonial knowledge that communities have designated as restricted has been deliberately omitted from this profile in accordance with the community's own expressed wishes.
Black Elk Speaks (Neihardt, 1932) is under complex copyright (copyright was registered but the renewal status has been contested; the University of Nebraska Press currently holds rights); it has not been archived. The Sacred Pipe (Brown, 1953) remains under copyright. No Lakota-language primary texts are available in the public domain in English translation that meet the archive's standards for independent derivation from source language; the oral tradition is living and transmitted ceremonially, not through archived text.
Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.
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