The Lakota

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In the early eighteenth century a people living in the marshes and wild-rice country at the head of the Mississippi began to acquire an animal they did not yet have a name for. They called it šuŋkawakaŋ — dog of mystery, dog of power — and the word fixed the scale of the change, because the dog had been the only beast that carried a load before the horse came north through the Cheyenne and the Missouri River trade. Mounted, the western bands crossed the Missouri, followed the buffalo herds out onto the high grass, and within two or three generations had made themselves the dominant nation of the northern Plains. By the 1770s their country had a center: a range of dark, pine-covered mountains rising from the dry tableland, which they call Paha Sapa, the Black Hills. The people who made that journey are the Lakota.

The Seven Council Fires and the western division

The name the world knows them by is not theirs. Sioux is a French clipping of an Anishinaabe term, carried into the fur trade and onto the maps; the people call themselves by their own word for alliance and relation. They are the westernmost of three divisions of a single confederacy, the Oceti Sakowin — the Seven Council Fires — whose member peoples speak dialects of one language and reckon themselves kin. The eastern division, in the woodland and prairie of Minnesota, are the Dakota; a central group are sometimes called the Nakota; and the western, the people of the open Plains, are the Lakota, also named the Teton, from Thitȟuŋwaŋ, “dwellers on the prairie.” The dialect difference is audible in the name itself: where the easterners say Dakota, the westerners say Lakota. The same word, the same claim — friends, allies, the people — pronounced across a distance of grass. The Aktá Lakota Museum, run by the Lakota themselves, sets out the structure of the Seven Council Fires plainly, and it is worth taking the count from a source inside the nation rather than from the ethnographers who first drew it.

Within the Lakota division there are seven bands of their own. Their names carry their histories: the Oglala, “they scatter their own,” now centered at Pine Ridge; the Sicangu or Brulé, “burnt thighs,” at Rosebud and Lower Brulé; the Hunkpapa, “campers at the entrance,” at Standing Rock and across the Canadian line at Wood Mountain; the Mniconjou, “planters by the water”; the Sihasapa or Blackfeet Lakota; the Itazipco or Sans Arc, “without bows”; and the Oohenunpa, “two kettles.” These are not tribes in the sense of bounded territories with kings. The living unit of Lakota society is smaller and more flexible: the tiyospaye, the extended-family camp, several related households who travel, hunt, and winter together under a respected leader whose authority rests on generosity and good judgment rather than command. Bands gathered in summer when the buffalo bunched for the rut, and that great convergence was the season of the nation’s largest ceremonies; they scattered into tiyospaye in winter, when the herds dispersed and the cold made small camps the only practical ones. The political logic ran from the household outward — kinship first, the band next, the council fire above that — and a Lakota’s standing was measured less by what he kept than by what he could give away.

The horse remade everything it touched. A people who had carried their goods on dog-drawn travois could now move a heavy lodge of buffalo hide, follow the herds at a gallop, and field mounted warriors who held the northern Plains against the United States Army longer than almost any other nation on the continent. The buffalo gave food, the hide gave shelter and clothing and the lodge-cover and the shield, the sinew gave thread and bowstring, the bone gave tools, the horn gave cups; the animal was not a resource set apart from life but its substance. This is the world the documentary record catches at its height and its destruction at once — the mounted buffalo nation of the 1830s through the 1870s, already a recent creation, already under pressure, and within a single human lifetime broken onto reservations. The Lakota are not an antiquity. They are a living people whose classical age happened to fall, by the accident of contact, inside the reach of the camera and the treaty clerk.

A Lakota tipi camp on a creek near Pine Ridge, photographed in the winter of 1890–91. John C.H. Grabill, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Wakan Tanka, the pipe, and the rites

At the center of the Lakota world is a word that resists the English that wants to translate it. Wakan means holy, sacred, charged with a power the mind cannot enclose; a stone of a certain shape can be wakan, a dream of the Thunder can make a man wakan, the words a holy person speaks in ceremony are wakan. Tanka means great, vast, encompassing. Joined, Wakan Tanka reaches for the whole of that holiness at once — the Great Mystery, the sacred totality that pervades all that is. The single most persistent distortion in the outside record is the rendering of this as “the Great Spirit,” a phrase that quietly converts a diffuse, pervasive sacredness into a Christian-style high god seated above creation. One important early account, given by the Oglala holy man George Sword to the agency physician James R. Walker around 1900, describes Wakan Tanka not as one person but as a gathering of sixteen powers — the Tobtob, the “four times four” — at once many and one. Whether that scheme is ancient Lakota theology or one ritualist’s systematization recorded through an outsider’s pen is exactly the kind of question that should be held open rather than closed; the source is precious and the source is also a non-Lakota physician writing down a guarded knowledge, and both facts bear on how much weight the count can carry.

The pivot of Lakota ceremony is the chanunpa, the Sacred Pipe, and the pipe’s origin is told in the coming of White Buffalo Calf Woman, Ptesan Win. In the people’s own telling she appeared to two hunters in a time of hunger, beautiful and wakan; one approached her with desire and was destroyed, the other with respect and was spared; and she came into the camp bearing the pipe, taught the people how to live and pray with it, and as she departed rolled over and became a white buffalo calf, the rarest of animals, before vanishing. With the pipe she brought the rites. The Lakota count seven: the keeping and releasing of the soul; the inipi, the rite of purification in the lodge of heated stone and steam; the hanblecheya, “crying for a vision,” the solitary fast on a high place — a mountain such as Bear Butte at the edge of the Hills — by which a person seeks a vision and a relationship with the powers; the wiwanyang wacipi, the Sun Dance; the making of relatives, the hunkapi; the girl’s coming-of-age rite; and the throwing of the ball. The Aktá Lakota Museum’s account of the seven sacred rites describes each at the distance a public, nation-sanctioned source keeps — which is the only distance this entry keeps as well.

The Sun Dance is the great communal ceremony, held in high summer when the bands gathered. It is a rite of sacrifice and renewal in which dancers pledge themselves for the welfare of the people, fasting and dancing for days around a sacred cottonwood pole, some of them offering their own flesh and pain as the most serious gift a person can make. That much is in the public record and the dancers’ own testimony. The operative detail — what is sung, what is shown, what is done and withheld inside the arbor — belongs to the people who carry it, and a great deal of Lakota ceremony is deliberately closed to outsiders. Where the tradition is guarded, the right thing is to mark the line and stop at it: the existence and the meaning of a rite can be told; the rite itself is not a procedure to be set down for a stranger to follow. The Lakota name a set of virtues that the ceremonies are meant to cultivate and that elders still teach — among them generosity, courage, fortitude, and wisdom — and these, unlike the closed liturgy, are spoken of openly precisely because they are meant to be lived in daily relation, not performed behind a screen.

Much of what the wider world thinks it knows of Lakota religion passed through one book. Black Elk Speaks, published in 1932, set down the life and visions of the Oglala holy man Heȟáka Sápa as told to the poet John G. Neihardt; a later volume, The Sacred Pipe of 1953, recorded Black Elk’s account of the seven rites through the ethnologist Joseph Epes Brown. These are among the most influential texts ever produced about Native North American religion, and they are also collaborations across a language barrier and a vast cultural distance, shaped by the editors’ selection and framing and, in Neihardt’s case, his poetry. Scholars and Lakota readers alike have spent decades arguing over where the holy man ends and the editor begins — Black Elk was also, by then, a Catholic catechist, a fact the early editions left out. The published Black Elk is a real and serious record. It is not an unmediated transcript of the Lakota mind, and reading it as one is itself a small monument to how badly the outside world has wanted such a transcript.

Treaty, massacre, and the unceded Hills

The destruction came fast and it is documented in the United States’ own paper. Two treaties signed at Fort Laramie set the terms. The first, in 1851, drew boundaries the government violated almost at once as emigrants and miners pushed through. The second, in 1868, ended a war the Lakota under Red Cloud had largely won; it established the Great Sioux Reservation across what is now western South Dakota, set the Black Hills aside for the “absolute and undisturbed use and occupation” of the people, and promised that no further cession would be valid without the signatures of three-quarters of the adult men. The 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, as the National Archives notes, is among the most consequential and most flagrantly broken agreements the United States ever made with a Native nation.

It broke over gold. In 1874 a military expedition under George Armstrong Custer confirmed gold in the Black Hills, miners poured in against the treaty, and when the Lakota would not sell Paha Sapa the government moved to take it. The war that followed produced the Lakota and Cheyenne victory over Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876 — and then the full weight of the Army, the killing of the buffalo, the confinement of the bands. In 1877 Congress simply annexed the Black Hills by statute, without the three-quarters consent its own treaty required. More than a century later the Supreme Court agreed that this was theft. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians (1980) the Court upheld an award of some seventeen million dollars for the 1877 value of the land plus a century of interest, well over a hundred million dollars in all. The Lakota refused the money. They have gone on refusing it, and the fund has sat untouched and growing past a billion dollars, because to accept payment would be to sell the Hills, and the Hills are not for sale. The land claim is not a grievance about compensation. It is a claim to Paha Sapa itself.

The lowest point came at the end. In the desperate winter of 1890 the Ghost Dance — a prophetic movement, born in the Great Basin, that promised the return of the buffalo and the dead and the lifting of the whites — spread through the broken reservations, and the agents read it as an uprising. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Cavalry surrounded a band of Mniconjou and Hunkpapa under Spotted Elk (Big Foot) at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and in the course of disarming them opened fire. Between roughly 250 and 300 Lakota were killed, the great majority of them unarmed, many of them women and children cut down as they fled. The Army called it a battle and handed out medals; it was a massacre, and it is named as one now. It stands as the conventional close of the Plains wars and, in Lakota memory, as a wound that has never been treated as one event among many.

Defeat on the ground was followed by a sustained attempt to end the religion and the language. Beginning in 1883 the federal Code of Indian Offenses — the so-called “Religious Crimes Code” — empowered Indian agents to punish traditional ceremonies, and the Sun Dance, the heart of the ceremonial year, was effectively outlawed for decades, driven underground or into disguised and shortened forms. Lakota children were taken, often by force, to boarding schools run on the principle of assimilation through erasure, where speaking the language was punished and the aim was to remake them as English-speaking Christian laborers. Native religious practice in the United States did not have clear federal protection until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 — a date worth sitting with, because it means the open practice of the chanunpa and the Sun Dance was legally precarious within living memory. The suppression failed to finish its work, but it did enormous damage, and the loss it inflicted on the language in particular is still being counted.

A living people

The Lakota did not vanish, and the present tense is the only honest one. They live today as sovereign nations on reservations that bear the band names — Pine Ridge (Oglala), Rosebud (Sicangu), Cheyenne River, Standing Rock, Lower Brulé, and others — and in cities across the country, governing themselves, running schools and colleges and courts, and carrying the ceremonies that the law once forbade. The Sun Dance is danced again, openly. The pipe is kept. The keepers of the original Sacred Pipe bundle, the calf-pipe brought by White Buffalo Calf Woman, are a recognized lineage of the Sihasapa band on the Cheyenne River Reservation, and when a rare white buffalo calf was born in Wisconsin in 1994, many Lakota read it through the prophecy rather than through the genetics — a reading that belongs to them to make.

The hardest front now is the language. Lakota is one of the more widely spoken Indigenous languages of the United States, and it is in steep decline: the Lakota Language Consortium reported that fluent first-language speakers had fallen to roughly two thousand by the mid-2010s, most of them elders, a collapse of two-thirds in a decade. Against that, immersion schools, dictionaries, apps, and a generation of young second-language teachers are working to raise children who think in Lakota again — though even the revitalization has its internal arguments, over who should own a grammar and who should profit from teaching a people their own words. The struggle for Paha Sapa continues in the courts and in the refusal of the settlement money. And in 2016 the Oceti Sakowin gathered as they had not gathered in a century: at Standing Rock, where the Lakota and Dakota and thousands of allies from hundreds of nations camped through the winter to oppose an oil pipeline routed beneath their water, under the Lakota phrase that became the movement’s name — mni wiconi, water is life. The Smithsonian’s own teaching materials place Standing Rock squarely in the long line of treaty defense rather than treating it as a sudden eruption, and that is the right frame: the same people, the same land, the same word for relation, pressed against the same state.

The reception that needs the most guarding is the friendly kind. The Lakota pipe, the vision quest, and above all the sweat lodge have been lifted out of the people who carry them and sold back to the world as a generic spirituality — by weekend “shamans,” by retreat centers, by the whole industry the Lakota themselves call the plastic medicine men. Some of this is merely tasteless; some of it has killed people, in sweat-lodge ceremonies run by the unqualified. Lakota spiritual leaders have formally declared war on the exploitation of their ceremonies, and the line they draw is the same one this entry has tried to keep: the existence and the meaning of the rites are open to be known, the rites themselves are not open to be taken. A tradition can be honored from the outside by being described accurately and left in the hands that hold it. To know that the Lakota call the Black Hills the heart of everything that is, and that they have refused a billion dollars rather than confirm their sale, is to know the shape of a people who never agreed to become a memory.

Pine-covered ridges of the Black Hills, the Lakota Paha Sapa, photographed in 1890. Grabill, John C. H., photographer, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

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