Wakan Tanka

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A Lakota speaker can call many things wakan. A stone of a certain shape; a man who has dreamed of the Thunder; the words a holy man uses that ordinary speech cannot carry; the buffalo, the storm, the unborn child. The term does not mean supernatural in the European sense, as though some events broke a natural order and others kept it. It means holy, set apart, charged with a power that the mind cannot wrap itself around. Tanka means great, large, encompassing. Put the two together — Wakan Tanka — and the phrase reaches for the whole of that holiness at once: the Great Mystery, the Great Sacred, the sum and source of everything that is wakan in the world. It is the central reality of the religion of the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, and almost nothing about it survives translation into a single English word.

The word that English settled on was Great Spirit, and that word is where the misunderstanding begins.

Genealogy: a word for the whole of the holy

The Oceti Sakowin — “the Seven Council Fires,” the name the people of this confederacy use for themselves rather than the outsiders’ Sioux — are bound by a single language spoken in three dialects: Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota. As the Native-run Aktá Lakota Museum and other community sources set it out, the seven bands shared one council fire, and coals from the old fire were carried to kindle the new — a sacred fire, peta wakan, that the alliance kept alive on the march. Wakan Tanka belongs to all of them, though the systematic account that reached the written record comes above all from the Lakota, and within the Lakota from the Oglala of the western plains.

That account did not write itself. It was set down in the early twentieth century by James R. Walker, an agency physician at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota from 1896, who spent years gathering the teachings of Oglala holy men and was, by his own report, eventually admitted to a degree of their confidence. The names he recorded as his informants — Little Wound, American Horse, Bad Wound, Short Bull, No Flesh, Ringing Shield, Thomas Tyon, and George Sword, with Bad Wound, No Flesh, and Ringing Shield his principal teachers on doctrine — were all of them, he noted, dead by the time he came to write. Their knowledge reached the page through an outsider, a government doctor, in English, decades after it was first spoken, and much of it was published only long afterward, in 1917 and again, more fully, in the collection Lakota Belief and Ritual assembled from Walker’s papers in 1980. This is the source-distance that has to be marked at the outset: the most detailed map of Wakan Tanka anyone has comes from a non-Lakota recorder, working with elders who agreed to speak, in a form they did not control. Read critically, Walker’s record is invaluable; read flatly, as if it were a creed dictated whole, it misleads. The Lakota’s own understanding, then and now, sits behind it and before it.

What that understanding refuses is the shape of a high god. Wakan Tanka is not a person enthroned above the world who made it and rules it from outside. It is the holiness of the world itself — the sacred that is in the rock and the sun and the wind, the quality that makes anything wakan, considered all at once and as a unity. The Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the term reaches for the same point in dry phrasing, describing Wakan Tanka as a collective unity of beings possessed of great power, wakan. To pray to Wakan Tanka is not to address one face but to address the whole, and the whole is genuinely plural without ceasing to be one.

The word wakan does most of the work, and it ranges widely. It marks the holy and the powerful, but also the incomprehensible, the dangerous, the not-to-be-handled-lightly. A person who carries unusual knowledge of the wakan is a wicasa wakan, often Englished as “medicine man” or “holy man,” though neither phrase is right: such a person is not a priest of an institution but one who has been given, through dream and discipline, a relation to particular powers and the standing to address them on the people’s behalf. The knowledge is not democratic and not written; it is held by those who have earned it, and the elders who spoke to Walker were among the last of a generation that had held it before the reservation closed around them. To pull a single tidy doctrine out of that and call it “the Lakota belief about God” is already to mistake the kind of thing it is.

The sacred reality: the Tobtob, the many and the one

The most striking thing in the Oglala account Walker recorded is that the Great Mystery has a structure. Wakan Tanka is spoken of as sixteen powers — the Tobtob Kin, a phrase his teachers glossed as the “four-times-four,” four groups of four. Together the sixteen are Wakan Tanka; each of them is also, in its own right, wakan; and the holy men addressed them in a single breath as Wakan Tanka kin, the Great Sacred, as though the sixteen were one. Many and one at the same time, without the contradiction the words make in English.

The first four are the superior powers. Wi is the Sun, the chief of them. Skan — Taku Skanskan, “that which moves,” “that-which-moves-moves” — is the Sky, and motion itself, the source of all movement and spirit and the judge of the powers. Maka is the Earth. Inyan is the Rock, the Stone, oldest of all. Walker’s teachers placed Inyan at the very beginning of things: in the recorded creation account the Rock existed first, soft and alone in the long darkness, and drew out of himself the Earth and the blue dome of the Sky, his draining blood becoming the waters and the sky’s color, so that the Rock spent his own substance to make the world and hardened into the stone we know. That cosmogony is reported here as Walker set it down from his Oglala teachers, not as a fixed scripture — it is one holy man’s careful exposition, and the Lakota tradition is wider than any one telling.

To the four superior powers the account joins four associates or kindred: Hanwi, the Moon, companion of the Sun; Tate, the Wind; Wohpe, the Falling Star, the gentle mediating power often spoken of as feminine, whom some accounts identify with the holy woman who brought the people the pipe; and Wakinyan, the Winged One, the Thunder-being, the power of the upper sky. Then four subordinate powers — the Buffalo, Tatanka; the Bear, here Hununpa, the “two-legged”; the Four Winds, Tate Tob; and Yumni, the Whirlwind. And last, four that are wakan-like, belonging to the human person and the breath: Niya, the breath of life; Nagi, the shade or ghost; Nagila, a lesser spirit; and Sicun, the indwelling spiritual potency a person carries. Four fours, sixteen in all, and all of them Wakan Tanka.

There is a tension worth naming inside this very neatness. The sixteen-power scheme, the four-times-four, is one Oglala systematization, the achievement of particular holy men explaining their tradition to a recorder who wanted it ordered. Other Lakota speakers, and Dakota speakers further east, have used Wakan Tanka more loosely — for the holy as such, for the sum of the powers without an enumerated roster, sometimes with the number and the names shifting from teacher to teacher. Both are true to the tradition. The diffuse usage and the systematic one are not rivals; they are the same reality seen close and seen ordered, and the documentary record happens to preserve the ordered version best because that is the version an outsider could write down. The recurring four — four superior powers, four groups of four, the four winds and four directions and four ages — is itself one of the sacred shapes of the plains, a way the world is felt to be built rather than a sum that has to add up.

Several of these powers open onto the rest of the Lakota sacred world. The Thunder-being Wakinyan is the same power that the upper-sky traditions of the plains and the woodlands gather under the figure of the Thunderbird, whose ancient foe is the power beneath the waters — a relation between traditions, not an identity of name. The mediating Falling Star, Wohpe, stands close in some tellings to White Buffalo Calf Woman, the sacred woman who, in the Lakota account, came to the people and gave them the chanunpa, the Sacred Pipe, and the rites that go with it. And the whole structure belongs to the lived religion of the Lakota, the buffalo-and-pipe world of the western plains.

The holy is met, not merely thought. The pipe is the instrument: its bowl of red stone and its stem joined make an axis between the smoker and the powers, and the smoke carries the prayer. The vision — the seeking of a dream alone on a hill, crying for a sight of the wakan — is one way a person comes to know a particular power and to carry its sicun. The great summer dance of sacrifice and renewal, performed before the sun, gathers the whole community toward Wakan Tanka. These rites are described here only as far as the public record and the people’s own willingness to speak allow; their inner conduct is not a thing to be set out as a procedure, and much of it is closed. What matters for the concept is that Wakan Tanka is not an abstraction one believes in but a presence one stands before — diffuse, total, and near.

A landscape of the Black Hills of South Dakota, the Lakota Paha Sapa. Runner1928 (talk) (Uploads), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Reception: the Great Spirit, and the word that outlasted it

The mistranslation that has shadowed Wakan Tanka for two centuries is the rendering Great Spirit — and behind it the Almighty, the chief god, the Creator. The phrase came out of the missionary and trader encounter and did real work: it let Christian preachers tell the Lakota that the people had merely glimpsed, in shadow, the single God the missionaries had come to name in full, and it let popular writers file the religion of the plains under a familiar monotheism. The trouble is that it remakes the Great Mystery in the image of the thing it is not. As the survey of the term in the study of the so-called Great Spirit records, scholars note that before contact the Lakota used Wakan Tanka for an organization or group of sacred beings whose ways were beyond human grasp, and that flattening this plurality into one supreme person serves a Christian model the concept did not hold. The Lakota activist Russell Means argued for decades that the more faithful English is Great Mystery, and that Lakota spirituality is not monotheism at all — a correction echoed in the reference accounts of Wakan Tanka themselves. A reader who keeps only one thing should keep this: render Wakan Tanka the Great Mystery, the sacred totality, and let Great Spirit stand as the artifact of its reception, not its meaning.

The distortion did not stop at words. The pan-Indian Great Spirit of the American imagination blends the diffuse wakan of the plains with concepts from wholly separate traditions — above all the Algonquian manitou, the spirit-power gathered in Gitche Manitou, which belongs to a different language family and a different sacred grammar. The two are not one god under two names; they are distinct ideas from distinct peoples, melted together by outsiders into a single noble abstraction. To merge them is to repeat the original flattening at larger scale.

And the flattening had a harder edge than mistranslation. From 1883 the federal Code of Indian Offenses outlawed the central Lakota rites by name, the great summer dance among them; agents withheld rations and threatened jail for those who kept the old ways; the boarding schools took the children and forbade the language in which Wakan Tanka is even nameable. The same government that recorded the concept also worked to end the practice of it. Native religion was, in effect, not free in the United States until Congress passed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, within living memory — and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890, in the cold weeks after the suppression of the Ghost Dance, marks how violent the closing of that world could be. Any account of how Wakan Tanka “survived in the record” has to say that it survived a century of attempts to extinguish the living thing the record describes.

It did survive. The concept was never the property of the ethnographers; the holy men who taught Walker were passing on what they had received, and the receiving did not stop. The Great Mystery is named today in Lakota prayer, in the language now being taught back to children whose great-grandparents were punished for speaking it, at Pine Ridge and across the lands of the Oceti Sakowin. The Black Hills — Paha Sapa, the heart of the Lakota world — remain sacred ground and a live grievance against the country that took them. Lakota writers and educators have taken the concept back into their own hands, insisting on Great Mystery over Great Spirit in their own publications and curricula and reading Walker’s record against the grain of the doctor who compiled it — using it where it preserves their elders’ words, correcting it where it bends the tradition toward a creed. Comparative scholars, for their part, still reach for Wakan Tanka when they want to think about a holiness that is plural and total at once, neither one god nor many gods but something the categories of theism were not built to hold; it sits beside other Indigenous American notions of pervading sacred power as a standing challenge to the assumption that religion must climb toward a single throne. The word keeps doing what the single English noun never could: it points at the whole of the sacred without pretending to have caught it, and the people who say it have not finished saying it.

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