"Visions, a world beyond the frog-skin world..."
Lecture 2: Lakota Religion
We're looking at Lakota religion as one solitary example of the many religions practiced by traditional societies in the Western world.We're taking the Lakota out of chronological order because we know more about them than about most ancient peoples, and so they give us a chance to talk about some common concepts in the study of religion, like myth, ritual, the numinous, sacred objects, sacred space, sacred time, and "axis mundi."
Here are two sound clip samples of Lakota ceremonial music.
Chronology
1641 Jesuits first encounter the Lakota -- in Minnesota near Lake Superior1750 By this year, the Lakota have moved into the Great Plains.
1804 Lewis and Clark find the Lakota along the White River in South Dakota.
1851 Fort Laramie Treaty
1868 Treaty with Red Cloud establishes Great Sioux Reservation
1874 Gold discovered in the Black Hills.
1876 Battles with U.S., including Little Big Horn (25 June). Black Hills "sold" to U.S.
1877 Crazy Horse surrenders and is killed.
1883 The last of the bison herds is slaughtered by Wasichu (white) buffalo-hunters.
1881 The U.S. government forbids celebration of sundance. (It continues in secret.)
1889 The Ghost Dance movement begins under Wovoka (Paiute holy man).
1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee (29 December)
1932 Black Elk tells his story to John Niehardt; Deloria publishes Dakota Texts.
1934 Indian Reorganization Act
1968 Founding of American Indian Movement
1973 The Seige at Wounded Knee
Historical Background
Newcomers to the Great Plains
The Sioux are distantly related to the Iroquois, and may have lived together with them in the middle Atlantic coast.The Lakota are one of seven divisions of the Sioux peoples. They are also known as the Teton or Western division. Lakota refers both to their tribal identity and their language. The northern Sioux are called Nakota, and the Eastern Sioux are called Dakota.
Europeans first found the Sioux living as an agricultural people in the prairies of central Minnesota. When their Ojibwa neighbors acquired firearms from the French, the Sioux migrated southwest to the great plains, following the herds of buffalo herds. The plains were home to well-established cultures: to nomadic hunters in the West and to settled, agricultural villages farming the rich bottomland to the East. (See map)
The Lakota were the first Sioux to cross the Missouri river and take
on the lifestyle of nomadic buffalo hunters.
They adapted quickly to their new surroundings. They acquired horses from other tribes, and rifles from White traders on the Missouri River. Mounted on horses and armed with rifles, they quickly became the dominant warriors and hunters of the Great Plains, with a reputation as dangerous enemies.
In the Great Plains, the Sioux were a single social unit, with seven divisions, of which the westernmost one was the Lakota. Once a year the divisions gathered for the annual Sundance, followed by the buffalo hunt in the fall. After the hunt, the divisions divided until the next summer.
The Lakota themselves consisted of seven bands. The largest is the Oglala, and the second largest is the Brulé (or Burnt Thigh) band.
1760-1850 were the glory days of the Lakota. The Lakota lived in the White River country of southern South Dakota. It was an ideal Indian paradise, a land with fine streams and groves of timber, a land teeming with buffalo, antelope, deer, and elk. At the Missouri river, they had easy access to traders for guns, ammunition, steel axes, and iron kettles. The Lakota prospered, though usually at the expense of the Pawnee and other tribes that had lived there before. Horses became increasingly essential and therefore a sign of wealth. Raiding enemy villages for horses became the foundation of their economic system.
From Paradise to Dependency
By 1850, the Sioux entered more difficult times. French fur traders had created a profitable market for buffalo robes and salted tongue. The Sioux slaughtered large numbers of buffalo to supply the market, and became increasingly dependent on European goods, including alcohol. They also picked up smallpox and measles from the traders.In 1851 the Sioux signed the Fort Laramie Treaty and began living on reservations. The Treaty of 1868 established the Great Sioux Reservation, within which they were permitted to roam. The treaty guaranteed that Indian land could only be entered with Indian consent.
But discovery of gold in the Black Hills brought settlers onto Indian land without Indian consent. The Sioux led retaliatory raids. The force of U.S. military might was brought against them, and in spite of the victory at Little Big Horn, the Sioux were forced to surrender to U.S. terms. The land given to the Lakota was decimated. (See maps showing their shrinking reservation.)
Allotment Acts of 1887 and 1889 divided up the land into family allocations. The Lakota were reduced to a people dependent on government rations. Meanwhile, there was a concerted effort to turn the Lakota into Europeans. Children were forced to live at boarding school, where they were forced to speak English only.
Two movements responded to the loss of resources and of traditional ways. The first was an apocalyptic movement called the Ghost Dance. The Paiute visionary and holy man, Wovoka (1856?-1932), had visions of a restored world in 1889.
When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told me to come back and tell my people they must be good and love one another, and not fight, or steal, or lie. He gave me this dance to give my people. [Wovoka, cited in Campbell, Historical Atlas, I.2.232](The sun's death was probably the eclipse of January 1, 1889.) Wovoka's visions were influenced by previous Paiute teachings and by Christian expectation of the end of the world, as mediated by the Mormon community in Utah. The Ghost Dance religion expected the imminent restoration of a world that would remain in peace forever.
"The ghost dancers ... thought that by performing the Ghost Dance ..., they could roll up the white man's earth like a carpet, toegether with its sinking factories, artificially bred pigs and chickens, and barbed wire and telegraph poles. They believed that underneath this rolled-up mass of spoiled soil would reappear the good red world of the Indian -- a world alive once more with herds of buffalo, teeming with game of all kinds, and covered with tipis inhabited by people who had been killed by while soldiers."The Ghost Dance spread like wildfire from reservation to reservation, until the U.S. government became alarmed. On December 29, 1890, the Seventh Calvary attempted to disarm a small gathering of Sioux at Wounded Knee. A shot was fired (we can debate who fired it), and the Seventh Calvary responded by massacring some 300 Sioux men, women, and children.[Archie Fire Lame Deer, The Gift of Power, 254]
Failure of the prophecies (and especially the failure of the "Ghost Shirts" to reflect the white man's bullets) finally quenched the hope of the Ghost dance, leaving the field open for a second new Native American movement: the Peyote religion. Now officially recognized as the Native American Church, the Peyote religion claims some 200,000 adherents among North American tribes. It has adherents among the Lakota.
In 1934, the Indian Reorganization Act allowed some political and cultural independence to the Lakota people. It also legalized drinking.
In 1973, Lakota and others involved in the American Indian Movement
faced down the U.S. government at a weeks-long seige at Wounded Knee.
Lakota Religion
Lakota religion is not a religion of salvation.It is a religion that recognizes good and bad in the world.
It is a religion that has very close ties to the natural world.
It is a religion with a variety of holy people.
The traditional boy's entrance into manhood is marked with a vision
quest. One waits in an underground cave for a vision that will direct
one's life. John Fire Lame Deer says,
- "Visions, a world beyond the frog-skin world, have always been very
important to us. You could almost say that a man with no vision can't be
a real Indian." [cited in Gift of Power, 56]
(The dominant society is concerned with getting "frog-skins," an
ironic term for greenback dollars.)
Girls have a puberty rite that can also lead to a vision.
Wakan Tanka
At the head of the sacred world of the Lakota is Wakan Tanka, which means the Great Mystery or Great Spirit. He is the Grandfather Spirit, the Everywhere Spirit, the Creator.Archie Fire Lame Deer says, "He has no form. He is not shaped like a human being, and humans are not made in Wakan Tanka's image, as in the Christian Bible. He is like the air we breathe -- invisible."
Wakan
Tanka never stops creating. He created the Wakanpi, the Sixteen Great
Mysteries, whom some white anthropologists call "gods." The Sixteen
Great Mysteries are all different aspects of the Creator. Archie
Fire Lame Deer says, "Christians who believe in the Holy Trinity should
have no problem with this concept. Wakan Tanka is the sun, the sky,
the rock, a brook, or a tiny flower."
The Lakota cosmology is mapped in layout of the Lakota sweatlodge.
The Lakota do not believe that the Earth belongs to humans. They
believe that we belong to the Earth. Lame Deer says, "We believe
that Grandmother Earth is one and indivisible; that she is there for all
and cannot be owned or sold in little pieces." The earth is full
of sacred places.
Iktomi
Iktomi is the spiderman, the wicked trickster of Lakota mythology."He is the smartass who often outsmarts himself, the glutton, the every-horny woman chaser, the player of practical jokes. Iktomi has a dual nature, being at the same time powerful and wak, proud and humble, smart and stupid, good and evil, young and old. Iktomi can transform himself at will into human, animal, or plant, but he usually appears in the shape of a spider." [Gift of Power, 258]
Relations
According to Ella Deloria, the single most important activity of Lakota life is the making and maintaining of relatives. One of the seven central Lakota ceremonies is makes relatives of those who are not. Deloria says, "the ultimate aim of Dakota life, stripped of accessories, was quite simle: One must obey kinship rules; one must be a good relative.... every other consideration was secondary: property, personal ambition, glory, good times, life itself." [Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 17]Lakota prayers proceed sunwise, facing each direction. In each direction, one extends the peace pipe to secure a spirit nation as an ally, as a spirit relative.
In the Lakota kinship system, all relatives can be trusted but strangers could turn out to be the incarnation of Iktomi, the legendary spider spirit of deceit.
Many Lakota stories focus on relatives known by their behavior as relatives or as Iktomi.
Iktomi exploits his relationships. He has a family by his mother-in-law in one story and tries to marry his daughter in another. "He represents those people who may be called father but who use rather than protect their families.
In Lakota society, one completely avoids the parent-in-law of the opposite sex: they do not speak or look at each other. So Iktomi's having a child by his mother-in-law is the ultimate disrespect.
"The story directs listeners to remember the potential chaos of treating relatives as objects of possession or pleasure." [Julian Rice, Lakota Storytelling, 13]
"Significantly, the White Buffalo Calf Woman presents herself as a sister who brings the people the sacred pipe, the most valuable means of sustaining kindship among themselves and between themselves and the spirits." [Rice]
Strangers cannot be trusted until they have been made relatives.
Treaties betwen the Sioux and the U.S. Government described the American
President as "father." The Sioux were told over and over that their
great white father in Washington wished to take care of his red children.
By the 1850s the white relatives were no longer honoring obligations to
feed their family. Outraged by the betrayal and unnatural abuse of
those they called "father," their only appropriate response was war.
The Sundance
The sundance medicine lodge is constructed with a central sacred tree (an example of an "axis mundi," the axis or center of the world). Twenty-eight poles surround it in a circle and 28 roof-beams connect the central tree to the surrounding support poles. (See side view and layout diagrams) A buffalo-hide covering covers it all. The central tree is a ritually selected cottonwood tree that is brought to the site. It represents Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit.28 is a sacred number. The lunar month has 28 days. Buffalos have
28 ribs. War bonnets usually have 28 feathers.
Black
Elk says, "Twenty-eight is the number of days in the moon's growing
and dying, and as the twenty-eight poles rest on the one central tree,
so the growing and dying of our ignorance reflects the one light of Wakan-Tanka,
which is our center."
The entrance of the lodge faces east. The ceremonies begin on
the date of the summer solstice.
Earlier, native Americans created Medicine Wheels to mark the summer solstice and the rising of significant stars such as Sirius. These Medicine Wheels are huge circles with 28 lines radiating from the center. The Medicine Wheel on Medicine Mountain in Wyoming was probably in use between 1250 and 1750 ce.
The annual Sundance of the Sioux is held in midsummer (June or July), when the moon is full.
(Check out this native artist's painting
of the sundance and this detail.)
A Final Observation
In a very real way, people who belong to different religious traditions
can live in very different worlds.
Later Note:
Let me expand on this by briefly giving an example. Archie Fire Lame Deer
and I live in the same world (in the ordinary sense). On the other hand, I
experience a world noticeably different from the world Lame Deer
experiences. If Lame Deer holds the Pipe in his hand, he can feels its
"power and its spiritual vibration". I'm sure I'd feel honored to hold a
Lakota Pipe, but it wouldn't vibrate for me. Why? In my world, a pipe is
a pipe. In Lame Deer's world, a pipe is really a pipeline that
communicates relationships, including relationships with the Sacred.
None of us see the world without mediation or interpretation. We learn to
experience the world according to the culture in which we are raised.
For More Information
Lame Deer, Archie Fire and Richard Erdoes.
Gift of Power: The Life and Teachings of a Lakota Medicine
Man. Santa Fe: Bear & Company, 1992.
Crow Dog, Mary and Richard Erdoes.
Lakota Woman. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Grobsmith, Elizabeth S.
Lakota of the Rosebud: A Contemporary Ethnography. New
York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.
[Field work done in 1973.]
Rice, Julian.
Lakota Storytelling: Black Elk, Ella Deloria, and Frank Fools Crow.
American University Studies, Series XXI, Regional Studies, Vol. 3.
New York: Peter Lange, 1989.
Brown, Joseph Epes.
"Sun Dance," in The Encyclopedia of Religion.
Powers, William K.
"Lakota Religion," in The Encyclopedia of Religion.
Neihardt, John G.
Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala
Sioux. New York: Penguin, 1932, 1972.
Campbell, Joseph.
Historical Atlas of World Mythology. Vol. I: The Way of the
Animal Powers. Part 2: Mythologies of the Great Hunt. Perennial Library.
New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
[Field work done in 1973.]