Lakota Sioux Creation Mythology::

The Transformative Powers of Iktomi

As Julian Rice points out, Lakota philosophy is characterised by vitality and freedom. Lakota texts, therefore, have at least the following in common: "1. The haphazard creation of the world and the inevitability of conflict and challenge. 2. The real danger and destruction of the trickster. [And 3.] The sense of the world as contradictory or 'absurd'" (1998: 13).¹

The fact that creative energy, for example, is both generative and destructive can be seen clearly in the Walker narratives reconstructed above. In these narratives, Iktomi features prominently, suggesting that, within a Lakota framework, life is predicated as much on conflict and strife as on harmony and stability.

Iktomi is the classic trickster-transformer, whose deceptions facilitate the creation of time and space). It is apt that Iktomi was Ksa, or wisdom, in a previous incarnation. With him around, nothing is likely to go smoothly for the spirits of creation, and yet his cunning shapes the present world: his scheming separates day from night, for example. It leads to the establishment of the calendar year and the four directions. Eventually Iktomi's deceptions lead to the emergence of the Lakota people themselves. In the myth The Death of Iya, the trickster defeats the son of Gnas, who has been eating all the people. In defeating Iya, Iktomi frees the tribes to spread out over the earth (Walker 1917: 190-191).² The myth How the Lark Won the Race provides another example of how Iktomi tricked some animals to run a race that eventually determined their unique markings and characteristics (Walker 1917: 210-212). Iktomi also invented languages, was the first to use human speech, named all things and could communicate with all things - plant or animal.

Iktomi's presence and role ensures that life will never be perfect - not even the life of the spirits. Drawing from Little Wound's The Feast by Tate, Rice says,

"It is Little Wound's trickster who grants the theoretically greater spirits their virtues and then simultaneously inserts a weakness: The Rock endures but is brittle and can be shattered; the Thunderers have bright eyes but they glory in destruction; and while Wakan Skan (the Great Spirit) gained the power to protect life 'and do it good,' Iktomi 'made him a very sleepy one'" (1998: 14, citing Little Wound in Walker 1917: 180).

Iktomi plays an important role in imparting morality to young people. He is the model of negative behaviour and stories abound of him transgressing social rules: he has children with his mother-in-law, he marries his daughter or he transforms himself into a woman and marries the chief's son. As a social transgressor, he not only teaches people correct social behaviour, but "also reminds us that disorder lurks not far below the surface of the socially acceptable" (Theisz 1975: 8).³

The following is a paraphrased excerpt of a conversation I had with an Oglala woman at Pine Ridge Reservation during anthropological fieldwork there. It seems to sum up Iktomi's power:

"Iktomi is a master fool. Even our fools can be heroes, you know [laughs]. Even our fools can be sacred. He shows us what not to do - that's his power. But early on especially, his mischief making transformed the world and made it what it is. Like those heyoka, too. They do everything backward to teach us things. And yet they hold sacred knowledge - even though we laugh at them" (1998).

Notes::

• 1 - Julian Rice. 1998. Before the Great Spirit: The Many Faces of Sioux Spirituality. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
• 2 - James R. Walker. 1917. "The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota." Anthropological Papers. 16 (2): 51-221. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
• 3 - R.D. Theisz, ed. 1975. Buckskin Tokens: Contemporary Oral Narratives of the Lakota. Aberdeen, SD: North Plains Press.