Native American Origin Stories II::

Ritual Stories

Whole bodies of ritual knowledge and activity are rooted in specific geographical regions across the Americas. On the northern Plains, close to the Black Hills, the Lakota were given their most treasured ceremonies as well as a complete moral code by the White Buffalo Calf Woman. Close by, at Bear Butte in South Dakota, the Cheyenne's culture hero, Sweet Medicine, was given four sacred medicine arrows. He and his wife remained in the heart of Bear Butte, receiving instructions from the spirit world - instructions that subsequently defined Cheyenne religious and philosophical culture. The medicine arrows are now in possession of the Southern Cheyenne in Oklahoma. The White Buffalo Calf Woman's Sacred Pipe is sequestered at Green Grass on the Cheyenne River Reservation.

Even today, all over Native America, medicine people or spiritual practitioners continue to learn sacred law from the inscribed markings on rock faces that we tend to call petroglyphs or from pictographs or rock paintings. Every geographical region in America has powerful and most often sacred stories embedded within it.