American Indian Religions::

The Lakota Sioux

For the Lakota Sioux of the Great Plains, the unity of all things also derives from a shared spiritual essence or substance originating from the beginning of time, except for the fact that spirit derives from a unified spiritual entity Wakantanka, meaning the Great Mystery or Most Mysterious. However, Wakantanka is not simply a singular and omnipotent spiritual force as is the Judeo-Christian deity Yahweh. Wakantanka unifies a multiplicity of sacred or wakan entities such as rock, earth, sky, thunder, sun, air, the buffalo, the eagle and the Lakota trickster figure of spider or Iktomi. Also making up Wakantanka are the souls or spirits (good or bad) that reside in every living thing and give each of us our own spiritual potency and potential. So, to generalise again - you might like to think of Christianity's The Trinity - God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, as a similar concept.

Because of its nature, Wakantanka resides both within the bounds of the universe and separate from it too: you could say that it both creates and is created by the ever-unfolding universe. As a result of this dynamic concept of spirit, 'good' and 'evil', fortune and misfortune, are seen to be necessary and inevitable parts of life.

For the Koyukon, ritual is more concerned with pleasing and placating the spirits, whereas for the Lakota, ritual is more concerned with spiritual and physical renewal, spiritual guidance and thanksgiving. During the vision quest, for example, the participant will seek advice on a specific matter or general guidelines for living from a spiritual guide, which will usually appear to him or her in the form of a visionary animal or bird. This spirit guide usually becomes the participant's spiritual guardian, for life and during the course of one's life, one may have several spirit guides ranging from a deer to an ancestor. Dreams, in fact, are central to Lakota spiritual life, for through them the spirits communicate. Before and after the quest, the participant joins the medicine person or shaman in the sweat lodge ceremony, where he or she is cleansed and asks to be open to guidance. The sweat lodge is primarily a cleansing or purification ceremony - the darkness and heat facilitates spiritual and physical sweating and the shedding of impurities.

The herbs sage and sweetgrass are used throughout Lakota ritual because their scent is pleasing to the spirits. The sacred pipe is smoked because the tobacco is also sacred and pleasing to the spirits. It is believed that the smoke from these plants carries the prayers of the participants to the spirit realm - a realm which is not somewhere far away, but which is perpetually present behind or in front of the physical one. The sacred pipe is in itself a sacred object because it was gifted to the Lakota long ago by the White Buffalo Calf Woman - a spiritual prophet-figure who also gifted the Lakota various important rituals and moral and spiritual values.

Perhaps nothing symbolically captures the Lakota vision of the universe better than the concept of the 'Sacred Hoop'. Traditional Native American cultures have tended to see life as a circular process. To the Lakota in particular, the circle is a sacred symbol. A Lakota man told an anthropologist at the turn of the century the significance for the Lakota of the circle:

"The Oglala believe the circle to be sacred because the Great Spirit caused everything in nature to be round […]. The sun and the sky, the earth and the moon are round like a shield, though the sky is deep like a bowl. Everything that breathes is round like the body of a man. Everything that grows from the ground is round like the stem of a tree. Since the Great Spirit has caused everything to be round mankind should look upon the circle as sacred for it is the symbol of all things in nature […]. It is also the symbol of the circle that marks the edge of the world and therefore of the four winds that travel there. consequently, it is also the symbol of a year. The day, the night, and the moon go in a circle above the sky. Therefore the circle is a symbol of these divisions of time and hence the symbol of all time. For these reasons the Oglala make their tipis circular, their camp circle circular, and sit in a circle in all ceremonies. The circle is also the symbol of the tipi and of shelter. If one makes a circle for an ornament and it is not divided in any way, it should be understood as the symbol of the world and of time. […] The mouth of a pipe should always be moved about in a circle before the pipe is formally smoked."

Lakota philosophy allows for an afterlife for all things. Upon death the soul or spirit will pass through four stages across the Milky Way - called the Ghost or Soul's Trail by the Lakota. One of the people I spoke with on Pine Ridge Reservation in 1998 described the soul's journey as follows:

"The first stage of the journey across the Milky Way, we go to every place that we've been to while we were alive on earth. From the place we died we travel all over until we come back to the place again. In the second phase of the journey, we as spirit go through a period of darkness. That's where, our still-living relatives do a lot of praying, do a lot of praying for our spirits to clear that darkness because if that doesn't happen, that then our spirit could be stuck in the darkness. The third stage is when we're cleared or purified to move into another dimension of life. And the fourth is when we're accepted into where the souls of other people are at."

We have looked very superficially at some key philosophical and spiritual beliefs of a Plains and a Western Subarctic Indian culture. Let's now turn to a survey of the impact of Christianity on Indian religions.