Lakota Summit V met in June 1993 and drew representatives of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota communities from across the United States and Canada. On 10 June the assembly adopted, without a dissenting vote, a document titled a Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality. Its language is deliberate: it declares war, and it says plainly that the war is on a practice and not on a people.
The practice it names is the imitation and sale of Lakota ceremony by those who have no standing to conduct it, whether from outside the community altogether or from within it. The declaration speaks of imitation sweat lodge ceremonies, of vision quests and puberty ceremonies offered for money, and of the self-appointed teachers who conduct them, and it asks Lakota people to identify and confront such activity wherever it appears rather than to leave it to the courts, which offer no remedy. It is addressed as much to relatives who might be tempted to sell as to strangers who buy.
The distinction the text draws is not between Lakota and outsider but between ceremony given and ceremony sold. What is objected to is a transaction: a rite taken out of the community whose elders answer for it, priced, and repeated by someone accountable to nobody. Nothing about how any of these ceremonies is conducted appears here, and the atlas takes no position on the disputes inside Lakota country about where the line falls; the document's own words are the record.
Sources Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota SpiritualityLakota Summit V with Lakota Belief and RitualJames R. Walker; edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner