Lakota

This entry is deliberately restrained, and the restraint is the accurate response rather than a gap in the record.

Lakota religion is living. It has custodians, it has offices entered by instruction and by call, and it has ceremonies whose conduct by outsiders has been objected to by name, in a declaration issued by Lakota leaders in 1993 that remains the community's stated position.

What the atlas records at this level is the shape rather than the content. Sacred power is understood as a quality present in the world and concentrated in particular beings, places and objects, rather than as a court of gods with ranks and offices. There is no divine king, no succession between generations of deities, and no roster to enumerate. The pipe and its origin, brought by a figure whose visit founded the ceremonial life of the people, stand at the centre of the tradition's account of itself.

The geography is specific. He Sapa, the Black Hills, holds a position no other place holds, and the legal history of that claim is a matter of public record and continuing litigation.

The seven rites are named in the tradition and are not described here. What they are for, who may conduct them, and what happens within them is held by the people who hold them, and the atlas records that this is so rather than working around it.

A reader can find detailed accounts of Lakota ceremony without difficulty, and that availability is the problem this article exists to describe.

The early twentieth century produced published accounts of Lakota religion built from interviews with a small number of elderly men, conducted through interpreters, by collectors working within the assumptions of their period. Those accounts became standard, were quoted for decades, and have since been the subject of sustained argument about how much of their systematising structure came from the people interviewed and how much from the men writing it down.

A second and larger body of material came later, through popular books that presented Lakota spirituality to a general readership. Their effect was to make ceremonies widely known, widely imitated and, in several documented cases, sold. The Lakota Summit V declaration of June 1993 was a direct response, objecting by name to the conduct of these ceremonies by non-Lakota and to their commercial use.

The tradition's own transmission runs through instruction, through relationship with a person qualified to teach, and through participation. It is not, and was never intended to be, a body of information transferable by reading.

The atlas therefore names the institutions, records the structure, states that the material is restricted, and reproduces none of it. That a thing is in print is not evidence that it was ever meant to be.