Lakota Spirituality

The Meaning of Wakan

From the perspective of the Lakota culture, the world was characterized by its oneness, its unity. Humankind were believed to have been created within the womb of Mother Earth, just as were the buffalo, which provided the people with most of their food. Both human beings and buffalo emerged upon the surface of the earth to populate the world as the Lakotas traditionally knew it. Therefore humans were called wicaša wakantula, 'men on top'. In a very real sense, humankind and nature were one, just as the natural and supernatural were one. The distinction between natural and supernatural, so basic to European thought, was meaningless in Lakota culture. For the Lakotas the important distinction was between humankind and that which was not human, between the common or ordinary and the extraordinary or incomprehensible. From the Lakotas' perspective, the quality of incomprehensibility characterized the universe: it was neither to be fully known nor controlled. Humankind existed not outside nature but as part of it. Human beings stood in awe and fear of the universe, venerated it, and dared to manipulate it to the best of their limited capability. The incomprehensibility of the universe, in which humankind, through ritual, could share, was called wakan.

A great deal has been written about the meaning of wakan. The most common analogy is a quality exhibiting the characteristics of electricity - that is, a force or energy that is derived from essentially an invisible source. Because wakan is a foreign term to the languages employed to discuss it, and moreover because it is an American Indian language, wakan has normally been regarded as perhaps more mysterious than any of its possible translation labels. Most frequently wakan is translated as sacred or holy, and these terms are usually used interchageably as they are in English. Less frequently, the term is described as roughly analogous to 'inexplicable', 'mysterious', even 'awesome'. These latter terms are sometimes heaped upon the more usual terms, sacred and holy, in an effort to make the point that wakan is simply a difficult concept to translate. One wanting a translation of wakan might be amazed that this term somehow is so wakan that no translation label can possibly reveal its manifold connotations. We are left with the feeling that the Lakota speaker is somehow emerging from some arcane intellectual swamp, refusing to reveal his complicated ideas about the supernaturals to the more civilized exegetes of Lakota religion. It is as if we must simply be satisfied that wakan is untranslatable because we are not capable of interpreting in English a term that is the most important link between the mundane and supernatural worlds. If there were an adequate translation label for wakan as sacred or holy, we would find agreement between Indian and non-Indian concepts of causation because yuwakan refers to a transformation from a state of not being wakan to being wakan. The instrumental prefix yu when added to wakan does in fact mean 'to make wakan'. In English, if wakan is synonymous with sacred and holy, then to make sacred, or holy, is quite respectably rendered "to bless," the act of blessing being synonymous with the act of transforming the profane into the sacred. Given that even in English terms such as sacred, holy, and blessing have negative as well as positive connotations, one might conclude that yuwakan can also refer to a transformation from sacred to profane. It is quite unacceptable to suggest that the English term sacred is too limited in its connotations. It is no more or less limited than wakan, for both words describe precisely the same process of transformation.

The process of transformation is accomplished through the ritual of blessing, blessing here being understood as the investment of the quality of sacredness into a person, place, or thing.

Further complications in translation arise when we believe that there are empirical changes in the persons, places, and things that undergo transformation. But transformations do not cause physical changes; they simply cause changes in the behaviors of those who believe that such transformations have taken place. For example, let us look at the phenomenon of holy water in Roman Catholicism. Holy water comes into being when the ritual of blessing is enacted upon common water. The priest makes the sign of the cross over the vessel of water and repeats a prayer formula. The enactment of the ritual and prayer over the water creates a transformation in the state of the water, but the water does not undergo any physical change. What changes is people's behavior toward the water. Subsequently, the water may be used to create further transformations in state, that is, once the water is blessed it can be used to bless other objects. For example, the holy water may be used to bless the house and bed of newlyweds. It is believed that the common water now transformed into holy water has the capacity to make the couple fecund by its association with the couple's nuptial bed. There are, so far, two ritual changes: transformation of the profane water into holy water, and the transformation of the profane bed into a sacred one, the combination of which is believed to potentiate childbirth. If the woman becomes pregnant - the final transformation in this series - then there is an obvious physical change in the woman's "natural" state which is believed to have been caused by the previous ritual transformations. In this example as well as other Lakota examples, the cause is always determined retroactively: the transformation of the holy water, and the transformatin of the nuptial bed caused the woman to become pregnant. But the cause is only discerned after the fact, not before, Thus the possibility that there will be a confusion between English and Lakota concepts of causality is unfounded. They are the same: both are determined retrospectively.

A Lakota example should help clear up the problem of translating wakan. The following is a personal experience of William K. Powers in 1966.

He had become particularly interested in Yuwipi during that year, and had the good fortune to work closely with George Plenty Wolf, who conducted most of the meetings in Red Cloud Community. During his stay that summer, Plenty Wolf told him that he wanted to give Mr. Powers a stone, a tiny transparent stone that he had found near an ant hill in the Badlands. According to Lakota beliefs, ants and other underground creatures are sacred because they transverse between the surface of the earth and the underground and thus in a mundane way continually act out the subterranean emergence of the Lakota. The stones, roots, insects, and the earth itself that are located underground are considered purer than the surface because they have not been contaminated by people or animals that live above. Stones then that are pushed up by ants and other creatures are particularly sacred and are the ones selected for use in rituals.

So Plenty Wolf presented this stone to Mr. Powers. His wife made a small bucksin bag for it, the kind that most of the Lakota at Pine Ridge use. The old man also told him that for the stome to be effective, that is wakan, it had to be named. Naming ceremonies, whether they are conducted to invest a stone with a name or to name a person in the traditional way, are called caštun from caš an attenuated form of caje, 'name', and tun, which here means 'to give birth to', that is, create a name. Plenty Wolf's ceremony was called Iktomi lowanpi, 'Spider sing', and although it resembled a Yuwipi, some elements of the ritual were quite different.

Normally in Yuwipis proper, Plenty Wolf used a long string of canli wapaĥte, 'tobacco offerings', to delineate the hocoka, the area inside the camp circle of tipis - in sacred language, any ritual space, and a smaller string which encircled the round makakagapi, mellowed earthen altar, located in the center of the hocoka toward the western part of the sacred space. This smaller string contained thirty-three tobacco offerings, each of which symbolized a spirit named after some peculiar aspect of Iktomi, the mischievous character prominent in Lakota morality stories. Now Iktomi himself is attributed with having named all things in the Lakota universe after it was created, so it is not unusual that he should bear so many different names and continue to be invoked to provide new names. Each of the tobacco offerings then were for such aspects of Iktomi as Iktomi oholašni, 'Iktomi (who) respects nothing', Iktomi mni akan mani, 'Iktomi (who) walks on the water'; and Iktomi kinyan, 'flying Iktomi. Plenty Wolf said that each tobacco offering was for a different Iktomi, and that if necessary he could name all of them. These spirits were particularly powerful and they were his most entrusted helpers. They were called upon during normal yuwipis, but they deemed to be particularly efficacious in meetings that were called for special purposes, so-called "emergency meetings" for the prupose of making a quick decision about a life crisis situation; meetings called okile lowanpi, 'hunting or search ceremonies', for the purpose of finding lost articles or persons, and meetings for the purpose of investing stones with what the Lakota call a šicun. As some early medicine men tell us:

A shaman must impart a tun with the right ceremony done in the right manner....When a shaman imparts a tun to anything the thing is made a šicun. A šicun is like the God....A shaman must put the container on a šicun and this makes it a wašicun.

Here the act of performing the naming ceremony potentiated the investment of the stone with a named spirit generically called a šicun but specifically named after one of Plenty Wolf's Iktomi helpers. Once the Medicine man has placed a container around the šicun, in this case the container being a stone, the stone is then wakan and is afterwards called a wašicun tunkan or what we may roughly describe as a "šicunized stone," that is, one invested with wowakan, 'sacredness'.

Like other Yuwipis, the Iktomi lowanpi was held in a darkened room from which all furniture had been removed, and the windows and doors covered with blankets and tarps. But the altar, or hocoka, consisted only of the small earthen altar around which the thirty-three canli wapaĥte had been placed. Instead of seven wanunyanpi, 'flag offerings', each representing the Four Directions, the Above, the Earth, and the Spotted Eagle, only two were used, a red wanunyanpi placed on the south side of the hocoka and a white one place on the north side. Between them was Plenty Wolf's personal altar containing a deer tail, a shell, a piece of root, a feather, and other symbols of the universe.

The only other item laid on the sacred space was the buckskin bag containing the stone, which upon advice from Plenty Wolf had been wrapped in a wad of sage before being placed inside the bag. One further instruction was that after the stone had been named, the buckskin bag could never be opened again because this would be offensive to the spirit.

Plenty Wolf drew the picture of a spider on the earthen altar and filled the pipe in the traditional manner. He then asked for the lights to be turned out. The singers began singing, and soon one could hear a great racket in the hocoka, thumping noises against the floor, ceiling, and walls around us, signaling that the powerful spirits had arrived. After perhaps less than twenty minutes, the lights were turned on, revealing a disheveled medicine man and a disorderly hocoka, the altar obviously having been trampled by the spirit helpers.

Plenty Wolf handed the buckskin bag to Mr. Powers and told him that the wašicun now bore the name of Iktomi Kinyan, 'Flying Spider', and if at any time he was in trouble or needed help for any reason, he could pray to the spirit of Iktomi kinyan to help him. Plenty Wolf told him that he should always keep the wašicun tunkan away from the presence of menstruating women. If for some reason it should be contaminated, he would have to take it into a Sweat Lodge for it to be purified. He must carry it with him when on long journeys or when he thought that he would confront any kind of personal troubles. They all smoked the pipe together and after a small fest of sandwiches and coffee, the Iktomi lowanpi was finished.

We can draw a direct analogy between the transformation of profane water into holy water, and the naming of the stone. In both cases, the ritual of transformation is yuwakan, 'making sacred', and the final result, transforming a profane object into a sacred one, results in the object's achieving a state being wakan. If we extend the analogy, we can see that the ritual transformation for both the medicine man and the priest follows the same process:

1. Potentiation. The process of performing the proper ritual so that the person, place, or object to be transformed is rendered worthy of the change of ritual status. The priest may recita a prayer to exorcise impurity in water before investing it with potentiality to sacredness. The medicine man fills the pipe, prays, and sings the proper words to entice the spirits to enter the room, and one of them to enter the heretofore profane stone. Both water and stone are potential "containers" for the sacredness that will be invested in them by conducting the proper rituals.

2. Transformation. The result of performing the proper ritual is that profane water is transformed into holy water; the water is now sacred, that is, people's behavior to it is changed. It is believed to have powers not attributed to profane water. Similarly, a profane tunkan, 'stone', is transformed into wašicun tunkan; the tunkan is now sacred, and likewise people's behavior toward it changes; it has powers that common stones do not have.

If there is a difference between the two processes it is not in the perceived causes of the transformations: they are always believed to be of supernatural origins. But there is a difference in the effects of these processes of transformantion. For the priest, each transformation from profane to sacred is the same: the proper prayers are spoken and the anticipated transformation is achieved. But for the medicine man, according to Lakota belief, each time the proper ritual is performed and the šicun invested, the medicine man loses a little of his power because his power is the sum total of the šicuns he owns as a result of Vision Quests. He does not receive new šicuns for old; each šicun given away to another remains permanently with the wašicun into which it was invested. If a person dies, his šicun leaves its container, the wašicun, and in a sense returns to a "pool" of šicun waiting to become part of another medicine man's stock of šicun that he receives through Vision Quests.

To the Oglalas, the totality of natural and cultural phenomena are capable of undergoing transformations which require that behavior toward these phenomena be altered, or somewhat modified. The causes of these transformations and the Oglala esplanation for concomitant changes in behavior are subsumed under the concept of taku wakan, 'sacred thing(s)'. The phenomena which are regarded as taku wakan may be temporarily or permanently transformed. Those which are permanently transformed are regarded collectively as Wakantanka, traditionally glossed as "Great Spirit" or "Great Mystery" (wakan, 'sacred' and tanka, 'great, large, big'). This term has become the conventional translation for "God." Although singular in form, Wakantanka is collective in meaning. Wakantanka is not personified, but aspects of it are. These aspects are often personified or manifested in the sun, moon, sky, earth, winds, lightning, thunder, and other natural phenomena.

Man exists as an integral part of nature, not as one wishing to control its vicissitudes, but as one wanting to live in harmony with it. Man is innately powerless and cries out to be pitied when confronted with danger, famine, and the unexplainable, When an Oglala is in need of supernatural help, he asserts his powerlessness by intoning "Wakantanka unšimala ye" (Wakantanka, pity me). Man's relation to nature is always unšike, 'pitiable'. By crying out to Wakantanka he at once addresses the sum total of supernatural help at his disposal.

Wakantanka may also be addressed in the metaphor of kinship. Thus an Oglala says "Ho Tunkašila Wakantanka..." (Ho Grandfather Wakantanka). Here Grandfather is used to appeal to Wakantanka independent of any manisfestation; Father is used to appeal to an aspect of Wakantanka which is capable of being manifested, such as the sun. The same metaphor of kinship is used to differentiate between the potentiality of the earth to grow things (unci, 'grandmother') and the actual manifest produce of the earth (maka ina, 'mother earth').

The ways in which Wakantanka manifests itself are limited. According to Sword:

"When Wakantanka wishes one of mankind to do something he makes his wishes known either in a vision or through a shaman....The shaman addresses Wakantanka as Tobtob Kin....This is part of the secret language of the shamans....Tobtob Kin are four times four gods while Tob Kin is only the four winds. The four winds is a god and is the akicita or messenger of all the other gods. The four times four are: Wikan and Hanwikan; Taku Škanškan and Tatekan , and Tobkin and Yumnikan; Makakan and Woĥpe; Inyankan and Wakinyan; Tatankakan; Hunonpakan; Wanagi; Waniya; Nagila; and Wašicunpi. These are the names of the good Gods as they are known to the people.
Wakantanka is like sixteen different persons; but each person is kan [attenuation of wakan]. Therefore, they are all only the same as one."

Wakantanka can be broken down into smaller analyzable components. Wakan means sacred and tanka means great or big; its reduplicated form tankinkinyan means 'important'. No one knows why these two words have been combined to symbolize the sum total of all that is sacred in the universe. In fact, the term is most unusual grammatically because its two adjectives combine to form a noun, but without any of the conventional noun markers (such as wa, wo, wica, or pi). Perhaps sometime in the unenlightened past several ancient philosophers, antecedents of the modern Lakota, decided that not only was everything potentially wakan, but also that supernatural elements coalesced and gave rise to all things that are or are potentially wakan. In a single burst of inspiration they coined the neologism Wakantanka.

Wakantanka is a complicated concept, not because it is Lakota but because figureheads of all religions are complex. It is unlikely that any two religions, unless they are derived from a common source, can be seen as objectively similar except in an analytical way, one which requires analogues and metaphors to make the point. It takes not analytical ability but raw faith to see the Sacred Pipe as a foreshadowing of Christ. The only thing the two concepts have in common is the analytical imposition of the notion of mediation between common people and the supernatural. From the perspective of raw faith there is always the possibility that Christ was a foreshadowing of the Sacred Pipe, but it is unlikely that any Lakota would believe that.

Wakantanka is a single term that refers to sixteen aspects (tobtob, 'four times four'), all of which are related to each other in a special way. There is a structural relationship between the sixteen aspects, particularly the way they are hierarchically ranked, and other aspects of Oglala society, particularly social organization at various levels of organization. Wakantanka is divided into two classes called Wakan kin, 'the wakan', and Taku wakan, 'something wakan. The first is considered to have existed prior to the creation of the world; the latter exists as a result of its creation. Each of these classes is further divided into two subclasses, Wakan kin being comprised of wakan ankatu, 'superior wakan, and wakan kolaya, 'kindred wakan', and Taku wakan being comprised of wakan kuya, 'subordinate wakan', and wakanlapi, 'wakan-like'. Each subclass is again divided into sets of four personae (in Lakota Cosmology I will cover these personae in full detail). The total picture looks like this:

The recognition that one's behavior differs with respect to phenomena which have undergone transformations is embodied in the concept of wakan. Wakan has been regarded as analagous to orenda of the Iroquois, the Shoshone pokunt, Algonquian manitu, Kwakiutl nauala, Tlingit yek, and Haida sgana in North America, as well as the Melanesian mana. About the meaning of wakan Sword states:
"Wakan means very many things. The Lakota understands what it means from the things that are considered wakan; yet sometimes its meaning must be explained to him. It is something that is hard to understand....Every object in the world has a spirit and that spirit is wakan. Thus, the spirit of the tree or things of that kind, while not like the spirit of man, are also wakan....Wakan comes from the wakan beings. These wakan beings are greater than mankind in the same way that mankind is greater than animals. They are never born and never die. They can do many things that mankind cannot do. Mankind can pray to the wakan beings for help."

That wakan refers to things that are hard to understand is implicit in the words which were applied to items newly obtained from other Indians and the white man: horses (šunkawakan, 'sacred dog'), guns (mazawakan, 'sacred iron'), and whiskey (mniwakan, 'sacred water'). An etymology of wakan leads to further interesting speculations. For example, the radical element kan signifies 'aged, worn out with age'; kanheca 'ragged, tattered'; kanhi 'to live to be old, reach old age'; kanit'a 'to die of old age'. Kan also appears in tunkan and tunkaši, 'father-in-law', and tunkan, in the sacred language,a sacred stone having great power and used in the oinikage tipi, 'sweat lodge'. This stone is also called yuwipi wašicun. Kan provides the basis for tunkašila, 'grandfather', and tunkaši (the n is dropped before ši), and also wakanka, 'old woman' (presumably in sacred language). In summary, it would appear that wakan carries the connotation of ancient, old, and enduring.