Among the ritual objects of the Great Plains peoples, none carries a weight comparable to the sacred pipe. For the Lakota, the western branch of the great Sioux nation, the pipe is not just a tool for smoking: it is a portable altar, a way of joining earth and sky, and a covenant binding human beings to everything that lives. To understand it, we have to start from the story that explains its origin.
The story of White Buffalo Calf Woman
According to Lakota tradition, in a time of famine two young scouts were sent out to look for game. On the prairie they saw a woman of extraordinary beauty approaching, dressed in white buckskin. One of them looked at her with lust and was wrapped in a cloud: when the cloud lifted, only his bones were left. The other, who had greeted her with respect, was told to return to camp and prepare a large lodge to receive her.
The woman entered the camp carrying a bundle. She opened it and showed the pipe, taught the people how to use it and explained the meaning of its parts. She announced that seven rites would be given through the pipe. Then she left the lodge and, as she walked away, transformed several times until she became a young white buffalo, which vanished over the horizon. Her Lakota name is Ptesan Wi, usually translated as White Buffalo Woman or White Buffalo Calf Woman.
The story already holds a lesson: the greedy gaze destroys the one who carries it, while respect opens the way to the gift. This is why the birth of a white buffalo is still welcomed by many Lakota today as a sign of great importance.
The meaning of the parts
The pipe is made of two separate pieces that are joined only at the moment of the rite: the bowl and the stem. In traditional explanations the bowl, carved from stone, is associated with the earth and the feminine principle; the wooden stem is associated with all that grows and with the masculine principle. When the two parts are joined, the pipe becomes alive and sacred; when the rite ends, they are separated again.
The bowl is often made from a soft red stone, catlinite, quarried at Pipestone in present-day Minnesota. That place was considered ground of peace, where different peoples could come to take the stone. Many traditions associate the red colour of the stone with the blood and flesh of the people.
The rising smoke carries the prayer upward. Before smoking, the pipe is offered to the directions, to the sky and to the earth: it is a way of placing the one who prays at the centre of the world, in relationship with all its parts.
The seven rites
The tradition tracing the seven main rites back to White Buffalo Calf Woman became known outside the Lakota world through the book The Sacred Pipe, published in 1953, in which the elder Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) describes the rites to Joseph Epes Brown. The seven rites are:
- The keeping of the soul, a mourning rite that kept a dead person's soul for a period before releasing it.
- The inipi, the purification lodge in which steam, glowing stones and prayer renew those who enter.
- Hanbleceya, the «crying for a vision», in which a person withdraws alone to a hilltop to pray.
- The Sun Dance, the great communal ceremony of summer.
- Hunkapi, the rite of «making relatives», which creates kinship bonds between people or between groups.
- The rite for the young woman, marking a girl's passage into adulthood.
- The throwing of the ball, a rite in which a girl throws a ball toward the directions and whoever catches it receives a blessing.
Each of these rites opens and closes with the pipe. It is the thread that holds them together.
Wakan Tanka and «all my relatives»
Behind the pipe lies a vision of the sacred that the Lakota call Wakan Tanka, an expression often translated as «Great Mystery». It does not mean a divine person separate from the world, but the totality of the sacred powers (wakan) present in the sky, the earth, the animals, the stones and the winds.
Many Lakota prayers end with the words mitákuye oyás'iŋ, «all my relatives» or «we are all related». It sums up what the pipe teaches: the one who prays does not speak only for himself, but on behalf of a family that includes every living being.
Respect and keeping
Sacred pipes are not collector's items. There are keepers, men and women, who hold responsibility for them, and the pipe that according to tradition was brought by White Buffalo Calf Woman is still entrusted to a keeper of the Lakota nation. Those who study these traditions from outside should remember that they are living religions, practised by communities that have known persecution and bans. Knowing the story is a way of honouring it; appropriating it with no bond to those who keep it is something else.
In short
- For the Lakota the sacred pipe is an altar joining earth and sky, not an ordinary object.
- The story of Ptesan Wi teaches that respect opens the way to the gift, while greed destroys.
- The stone bowl and the wooden stem are kept apart and joined only in the rite.
- Black Elk described the seven rites in The Sacred Pipe, published in 1953.
- The phrase «all my relatives» sums up the relational vision of the sacred.
