The Sky as Sacred Geography

In the Western tradition, astronomy and cosmology are sciences: quantitative, predictive, and rigorously separated from ethics, politics, and spiritual practice. The stars are objects, distant nuclear furnaces whose positions and movements obey mathematical laws. What they mean to human beings is a separate question, and for most contemporary scientists, not a scientific question at all.

For the Lakota people, the westernmost of the three subdivisions of the Great Sioux Nation (Lakota, Dakota, Nakota), whose traditional homeland centered on the Black Hills (Pahá Sápa, "the Heart of Everything That Is") in what is now South Dakota, this separation does not exist. Star knowledge (wiċháȟpi wóȟlake in Lakota) is not a proto-scientific precursor to modern astronomy that a more sophisticated understanding would eventually replace. It is an integrated cosmological system in which celestial movements, geographical places, ceremonial practices, ethical obligations, and spiritual identity are aspects of a single living order.

The foundational principle is elegant: What is on the earth is in the stars, and what is in the stars is on the earth. The Lakota constellations are not abstract patterns imposed on neutral space. They are mirror-images of sacred places and movements on the earth, primarily the Black Hills and the seasonal migrations of the people through them. When the sun moves through a particular constellation, it signals the time and place for a corresponding ceremony in the Black Hills. Sky and earth are synchronized, and human life finds its proper timing and location by attending to that synchronization.

This knowledge was painstakingly recovered and documented over more than fifteen years by researchers at Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation, interviewing dozens of elders, searching historical records, and making precise computations based on the precessional cycle of the earth's axis to establish ancient dates. Their work, compiled in Lakota Star Knowledge: Studies in Lakota Stellar Theology (Sinte Gleska University Press, 1992), was dedicated "to the Lakota people, who have for decades hidden the star knowledge in their hearts, but who are now reaching over the walls of prejudice to share it with their brothers and sisters of every continent."

The Lakota sky is inhabited, not empty. Stars are called "the holy breath of Wakan Tanka", woniya, the divine breath or life-force of the Great Mystery. Observing their movement is not mere astronomical record-keeping; it is receiving spiritual instruction. And the relationship between humans and stars is intimate in a way that goes deeper than metaphor: according to Lakota tradition, every Lakota baby born is given a wanagi, a spirit from a star. They live with this wanagi throughout their life, and when they die, it leaves the body and travels to the cup of the Big Dipper before moving along the Milky Way, the Wanagi Tacanku, the Spirit Path, on its journey back to the star nation.

According to Lakota tradition, every Lakota baby that is born is given a wanagi, a spirit from a star. We live our lives here on this earth with that wanagi. Then when we die, that wanagi leaves our body and it goes to the cup of the Big Dipper. [...] The star nation is one, and that is this idea of relatives throughout the universe. All Lakotas are related to stars.

— Craig Howe, Director of the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies, SDPB 'Lakota Star Knowledge, Milky Way Spirit Path' (2018)