Lakota medicine

The Lakota are the westernmost people of the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires, whom outsiders called the Sioux. Their eastern relatives are the Dakota and the Nakota. The Lakota themselves consist of seven groups, among them the Oglala, the Sičháŋǧu (Brulé) and the Hunkpapa. In English they are also called the Teton Sioux.

According to the historical record their ancestors lived by the western Great Lakes and were pushed west by the Anishinaabe and the Cree in the seventeenth century. Around 1730 they acquired the horse, and the buffalo hunt became their livelihood. According to their own tradition the people once emerged from Wind Cave in the Black Hills, so their journey west was a return home. The Black Hills, Ȟe Sápa, became the centre of their land.

In the stories White Buffalo Calf Woman brought the sacred pipe and taught the people the ceremonies. In the nineteenth century the Lakota made treaties with the United States, in 1851 and 1868, which promised them the Black Hills. When gold was found there, the government no longer kept to the treaty. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 the groups were forced onto reservations. In 1890 Sitting Bull was killed at Standing Rock, and two weeks later the army killed more than 250 Lakota at Wounded Knee, many of them women and children.

On the reservations the government banned the Sun Dance and other ceremonies. Around 1912 the ethnologist Frances Densmore wrote that healing with sacred stones and conjuring over the sick were forbidden, but that some old men were allowed to go on treating the sick with herbs.

Wakȟáŋ means holy or mysterious: everything that has a power beyond human understanding. Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, the Great Mystery, is the sum of those powers. A plant, a stone or an animal can be wakȟáŋ.

The power to heal did not come from a book or a training, but from a dream or vision. No one treated the sick without a dream that told him to, and each healer treated only the illnesses for which his dream had given him the remedies. The healer Shooter explained to Densmore that a healer did not try to dream of all herbs, for then he would fail in everything. That, he said, was why the healers lost their power when so many new diseases came with the white people.

The bear was the animal that knows the herbs, because it digs up roots with its claws. The badger digs even deeper; its remedies were for children.

Illness and healing belong to the relationship between people, animals, plants and the spirits. Whoever heals sings the song that goes with the herb, and asks Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka that the herb do its work. Before giving a child a remedy, Eagle Shield said: 'Wakȟáŋ Tȟáŋka, you have made these herbs. We are going to give them to this child. We hope you will make the child well.'

The Lakota told Densmore of three ways of healing. The highest healers worked with the sacred stones; they could also call fine weather and acted as intercessor in the Sun Dance. Whoever conjured was called wapíya, 'one who repairs'. Whoever healed with herbs was called pezu'ta wica'hu, 'one who places his confidence in the roots of herbs'. A healer could use more than one way, but was known for the one he used most.

Eagle Shield received his remedies for adults from the bear and those for children from the badger. He kept them in a bag of mink skin and buried a little tobacco as an offering to the badger whenever he dug up a root. He treated wounds with yarrow, 'the herb for the wounded', which he chewed and laid on the wound. In this way he cured a man who had been shot through the body; his fee was a hundred dollars, a tent, a revolver and a steer. He rubbed broken bones three times a day with the root of wild four-o'clock in fat, under a splint of rawhide. For kidney pain he gave blue lettuce, for bleeding and earache prairie coneflower, and for headache he let the powdered root of fringed sage smoulder on glowing coals, so the smoke could be breathed in. With the root of wild licorice he sang a bear song, but never more than three times: 'My paw is sacred, all things are sacred.'

For children he used, among other things, horseweed for diarrhoea and bowel pain. He gave the remedy with a small spoon of white bone and said you had to smell the tea to judge its strength.

Bear-with-White-Paw sang one song for all his herbs. When visiting the sick he wore a necklace with two small bags of medicine and a bear claw, which he pressed into the skin so the remedy could enter more easily. He used narrow-leaved echinacea for toothache, bowel pain and tonsillitis, the flowers of wild bergamot for fever and a hard cold, and fringed puccoon for coughing up blood.

Another well-known ceremony of purification and healing is the inípi, the sweat lodge. The name means roughly 'they make themselves live again'.

The knowledge is oral and is passed on in the ceremonies. The winter counts, painted hides with one image for each year, keep the history.

In the 1910s Frances Densmore recorded hundreds of songs with a phonograph on the Standing Rock and Sisseton reservations. In Teton Sioux Music (1918) she also wrote down what the healers told her about their herbs. She had the plants identified at the Smithsonian. In 1919 Melvin Gilmore described the plants of the peoples along the Missouri, with their Dakota and Lakota names.

Black Elk, an Oglala healer, told his visions to John Neihardt, who published them in 1932 as Black Elk Speaks, and later to Joseph Epes Brown, for The Sacred Pipe. Sioux writers and scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr. have since written about their own history and religion.

The herbalist Stephen Buhner quoted much of Densmore's material in Sacred Plant Medicine (1996). Here we follow Densmore herself, because Buhner mixes up some of the remedies.

Most Lakota live on five reservations in South Dakota: Pine Ridge, Rosebud, Lower Brule, Cheyenne River and Standing Rock, which also lies in North Dakota. Other communities are in Nebraska, Montana and the Canadian prairie provinces. In 1980 the Supreme Court awarded the Sioux nations compensation for the taking of the Black Hills. They refuse the money, because accepting it would end their claim to the land. With interest, the account now holds more than a billion dollars.

Since the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 the ceremonies are protected again. The Sun Dance, the sweat lodge and the vision quest are held, and Lakota is taught at schools and colleges. In 2016 thousands of people went to Standing Rock to protest against an oil pipeline under the Missouri, under the slogan 'Mni wičóni', water is life.

The herbs in Densmore's notes grow on the prairie: yarrow for wounds, narrow-leaved echinacea, which Gilmore calls the remedy used for more ailments than any other, and wild bergamot, which the Lakota boil for stomach pain and fever.

The pasqueflower is the first to bloom in spring, often still among the snow. In Lakota the flower is called hokší čhekpa, 'child's navel', because the bud looks like the healing navel of a newborn baby. The Dakota call it 'twin flower', because a plant usually has two flowering stems. Gilmore wrote that the peoples of the prairie had stories and songs about almost every plant and animal.

Prairie sage is burned to purify; Gilmore writes that every ceremony began with sage. Together with tobacco, sweetgrass and cedar, sage is one of the four sacred medicines of many prairie peoples. Ground plum is called pte ta wote in Dakota, 'buffalo food'; the Lakota gave it to horses as medicine.

In 1993 Lakota, Dakota and Nakota leaders adopted a declaration against the exploitation of their spirituality. They asked non-Native people not to lead or sell sweat lodges, pipe ceremonies or vision quests. In 2003 the keeper of the White Buffalo Calf Pipe asked outsiders to stop taking part in the Sun Dance. That is why nothing here describes how to perform those ceremonies.

The knowledge in this story was written down by Densmore and Gilmore, but it comes from healers such as Eagle Shield, Bear-with-White-Paw, Shooter and Jaw. It belongs to their families and communities.

Some prairie plants are poisonous. Use pasqueflower only externally. Many species of Astragalus look like ground plum and are poisonous.