A Living Storytelling Tradition

Iktomi stories continue to be actively told and retold within Lakota communities and have also reached wider audiences through published collections and children's literature, a circulation that Lakota educators and cultural authorities have approached with some caution, given the same broader concerns about outside use and mistranslation of Lakota religious and cultural material reflected in the Lakota Summit V declaration against exploitation of Lakota spirituality, since a trickster tale told outside its proper storytelling season, context or by someone without standing to tell it can lose or distort the teaching function the story is meant to carry within the community. Within Walker's recorded Lakota cosmological system, Iktomi occupies a place distinct from the four Superior gods and the more solemn ceremonial figures of Lakota religion, situated instead among a category of more actively mischievous, unpredictable wakan beings, reflecting a broader and very common pattern across world mythology in which a culture's most solemn creation and sky deities coexist alongside a separate, more freewheeling trickster figure who operates by different, often inverted, rules.