The fullest published account of White Buffalo Calf Woman's appearance comes down through Lakota oral tradition as recorded by ethnographers working directly with Lakota religious leaders, most extensively James R. Walker at Pine Ridge in the early twentieth century and later Joseph Epes Brown, who set down Black Elk's own telling of the Seven Sacred Rites. In the accounts they preserved, two young men out scouting during a period of hardship saw a woman approaching who radiated a strange light, and one, thinking to approach her with disrespect, was consumed by a cloud that descended around him, while the other returned to camp to report what he had seen and was told to prepare the people to receive her. She arrived at the camp circle, revealed herself to be wakan, sacred, and presented the Chanupa, instructing the people in how the bowl of red stone and the wooden stem, kept separate except in ceremony, were to be joined and smoked as a way of carrying prayer to Wakan Tanka.
Before leaving she is said to have taught what became known as the Seven Sacred Rites, the framework of ceremonial practice that structures much of traditional Lakota religious life, and to have promised she would return in a time of need. As she departed, she rolled over four times, changing color with each turn, and finally took the form of a white buffalo calf before disappearing over the horizon, an image that gives the rare birth of a white buffalo calf its standing among Lakota people today as a sign connected to her continuing presence.