Maka

Maka, the earth, is recorded as one of the four Superior gods in the Walker ethnographic system, standing as the source and mother of all growing, living things and forming the necessary complement to Skan's sky and Wi's sun within Lakota cosmology's foundational structure, an earth whose fertility and stability the people's continued survival directly depends on. Devotion to Maka runs through Lakota religious practice at both the most solemn ceremonial level and the most everyday level: formal rites including the sun dance and the sweat lodge, inikagapi, are understood as conducted in direct physical and spiritual relationship with the earth, while individual prayer often involves direct physical contact with the ground itself, kneeling or placing the hands on the earth, as an embodied expression of relationship with Maka rather than an abstract, purely verbal address.

The Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyasin, "all my relations" or "we are all related", commonly used to close prayers and ceremonies, reflects the broader Lakota theological principle that Maka's earth and everything it sustains, plants, animals and people together, form one interrelated family rather than a resource external to human concern.

Devotion to Maka in Lakota tradition is inseparable from a specific, named sacred landscape, above all the Black Hills, Paha Sapa, in present-day South Dakota, understood as profoundly sacred ground central to Lakota origin narratives and ongoing religious practice, and the site of one of the most significant and still unresolved conflicts between Lakota religious and treaty rights and United States federal law. The 1980 Supreme Court decision in United States v.

Sioux Nation of Indians found that the Black Hills had been illegally taken from the Lakota in violation of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty and ordered financial compensation, an award Lakota nations have consistently refused to accept, insisting on the return of the land itself rather than payment, since the Black Hills' significance is understood as religious and relational to Maka rather than only economic or historical, a position that remains unresolved in the twenty-first century. This ongoing legal and political struggle over Paha Sapa is a direct, living expression of Maka's continuing religious significance to Lakota communities today, not merely a historical episode from the nineteenth century.