Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality

Lakota Summit V met in June 1993 and drew representatives of Lakota, Dakota and Nakota communities from across the United States and Canada. On 10 June the assembly adopted, without a dissenting vote, a document titled a Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality. Its language is deliberate: it declares war, and it says plainly that the war is on a practice and not on a people.

The practice it names is the imitation and sale of Lakota ceremony by those who have no standing to conduct it, whether from outside the community altogether or from within it. The declaration speaks of imitation sweat lodge ceremonies, of vision quests and puberty ceremonies offered for money, and of the self-appointed teachers who conduct them, and it asks Lakota people to identify and confront such activity wherever it appears rather than to leave it to the courts, which offer no remedy. It is addressed as much to relatives who might be tempted to sell as to strangers who buy.

The distinction the text draws is not between Lakota and outsider but between ceremony given and ceremony sold. What is objected to is a transaction: a rite taken out of the community whose elders answer for it, priced, and repeated by someone accountable to nobody. Nothing about how any of these ceremonies is conducted appears here, and the atlas takes no position on the disputes inside Lakota country about where the line falls; the document's own words are the record.

Sources Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota SpiritualityLakota Summit V with Lakota Belief and RitualJames R. Walker; edited by Raymond J. DeMallie and Elaine A. Jahner

The declaration reads differently once its legal background is in view. From 1883 the federal Code of Indian Offenses made the ceremonies of the Plains nations punishable, and the Sun Dance in particular was suppressed for decades; the practices survived in private and in modified form. Only with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 did the United States formally acknowledge a right it had spent a century denying, and even that statute was found in the courts to carry no enforcement teeth. A community that had recently regained the legal freedom to hold its own ceremonies found them, within a few years, being sold at weekend workshops by people it had never authorised.

The commercial context was the spiritual marketplace that grew from the 1970s, in which books, retreats and paid ceremonies presented as Native teaching were produced largely for non-Native buyers. Vine Deloria Jr., the Standing Rock Sioux writer whose God Is Red argued that Native religion is inseparable from particular land and particular obligation, had already set out why such material cannot be transplanted: what is portable is information, and ceremony is not information.

The land dimension is not separate from it. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians in 1980 the Supreme Court found the 1877 taking of the Black Hills unlawful and awarded compensation, which the Lakota nations have declined to accept, because accepting payment would confirm a sale of country that includes their sacred sites. The refusal of money for the Hills and the refusal of money for ceremony are the same argument.

Sources God Is Red: A Native View of Religion, 30th anniversary editionVine Deloria Jr. with United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371Supreme Court of the United States