A General Outline of Lakota Sioux Philosophy::

Concepts of Life and Death I

All living things have a spiritual as well as a physical aspect. More broadly, there is an invisible component to visible life. All living things - including humans, animals, birds and plants - have four spiritual aspects, described as niya, nagi, sicun and Skan or nagila. Tun is the wakan power inherent in all things that can transform an object between invisibility to visibility. Tun means to give birth to or to create and is the potentiality inherent in all things to become wakan, through ritual. Lynd described the four spirits in relation to humans, though they can be applied to all living things:

"The first is supposed to be a spirit of the body, which dies with the body. The second is a spirit which always remains with or near the body. Another is the soul which accounts for the deeds of the body, and is supposed by some to go to the south, by others to the west, after the death of the body. The fourth always lingers with the small bundle of the hair of the deceased, kept by the relatives until they have a chance to throw it into the enemy's country, when it becomes a roving spirit, bringing death and disease to the enemy in whose country it remains" (1864: 68, 80).¹

Of niya, the Oglala educator, Arthur Amiotte wrote:

"This soul is very much a part of the body, for it is this that gives life to the organism, that causes it to live and to have its limited movement in the life process. […] [I]f a person's Niya leaves his body […] and re-enters the spirit world, the body is quite without motion and the Niya must be retrieved and reintegrated with the body" (1992: 164, 165).²

Niya is derived from woniya, spirit, life, breath. In relation to humans, niya is the life-breath of an individual. When the body is weak, it may be because the niya is weak or has departed the body, and thus can be restored to health through ritual means, such as taking an inipi (to live again; also inikagapi, to make live, breath or steam) or sweat. When the niya departs the body for good, the body decomposes.

Nagi is derived from wanagi, translated as ghost or shadow. It is the 'soul' that shadows the body through life and that often remains to linger on earth when the niya has left the body. Amiotte wrote that its nature is often capricious and unpredictable, "depending on the nature of the person or thing" it shadows (1992: 166). Elsewhere, he wrote that the personality of the individual inheres within his or her nagi (Amiotte 1987: 87).³ Powers wrote:

"The wanagi, particularly right after death, is dangerous because it grieves for its loved ones and will try to entice its family to join it. In order to appease the wanagi, the parents or loved ones will "keep" it for one year. Ghost keeping is accomplished by feeding the wanagi. Sacred men can learn things from it, particularly how to cure the sick" (1975: 53).⁴

After the wanagi have been released, they depart from the earth along the wanagi yata, or the wanagi tacanku - the 'Spirit Path' or the Milky Way. The stars in the Milky Way are caused by the glow from the wanagi's campfires. Brown wrote that at the end of the Spirit Trail the wanagi are met by an old woman known as Maya owichapaha who judges the souls. Those who she judges worthy travels on to the land of the spirits (wanagi yata) whilst the unfortunates are pushed over the bank to remain forever roaming the earth and causing some degree of mayhem to the living, or else go through some form of cleansing so that their purified forms can enter the wanagi yata (1953: 29, n.13).⁵ Other writers wrote that it is Skan, who imparted each thing with a soul at its birth, who judges the souls upon death, and that it is Tate who sits are the edge of the Milky Way (for example, Walker 1917: 86-87).⁶ Standing Bear said that no soul, "not even the wicked", are excluded from the spirit world (1933: 197).⁷ Few of my own research participants spoke of a spiritual judicial process, saying simply that the spirits of the dead return from whence they came - the spirit realm; but this does not mean there are no Lakota today who do not believe in the existence of a judgement procedure.

One of my research participants described the Milky Way and the soul's journey after death in this way:

"The Milky Way is considered the Spirit Road. It's the way the spirits gather and get on that road and travel. After one year, after you die, the one year after your spirit is released [through the Releasing of the Soul ceremony] then you're up, you're gone on a four-day journey. Now, down here on earth as common people we understand what a day means - we understand it from a clock, twenty-four hour time, that's a day. Or if it's daylight, we can understand it from sun-up to sun-down. And from the night to the next day. Okay, that to us is a day. But in a spiritual language sense, four time units could be forever or [clicks his fingers quickly] instant. We don't under… we don't know that part. All we know is that the first day of the journey, we go to every place that we've been to while we were alive on earth. From the place we died we travel all over until we come back to the place again. In the second phase of the journey, we [spirit] go through a period of darkness. That's where, our belief is that, we [human relatives and friends of spirit] do a lot of praying, do a lot of praying for our loved ones [spirit] to clear that darkness because if that doesn't happen, that person [spirit] could be stuck in the darkness. The third is we're cleared to move into another dimension of life. And the fourth is he's accepted into where the souls of other people are at. We know that, so that when we're going to drink water or eat food, anything like that, we always set some out, because we know a lot of our people went into the second phase and got stuck in the darkness. So we have to feed the spirits. So that's a way of… the belief that… because God created us like this" (1998).

Notes::

• 1 - James W. Lynd. 1864. "The Religion of the Dakotas." Minnesota Historical Society Collections. 2 (2): 150-174. 2d ed., 1881.
• 2 - Arthur Amiotte. 1992. "Our Other Selves." D.M. Dooling and Paul Jordan-Smith, eds. 161172. I Become Part of It: Sacred Dimensions in Native American Life. New York: HarperCollins.
• 3 - Arthur Amiotte. 1987. "The Lakota Sun Dance: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives." Rayrnond J. DeMallie and Douglas R Parks, eds. 75-89. Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• 4 - William K. Powers. 1975. Oglala Religion. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
• 5 - Joseph Epes Brown, ed. 1953. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
• 6 - James R. Walker. 1917. "The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota." Anthropological Papers. 16 (2): 51-221. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
• 7 - Luther Standing Bear. 1933. Land of the Spotted Eagle. Boston/New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.