White Buffalo Calf Woman

Lakota oral tradition tells that long ago, in a year of famine, two scouts searching for buffalo met a beautiful woman in white buckskin carrying a bundle. One scout approached her with lust; a cloud descended, and when it lifted only his bones remained. The other stood in awe, and she sent him back to have the people raise a sacred lodge to receive her. Entering the camp, she gave the people the chanunpa, the sacred pipe: its bowl of red stone standing for the earth and the blood of the people, its wooden stem for all that grows, twelve feathers hung from it belonging to the spotted eagle. Smoke rising from the pipe carries prayer directly to Wakan Tanka.

She stayed four days and taught the Seven Sacred Rites that center on the pipe, from the keeping of the soul and the sweat lodge to the vision quest, the Sun Dance, the making of relatives, the girl's coming-of-age, and the throwing of the ball. Leaving the camp, she rolled on the prairie four times, rising in turn as a black, a brown, a red, and finally a white buffalo before vanishing. The birth of a white buffalo calf has been the most sacred of signs to the Lakota ever since.

In 1947 the Oglala holy man Black Elk gave a full account of her coming and of the seven rites to the scholar Joseph Epes Brown, published in 1953 as The Sacred Pipe, the tradition's most important written record. The original Calf Pipe she left is said to pass down an unbroken line of keepers, held today by Arvol Looking Horse, the nineteenth keeper, at Green Grass on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.