The Social Memory of Pté Sáŋ Wíŋ: Indigenous History and Oral Tradition in a Lakota Origin Story

Since the early 1900s, the Lakota origin story of the sacred pipe has been told and retold many times. A central symbol of Lakota religion facilitating communication between the human and spirit worlds, the sacred pipe is an instrument of prayer and a portable altar of sacrificial offerings, reflecting the symbiotic relationship between the Lakota and the buffalo as well as their culture’s high regard for the female as representing the sacred. This article reexamines the story of the sacred pipe, arguing that the earliest written reports in the ethnographic literature are not only inconsistent but inadequate in understanding its historical emergence, rendering suspect normative Western assumptions of historiography that privilege written texts and documents over oral narrative and tradition. I argue that Lakota oral traditions contain both alternative and counternarratives of the pipe symbolically embedded within those early ethnographic reports and that social memory theory provides contemporary researchers with a cogent way to understand how and why the story of the pipe was subject to modification even while its historical narratives produced distorting “memories” of the past.