Many Native American emergence stories surround Wind Cave National Park. Sina Bear Eagles from the National Park Service shares with us one of the most common.
Sina Bear Eagle:
My name is Sina Bear Eagle and I'm a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe. Wind Cave is very special to us. In our language we call it Oniya Oshoka or Maka Oniye which means the earth is breathing. The reason this cave is so special to us is that this is the site of our Emergence Story, which is part of our larger Creation Story.
Now, in Lakota culture, culture and history are passed on through an oral tradition, that is stories going from generation to generation. For that reason there can be a lot of variations of the same story but in our culture what's important to us is not the smaller details but the larger idea. The larger idea in any story you hear about Wind Cave is that Lakota people emerged out of Wind Cave. This story was passed on to me by Wilmer Mesteth who was our tribal historian and an elder in our tribe.
Wilmer unfortunately passed away towards the beginning of 2015, but in our culture, when our elders pass away like this, the way that we honor them and keep their memory alive is to keep telling the stories they told us and to keep teaching the things that they taught us.
What emergence means in an anthropological sense is that a people believe that they lived underground and they emerged onto the surface of the earth. The story I tell is a little different because in this story Wind Cave is a passageway and somewhere hidden deep inside this passageway is a portal to the spirit world. That's where the people were living and they were waiting until the earth was ready for them.
So the story begins at a time when the earth was here and all the plants and animals but there were no people yet and there were no bison either. There were two spirits who had been banished to the surface of the earth. Their names were Iktomi, the trickster spirit, and Anog-Ite, the double-faced woman. This was a woman who had two faces on her head. On one side she had a really beautiful face and on the other she had a really horrible face, it was twisted and gnarled.
Now, these two spirits only had each other for company so Iktomi was always playing tricks on Anog-Ite, just bothering her and torturing her, and she really hated him until he started to get bored. He decided he was going to play a trick on the human beings. So he asked for Anog-Ite's help and he told her that if she helped him then he would never bother her again and so she agreed.
So to begin the trick, Anog-Ite took a pack. She loaded this pack with buckskin clothing that was beautifully decorated with porcupine quillwork, with all kinds of berries and dried meats, and she put it onto the back of her wolf companion. Iktomi the trickster opened a hole in the ground and sent the wolf down inside through the cave's passageways until it found the portal and went through to meet the humans.:
You know, once there it showed them everything that was on its back and they took out the clothes and they passed them around and tried them on and tasted the berries but it was the meat that they really liked because there's nothing like that in the spirit world, they wanted more. So the wolf told them, "If you come with me to this place called the earth you can have all these things and more."
Well, the leader of the people was a man named Tokahe and he didn't want to go. He said, "The Creator told us to wait here till the earth was ready and that's what I'm going to do." Most of the people decided to wait with Tokahe but the ones who had tasted the meat went with the wolf. So the wolf led them through the dark passages of the cave and when they came up to the surface the very first thing they saw was a giant blue sky above them. And it was summertime so all the hills around there were covered in green and yellow grasses and these people thought this was the most beautiful place they'd ever seen. The wolf led them to the lodge of Anog-Ite and she was in disguise. She had a shawl over her head hiding her horrible face and showing only her beautiful face. She invited them inside, she fed them, and she told them that she would teach them how to get everything the wolf brought.
And she was true to her word. She taught them how to hunt and to gather berries, dry meat, quill clothing, but this work was very difficult and these people actually had an easy life in the spirit world so they worked slowly and they got tired easily. You have to remember, they knew nothing about the seasons on the earth so when winter came they weren't ready for it. They didn't have enough clothes for everyone or enough food so they started to freeze and starve and they were desperate for help so they went back to Anog-Ite but it was at that time that she revealed her true intentions. She pulled the shawl from her head, revealing her horrible face. And with both her faces, beautiful and horrible, she started to laugh at the people. The people were all terrified of her so they ran away back to the hole they'd come from only to find that Iktomi had closed it up again, leaving them trapped on the surface.
So these people didn't know what to do or where to go. They were cold and they were hungry so they just sat down on the ground and they started to cry. Well, it was at that time that the Creator heard them and asked why they were there. They told the story of the wolf and Anog-Ite but the Creator was upset. The Creator said, "You should not have disobeyed me because now I have to punish you." The way the Creator did that was by transforming them, turning them from people to these great wild beasts. And this was the first bison herd.
So some time passed and finally the earth was ready. Tokahe led the people out of the cave and along the way they stopped four times to rest and to pray. For that reason, four is a sacred number in Lakota culture. And when they emerged from the cave they saw everything the people before them did, but there was also a bison hoofprint on the ground. The Creator told them to, "Follow that bison because if you follow the bison, you'll have everything you need to live on this earth. From it you can get food, clothing, shelter, it leads you to water."
And as the people were leaving to follow the bison, the Creator did one more thing and that was to shrink down the hole from the size of a person down to the size it is today so that the people would always have it and they'd never forget where they came from but also, so that they'd know not to try to go back to the spirit world because their lives were on the earth now.