Wakinyan

The West Wind stood on a mountaintop at the edge of the world and asked to see what was making the noise. He had been warned. A swallow had come up out of the round lodge in front of him, a lodge with no door and open at the top, and said plainly that anyone who looked on the real Winged God would spend the rest of his life doing everything backwards. Eya asked anyway.

What rose out of the lodge had no proper body. It came up shapeless, like a cloud of smoke, and out of the smoke came an eagle’s beak with four rows of teeth in it, set like a wolf’s. It had one eye, and the glance of that eye was the lightning. Its wings folded at four joints. It had no legs, only eight toes, and every talon ran the length of an eagle’s wing. Beside the lodge stood a great cedar, and high in the cedar sat a nest built of dried bones with an enormous egg in it, something inside the shell already pecking to get out. The thing took the egg in its talons and shook it, and the long rolling crack of that sound was what had emptied the mountain of the other three Winds an hour earlier.

Wakinyan means the flyer. The name sits on kiŋyaŋ, to fly, and it gives away exactly as much as the people who used it meant to give away. Lightning is not a weapon he carries. It is what comes off him, the way heat comes off a fire. Thunder is not an effect of the storm. It is his voice, in the same plain sense that your voice is yours.

That smoke-and-beak shape was one account of him. Further east, among the Dakota of the Minnesota country, the wakan men said there were four kinds of Wakinyan and that in essence the four were one. The first is black, long-beaked, four joints to the wing. The second is yellow and has no beak at all, and only six quills in each wing. The third is scarlet, and the notable thing about him is the eight joints in each enormous pinion. The fourth is blue and round as a ball, without eyes or ears; where the eyes should sit there is a half-moon of lightning turned upside down, and out from under it two chains of lightning run downward, zigzagging apart as they fall, with two plumes of soft down near their roots serving him for wings. Nobody describing that fourth one was trying to describe a bird.

They keep a house. The world in these tellings is a circular plain ringed by water, and at its western rim stands a high mountain with a beautiful mound on the summit, and on the mound sits the palace of the whole thunder family. It opens at each of the four directions, and every doorway has a watcher: a butterfly at the east, a bear at the west, a reindeer at the north, a beaver at the south. Each of them is wrapped to the neck in scarlet down of the finest softness anyone thought to put in the story, standing guard over the loudest thing in it.

Down on the rivers the work was less decorative. A bluff along the Missouri leans, sags and slides into the brown water, and the people who watched it come down knew what they had just seen. The thunder had come for Unktehi, the horned monster that lives underneath, and had either found him or not. Great bones weathering out of the clay were read the same way. Those were Unktehi that the Wakinyan had killed, and they were gathered and kept and handled carefully, because what is left of a god still carries what the god had.

The war between the winged and the horned is old and it is never fought in the open. Neither can survive being struck by the other’s tonwan, the emanated force that does the actual harm, so neither will risk a straight fight, and the entire campaign runs on ambush and vigilance. The thunder gods lose sometimes. A man who said he was there described a Wakinyan that had been killed and had fallen on the bank of the Blue Earth river, and put the distance between its wingtips at twenty-five or thirty yards.

For all the cruelty in the descriptions, and there is plenty of it, the Winged God is a giver. The spear and the tomahawk came from him, and so did the pigments that, correctly applied, turn an enemy’s weapons off a man’s body and leave him feeling armoured. The thunderers made the wild rice, and a prairie grass whose seed looks a great deal like it. The same beings who are called ruthless and permanently on the war path also stocked the marshes.

Then there is the price of looking, which the swallow had not invented. To see the true Winged God is to become heyoka, and a heyoka lives against nature for the rest of his days: shivering in August, complaining of the heat in a blizzard, saying no when he means yes, mounting a horse from the wrong side and riding away facing the tail. This is an institution, not a punchline in a story. Men who dreamed of the thunder took the obligation on, and the ceremonies that discharged it were public and unavoidable. One of the heyoka gods is described carrying a drum full of lightning, and for a drumstick he holds a small Wakinyan by the tail and strikes the drumhead with the god’s own beak. Nobody meant that as an insult to the thunder. The more absurd a thing was, the more wakan it was held to be, and this is a tradition that believed that firmly enough to build a drum out of it.

Eya, who had looked and had not run, came out of it better than most. Because he had stood there without falling down, the voice told him he would be the companion of Wakinyan forever and would help him clean the world of filthy and evil things. He chose the swallow for his messenger. Since then, when the West Wind comes on with the thunder behind it, the swallows fly high in circles, which anyone who has watched the air go strange before a summer storm has seen for themselves.

The obligation runs the other way too, and it is not gentle. When a holy man was struck dead by lightning, and it happened, the people who had listened to him teach about the Wakinyan did not conclude that he had been unlucky. They concluded that everything he had told them was true and that his own sins had drawn it down on him. That is the shape of the relationship. The thunder is not asked to be fair. It is asked to come, and it comes with the west in the early summer, and on the sundance grounds people still say the name when the sky darkens over the arbour and the wind starts pulling at the lodge poles.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Wakinyan?

Wakinyan is the winged thunder god of the Lakota and Dakota peoples, whose name means “the flyer.” Lightning is the power that emanates from him and thunder is the sound of his voice. He is counted among the great wakan powers and lives on a mountain at the western edge of the world.

What does Wakinyan look like?

The oldest Oglala description gives him no fixed body: a shapeless mass like a cloud of smoke, an eagle’s beak holding four rows of wolf-like teeth, a single eye whose glance is lightning, four-jointed wings, and eight taloned toes with no legs beneath them. Dakota accounts instead describe four Wakinyan of different colours, one black, one yellow, one scarlet and one blue and globular with no eyes or ears, while insisting the four are really one being.

Who is Wakinyan’s enemy?

Unktehi, the horned water monster, is Wakinyan’s permanent enemy. Neither can withstand the other’s tonwan, the emanated power that does the damage, so they never fight openly and instead hunt each other by ambush. Collapsed river bluffs were understood as the marks of these attacks, and large fossil bones found in the clay were taken to be Unktehi that the thunder had killed.

What happens if you see Wakinyan?

Anyone who sees the true form of the Winged God must become heyoka and live in an anti-natural way for the rest of their life, doing and saying the opposite of what is expected. This was a real religious obligation taken on by men who dreamed of the thunder, not merely a detail in a story. Seeing the figure called Heyoka rather than the Winged God itself carried no such obligation.

What did Wakinyan give to people?

The Dakota traced the spear and the tomahawk to Wakinyan, along with the protective pigments that were believed to turn an enemy’s weapons aside when properly applied. The thunder beings were also credited with creating wild rice and a similar-seeded prairie grass. The same god described as ruthless and always on the war path was therefore also a provider of food and of war medicine.

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