White Buffalo Calf Woman

Two scouts lay flat in the bunchgrass on a rise, watching something come toward them out of the heat shimmer. The herds had moved off that season and the camp behind them had been eating badly for weeks, which was why the two of them were out this far in the first place. What crossed the grass was not a rider, and it was not an animal. It resolved into a woman walking alone, in a dress of white buckskin bleached almost to the colour of bone, and on one arm she carried something wrapped in sagebrush.

She stopped at a distance and looked directly at their hiding place. Then, though the wind was against her and they had said nothing above a murmur, she answered what one of them had just said.

He had said he wanted her for a wife. His companion had told him to look properly at what was in front of him, that no ordinary woman walks the open country alone with a bundle and no fear, and that whatever she was, she was not for wanting. The advice went nowhere. The first man walked down the slope and put his hands on her.

What came down over the pair of them was described afterwards as a whirlwind, or a cloud, or a rolling mist. It lasted only a moment. When it thinned out the woman was standing exactly where she had stood before, unmarked, still holding the bundle, and at her feet lay a heap of bones picked clean and dry, as though the man had been dead for a decade rather than a breath.

The survivor got his bow half up before she stopped him with her voice. She could see what was in him, she said, and it was not what had been in his friend. He was to go back to the camp, tell the people who was coming, and have them raise a large lodge facing the right way and prepare to receive her properly. He went.

She came the next day, singing as she walked into the circle. The song the Lakota kept for that moment is plain to the point of starkness. With visible breath I am walking. A voice I am sending as I walk. In a sacred manner I am walking. With visible tracks I am walking. On a cold morning a person walking toward you across the prairie is preceded by their own breath, and that is the image she chose for herself: something whose passage can be seen.

Inside the lodge she opened the bundle. The pipe she lifted out had a bowl of red stone with a buffalo calf carved into it, facing inward, and a stem of wood, and twelve feathers from the spotted eagle hanging where the two joined. She told them what each part stood for. The red stone was the earth and everything that walks on four legs; the wooden stem was everything that grows out of that earth; the feathers were the birds and the whole of the air. Smoke it, she said, and all of them are joined to you. When you pray with this, you pray with everything there is, and not merely for yourself.

Then she taught the ceremonies. Black Elk’s account, given to Joseph Epes Brown in the late 1940s, lists seven: the keeping and releasing of a soul, the purification lodge, the crying for a vision, the sun dance, the making of relatives, the girl’s passage into womanhood, and the throwing of the ball. Each one has the pipe somewhere inside it. Taken together they are less a set of rituals than a working definition of how a person is supposed to stand in relation to their dead, their relatives, their own hunger and the sky.

She stayed four days by most tellings, and then she left the way she had come. Outside the opening of the camp circle she stopped, lay down in the grass and rolled, and got up a black buffalo. She did it again and rose red, again and rose brown or yellow depending on who is telling it, and the fourth time she stood up a white buffalo cow, spotless, and walked north until the ground took her out of sight.

The story did not reach print through one channel, which is worth saying because it is often assumed it did. Marie L. McLaughlin, who was of Sioux descent and had lived on the reservations for forty years, published a version in 1916 in which the pipe is given to a good man named Bull Walking Upright, who kept it into his hundreds and passed it to a man called Sunrise. Five years before that, at Standing Rock in 1911, a man named Isnala Wica, Lone Man, told the narrative to Frances Densmore; Robert P. Higheagle translated it, at least ten Lakota men vouched for its accuracy, and it went into her *Teton Sioux Music* in 1918 as the account of how the pipe came to the Itazipco, the Sans Arc, who received it in the name of all the common people. Densmore also got Charging Thunder to sing the Song of the White Buffalo Maiden into a wax cylinder while she was there, so the tune survives as sound and not only as words on a page. In another version recorded later she appears at Wind Cave in the Black Hills, Wašúŋ Niyá, the breathing place, where the fog comes out of the ground and where the animals are said to have entered the world.

When she came is a harder question and nobody pretends otherwise. The keepers of the pipe count nineteen generations of stewardship, which puts the encounter roughly four centuries back. Some tribal histories place her arrival much later, in the closing decades of the eighteenth century, during the difficult migration out of the Great Lakes country and onto the plains, at exactly the moment a people were becoming a buffalo people and needed to know what that obliged them to. Both datings are held by Lakota who know their own history. Neither has displaced the other.

Some Lakota identify her with Wóȟpe, the daughter of the sky power Skáŋ, whose name is bound up with falling stars and whose office is mediation and peace, and who is understood to have appeared before under another form. Others keep the two distinct. The material collected from Oglala holy men by James R. Walker between 1896 and 1914 runs the two together in places, and the disagreement has never been settled, mostly because it does not need to be.

Her powers are all of a piece with her errand. She sees intention, which is why one scout died and the other was trusted with a message. She moves between the Buffalo Nation and the human one as an emissary, and can wear either shape. She hands over something permanent, which is rarer in myth than it sounds; most divine visitors take something away or set a condition nobody can meet.

Her limits are just as plain. She did not stay. What she left behind can be neglected, and the tradition is explicit that if the pipe is forgotten the people will not last. She made her return conditional on the ceremonies being kept, which puts the outcome in human hands rather than hers, and she has not yet come back. The bundle itself is not a story. It is kept at Green Grass on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota, in the care of Arvol Looking Horse, who took the responsibility at twelve years old and is counted the nineteenth keeper.

In 1994 a white buffalo calf was born on a farm in Wisconsin and was given the name Miracle, and Looking Horse went and performed the rite of the four directions over her. Others have been born since. Every one of them draws visitors from a long way off, carrying tobacco and cloth and questions, because the promise she made on her way out of the circle has never been withdrawn.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is White Buffalo Calf Woman?

White Buffalo Calf Woman, Ptesáŋwiŋ in Lakota, is a sacred woman sent from the Buffalo Nation who brought the Lakota people the sacred pipe and the seven rites that accompany it. She appeared during a time of hunger, taught the people how to pray and how to treat one another, and left by transforming into a white buffalo. She is central to Lakota religion as it is practised today, not only as it was in the past.

What did White Buffalo Calf Woman give the Lakota?

She gave them the čhaŋnúŋpa, the sacred pipe, along with instructions for its use and the seven ceremonies built around it. The pipe she brought had a red stone bowl carved with a buffalo calf, a wooden stem, and twelve spotted eagle feathers, and she explained each part as standing for a different order of living things. The bundle containing that pipe is still kept on the Cheyenne River Reservation in South Dakota.

What are the seven sacred rites she taught?

According to Black Elk’s account, published by Joseph Epes Brown in 1953, they are the keeping and releasing of the soul, the purification lodge, the crying for a vision, the sun dance, the making of relatives, the girl’s coming of age ceremony, and the throwing of the ball. The pipe is used in all of them. Together they cover a person’s obligations to the dead, to relatives, to the spirit world and to the community.

Why did one of the two scouts die?

The first scout looked at her with lust and reached for her despite being warned that she was wakȟáŋ, holy. A cloud or whirlwind came down over the pair, and when it cleared only his bones remained. The second scout, who had recognised what she was and shown respect, was left unharmed and sent back to prepare the camp for her arrival.

Is White Buffalo Calf Woman expected to return?

Yes. She promised to come back, and Lakota tradition ties that return to the people keeping the ceremonies she taught. The birth of rare white buffalo calves, beginning with a calf named Miracle born in Wisconsin in 1994, has been read by many Lakota as a sign that the promise is still live.

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