Making Relatives

Originally established to ceremonially sanctify the great love of a man for his adopted children, this rite would later include all adoptive relations. “When a Lakota had a good heart towards another,” according to Ringing Shield, such a person “could adopt a brother, or a sister, or a parent, or a child.” Deloria wrote that “kinship rose to its sublime height” when, in rare instances, the relatives of a murdered man might even adopt the murderer “to be one of them in place of his victim.”

The first person adopted by Lakotans was White Buffalo Woman, which thereby established a kin relationship, symbolized by the Buffalo Calf Pipe, between the Lakota and Buffalo nations. “For this reason,” Higheagle claimed, “the essential article in the ceremony is the ‘Hunka Canon’pa,’ a decorated wand,” that represents the wooden stem of the sacred pipe. Fastened to it are tufts of feathers and the head of a woodpecker, the tail feathers of an eagle, and strands of horsehair.

Other ceremonial articles associated with the rite are a rattle, a buffalo skull, red paint, and an ear of corn, its blunt end stuck onto a stick the same length as the wand. The face of the hunka, or adoptee, is solemnly painted in a prescribed manner by the leader of the ceremony. Then the leader, holding the decorated wand in one hand and the rattle in the other, performs the defining acts of the ceremony, waving the horsehair wand over the adoptees, and singing special songs over them.

Black Elk. Hunkapi: The Making of Relatives. In The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (Brown, Joseph E., ed.), 101-115. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953, 1989.

Deloria, Ella.  Kinship’s Role in Dakota Life. In Speaking of Indians, 17-26. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

Higheagle, Robert. The Alo’wanpi Ceremony. In Densmore, Frances, Teton Sioux Music, 68-77. New York: DeCapo Press, 1972, reprinted from 1918.

Ringing Shield. The Spirits Taught the Oglalas. In Walker, James R., Lakota Belief and Ritual (DeMallie, Raymond J. and Jahner, Elaine A., eds.), 206-207. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980, 1991