- 01
Tayámni joins the Pleiades, Orion’s Belt, Betelgeuse, Rigel and Sirius.
- 02
The Seven Little Girls are the Pleiades, atop Mathó Thípila.
- 03
The Leonids of 1833 appear in winter counts: “the year the stars fell.”
THEIR MARKER · 12 MONTHS
"As above, so below"
Lakota star knowledge, documented notably by Ronald Goodman with elders and students of Siŋté Glešká University (Rosebud), rests on one powerful idea: the earth-sky correspondence. Around the Black Hills runs a circular depression of red rock the Lakota call the Race Track (Kh'iŋyáŋka Očháŋku); in the sky answers a great ring of stars — the sacred hoop — whose figures correspond to specific places in the hills. When, in spring, the Sun crossed certain constellations, Lakota bands moved from site to site through the Black Hills to hold the matching ceremonies: the route on the ground followed the Sun's route through the stars.
Tayamni, the celestial animal
Several of our constellations are one for the Lakota: Tayámni, a great animal whose head is the Pleiades, whose spine is Orion's Belt, whose ribs are Betelgeuse and Rigel, and whose tail is Sirius. Its return to the winter sky accompanied the great narrative of birth and renewal. Beside it: the motionless star Wičháȟpi Owáŋžila (our Polaris), and the Milky Way, Wanáǧi Thačháŋku — the road of the spirits that souls follow.
The Seven Little Girls and Bear Lodge
West of the Black Hills stands the extraordinary fluted monolith maps call Devils Tower and the Lakota call Mathó Thípila, Bear Lodge. The story: seven little girls, chased by a giant bear, take refuge on a rock that rises toward the sky; the bear rakes its flanks with his claws — the tower's flutings — and the girls become the Pleiades, Wičhíŋčala Šakówiŋ, the Seven Little Girls. The same sky told by the stone: one of the most beautiful examples of astronomy written into a landscape.
The Black Hills are not scenery: they are sacred land whose dispossession (the Fort Laramie treaty broken after gold was found) remains a living grievance — in 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the taking and awarded compensation the Lakota still refuse to cash: the land is not for sale. Telling their sky means saying that too.
How they observed
The Lakota observatory is the land itself, traveled. Star knowledge was not practiced from a tower: when the Sun entered a given constellation of the great hoop, the bands moved to the matching site in the Black Hills to hold the ceremony at the right moment. Observation was a journey synchronized with the sky — the land serving as dial, the hills as markers.
And the Lakota kept archives. The winter counts (waníyetu wówapi), those chronicles painted on hide where each year receives its pictograph, recorded the great celestial events: the night of November 12-13, 1833, the Leonid storm — thousands of meteors per hour — appears in many counts as "the year the stars fell". A meteor storm documented by field observers a century before photographic astronomy: hard to be more Vigi-Sky than that.
What they read in the sky
A mirrored world: as above, so below — the Black Hills reflect the hoop of stars, and to be in the right place at the right time is to be in accord with the sky. The Milky Way is the road of the spirits that souls follow (the stories tell of a fork where each is judged), and the stars are relatives: the hero Fallen Star (Wičháȟpi Hiŋȟpáya), son of a star and a human woman, returns to help his people. The sky is not above the Lakota: it stands facing them, the land's counterpart.