White Buffalo Calf Woman Brings the Pipe

Two scouts are sent out when the camp is hungry.

The buffalo have not come. The bands have moved and looked and moved again, and the grasslands are empty in a way that frightens the elders. So Standing Hollow Horn sends two young men north to find the herds, or at least to find their sign, and the two men ride out in the early morning through the blue-gray light of the open plains.

They ride until they see her.

She is walking toward them across the open ground, coming from the direction of the north wind, and she is so luminous — a light around her like the light around the sun on a day of high clouds — that the two men stop their horses and stand still. One scout feels something that is not desire but is being mistaken for desire by the part of him that doesn’t understand what he is looking at. He reaches for her. He is immediately enclosed in a cloud of darkness, and when the cloud clears there is only a skeleton at the feet of the woman, picked clean by the sacred.

The other scout understands what he is seeing. He does not move. He does not speak until she speaks first.

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She tells him: go back to your chief. Tell him to prepare a lodge. Tell him what you have seen. I am coming to bring something your people need.

The scout returns. Standing Hollow Horn prepares the lodge. The people wait.

She walks into the camp carrying a bundle wrapped in sage, and in the bundle is the chanupa — the Sacred Pipe. She unwraps it slowly and holds it up so the people can see what it is: a red stone bowl carved in the shape of a buffalo calf lying down, a wooden stem, and the whole thing joined together at the center so that what comes from the earth and what reaches toward the sky are made one.

She holds the bowl toward the earth: this represents Grandmother Earth, who is the mother of all. She holds the stem toward the sky: this represents the sixteen hoops of the nation, the generations, the four directions. She shows them how to fill the pipe with tobacco and how to light it and how to send the smoke upward so that the prayers travel.

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Then she teaches the seven sacred rites.

She teaches them how to purify themselves in the sweat lodge, how to name a child and bring it into the circle, how to keep a soul after death so it may travel safely, how to seek a vision alone on the hilltop, how to renew the nation through the Sun Dance, how to make relatives of those who are not born to you, and how to throw the ball — the ceremony in which the living energies of Wakan Tanka are thrown from person to person across the sacred circle so that all may be touched.

She says: the pipe is the living center. When you hold it and smoke with a brother or a sister you are holding the world together. When you offer it to Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery knows you are serious.

Then she walks away from the camp, back across the open grassland, back toward the north. The people watch her go. At the edge of sight she stops and lies down, and when she rises she is a black buffalo calf. She rises again and is a red buffalo calf. She rises a third time and is a brown calf. She rises a fourth time and is a white buffalo calf, and she walks away until she disappears into the horizon like a cloud.

The buffalo returned to the plains that same season.

They have always returned when the pipe was held correctly.