The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice (review)

The Lakota Ritual of the Sweat Lodge: History and Contemporary Practice. By Raymond A. Bucko. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. vii+336 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $40.00, cloth, $14.96 paper.)

The anthropologist Raymond A. Bucko writes a definitive monograph about the sweat lodge ceremonial complex among the Lakota Sioux. As the subtitle indicates, Bucko presents the ritual in its historical manifestations as well as its contemporary practice and discusses both in their dialectical constructions of tradition and its constant re-creation in new times and circumstances while retaining a resonance with previous praxis. Throughout Bucko is reflexive about his role as both a participant and an investigator.

The historical treatment of religious life and belief systems has long been the concern of ethnohistorians. Bucko dialogically engages the discourse of previous descriptions in the ethnographic record to lay a foundation for examining the ideas of more current practitioners, some of these being non-Indians and non-Lakotas. The central questions underlying his examination are: “Which traditions are indeed ‘authentic,’ and who may make this judgement?” (25). Aware of the various types of sources, Bucko evaluates texts in terms of the “legitimacy of each as representative of culture” (25) and the various purposes and intentions of the ritual. Bucko demonstrates that this task is not as straightforward as it might initially appear, and the complexity of the sources is also his point.

Bucko organizes his study into seven chapters. In the first, he offers a historical analysis of the ceremony based on the earliest written sources. In the second, utilizing contemporary documentation, he analyzes how both continuities and changes in the ceremony reflect the dynamics recurrent in contemporary Lakota ritual practice. This also reflects transformations in the social life of Lakotas. In the third chapter, he scrutinizes the recorders of the texts in the ethnographic record, which reveals certain contentions about the regulation of practice across a variety of groups of believers, including assorted outsiders. In chapter four he addresses the role of the Lakota language and other types of communication that occur in and through the sweat. In chapter five he turns to a biographical treatment of various participants and how they came to be involved in sweat lodges and the range of interpretations they offer about its meanings. In chapter six he examines the ceremony’s role “within the larger context of social exchange and interaction” (15). In the final chapter, Bucko considers the significance of the sweat lodge as a cultural vehicle for incorporating persons into Lakota groups within the cultural prerogatives of their system of kinship. This necessarily emphasizes “the implications of incorporating whites in Lakota ceremonies and the independent use of the ceremony by non-Indians” (15).

In the tradition of James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890 (1896), Alexander Lesser’s The Pawnee Ghost Dance Hand Game (1933), and Lee Irwin’s The Dream Seekers: Native American Traditions of the Great Plains (1994), Bucko emulates the scholarly task of important construction of genealogies of religious practice, its changes and transformations. Although this kind of examination is often dismissed by adherents to postmodern approaches, the importance of a historical anthropology is epitomized in this study.

Bucko reveals certain aspects about the ritual’s resilience. He contends that by refusing to create either canon or dogma, the Lakota enabled an individuation in practice that was regulated only informally but effectively. How any key element is performed is more a matter of interpretation falling within a cultural continuum than a rigidly prescribed action. Individuals often describe the manner in which they perform the ritual as being informed by how the spirits or the grandfathers have given them the prerogative to make the sweat in a particular way. Bucko reveals how the knowledge of past practice and therefore tradition is essential and informs what contemporary individuals think about the sweat lodge and how they explain this...