Like so many Native American and First Nations peoples of North America, the name by which the Lakota are known to Westerners, the Sioux, comes from European colonists. The name was used by French and British imperial powers to describe a number of peoples within the Great Plains region. Anthropologist Guy E. Gibbon explains the mobile economic system of Dakota, another Sioux nation:

Several early writers describe the seasonal settlement and subsistence round of the Dakota. They were described as mobile hunter-gatherers, who exploited resources seasonally in widely different localities...Their basic seasonal round consisted of hunting bison on the prairies to the south and west in the summer and residence in the northern forests in the fall, winter, and spring, where they harvested wild rice and hunted deer, elk, and beaver. ¹

Gibbon identifies descriptions of mobility without the characteristics of an economic system of pastoralism, a connection which seem to have present in nearly all of the previous cases presented in this writing. For purposes of our inquiry, it would seem appropriate to put emphasis on mobility, rather than pastoralism, as a strategy which more accurately opposes what Frachetti calls the “sedentary strategy” of settled peoples: it reflects a most dramatic and notable example of environmental pragmatism of human beings in a specific ecological context.

The situation of unearthing pre-colonial information regarding indigenous nations in North American is not so different from the effort in Africa. European imperialism wrought its destruction on both living nations and their respective histories, and as we have discussed, too often the efforts of Westerners to document the cultures of non-European (specifically colonized) peoples seem to distort rather than preserve. Gibbon describes the difficult situation of extricating knowledge of locations historically populated by the different societies called Sioux from colonial narratives:

As should be obvious, the early location of the Sioux as a people remains cloudy. One conclusion that we can draw is that movements and distributions of proto-historic peoples should not be proposed without confirming archaeological evidence. The earliest written records in this area were on occasion based on hearsay, intentionally exaggerated, or distorted for other reasons.²

Gibbon's comments point to an important consideration in our examination of this society: if we are to understand the role of the landscape in the development of social, economic, and religious systems, then we must seek the 'original' landscape out of which a society grew. It is important to recall that the landscape which contextualized the development of the ancient Iranian people, the Eurasian steppe, is characteristically broad, like the Great Plains. While we may not be able to pinpoint the specific 'original' homeland of either societies, it is very likely that each inhabited some area(s) within their respective regions. For our purposes, it is these regions, those agriculturally marginal landscapes which are ecologically significant to the facilitation of the development of mobile (often pastoralist) societies, as opposed to settled agriculture, which appear to concomitantly inspire the development of religious systems which are (proto-)monotheistic.

The religion of the Sioux, specifically the Lakota, is characterized by a worldview of unity, which is understood by scholars to be summarized in the concept of wakan.³ Anthropologists Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks write:

Wakan...designated 'anything that was hard to understand'. It was the animating force of the universe, the common denominator of its oneness. The totality of these life-giving forces was called Wakan Tanka, 'great incomprehensibility.' Wakan Tanka was the sum of all that was considered mysterious, powerful, or sacred – equivalent to the basic meaning of the English word 'holy.'⁴

The collective Wakan Tanka specifically complicates our discussion of (proto-)monotheism. Not surprisingly, it seems to have proven a difficult task for Western scholars to understand the system as it was understood by the religious culture in which it developed. Whereas DeMallie and Parks liken Wakan Tanka to “the English word 'holy,'” anthropologist William K. Powers suggests a more specifically theistic association: “...Wakantanka, [is] traditionally glossed as 'Great Spirit' or 'Great Mystery' (wakan 'sacred' and tanka 'great, large, big). This term has become the conventional gloss for 'God.' Although singular in form, Wakantanka is collective in meaning. Wakantanka is not personified, but aspects of it are.”⁵ Powers' explanation points to the complexity of religious constructions which cannot be so simply reduced to numeric mono- or polytheistic systems and their implicitly associated worldviews.

To characterize Wakan Tanka or Lakota religion, more broadly, as monotheistic or proto-monotheistic, is difficult, particularly given the overwhelming dominance of biblical monotheism on scholarly conceptions of this type of religious system. DeMallie and Parks argue, specifically, against the deifying associations of Wakan Tanka with the Christian 'God': “Rather than a single being, Wakan Tanka embodied the totality of existence; not until Christian influences began to affect Lakota belief did Wakan Tanka become personified.”⁶ Does that personification speak to the natural familiarity of a proto-monotheistic system with a recognizable form of monotheism? Or does it point to the aggressive assimilationist colonialism of European Christianity? Perhaps both?

Pine Ridge Reservation physician James R. Walker reports the words of Little Wound on the nature of Wakan Tanka: “'Wakan Tanka are many. But they are all the same as one.'”⁷ This is, perhaps, the useful summary of Wakan Tanka for our present discussion as we cannot properly form a conclusion regarding the potentially theistic nature of this concept. But like the Maasai Ngai, it cannot be so easily dismissed in discussions or scholarship regarding monotheism. The seemingly incomprehensible nature of the “'great incomprehensibility,'”⁸ in Western scholarship, cannot qualify the concept for dismissal. Rather than disregarding the concept for failing the 'biblical monotheism test', as has too often been done in the past, those theorists concerned with that complex effort of categorizing religions must ask how Wakan Tanka informs our understanding of both mono- and polytheistic systems.

Considering the case of the Lakota (and Sioux) it seems clear that rather than affirming outright the theory proposed in this paper, we find inconclusive information that calls for more research to be conducted. It must be acknowledged though that, in attempting to apply this theory to the Great Plains of North America, we have found mobile societies whose religious systems are far from well-established polytheisms known elsewhere in the world (and continent). The case of the Lakota provides both an example of mobility as an economic strategy in response to the natural environment which did not develop pastoralism and a religious system in which, according to DeMallie and Parks, “...the world was characterized by its oneness, its unity.”⁹ Rather than negating or invalidating the theoretical framework which underlies my argument, the case of the Lakota provides ample evidence to call for further investigation of the influence of the natural environment on the development of religion.