The Thunderbird

For the Lakota, or Teton Sioux, the Thunderbird - Wakin'yan' - is an important subordinate deity. It is a great bird which lives somewhere in the west and sends the rain. Thunder is caused by the beating of its wings, and bolts of lightning flash from its eyes. Visions are important to the Lakota, and visions of the Thunderbird particularly so. Members of the Heyoka society, the famous contraries, are men who have received this vision, though the precise connection is not clear.

One great mystery is that 'myths' about Thunderbirds are remarkably widespread, they occur from coast to coast. In the north-west, it is said that thunder is caused by these great birds picking up whales, and dropping them back into the sea.

A documentary on the Discovery Channel postulated that the Thunderbird legend might be grounded in reality. Perhaps this bird does exist, in some remote part of the Sierra Madre or someplace. It was suggested that maybe these birds ride thermal air currents, in the manner that big birds do; this is why their appearance, coming from the west, would correspond with thunder storms. Naturally, the birds would be perceived as not merely preceding but actually causing them.

There have been a few reports in recent decades from people who claim actually to have been attacked by these birds. These stories echo ancient Cherokee legends, according to which there was a time when the birds carrying off children of the tribe was a serious problem. Intriguingly, it has been demonstrated scientifically that the time and place of these attacks have coincided with thundery weather conditions, ie exactly when, from both the scientific and traditional points of view, you would expect the birds to appear.

There was a fascinating story in the biography of Chief Joseph White Bull. (Warpath -The True Story of the Fighting Sioux - Told in a Biography of Chief White Bull, by Stanley Vestal, University of Nebraska Press, 1984) He had promised to tell his biographer everything about his life, but was clearly holding back on his Thunderbird vision. He eventually admitted that the reason for his reticence was that every time he had talked about it in the past, a thunder storm had always blown up. Eventually, he did reluctantly agree to talk about it, and according to the account given by his biographer, a highly localised thunder storm then blew up out of nowhere.

In the seminal and influential autobiography Black Elk Speaks, written with the assistance of John G. Neihardt, Black Elk states that when he visited New York in the winter of 1886 as a performer with Buffalo Bill's Wild West, he found the city lit up with bright lights, some of which were made 'with the power of thunder.'

On the basis of this reasoning, every web site, the present one included, is produced by means of the awesome and elemental power of the Wakin'yan'.