All My Relatives : Exploring Lakota Ontology, Belief, and Ritual

In All My Relatives David C. Posthumus offers the first revisionist history of the Lakotas’ religion and culture in a generation. He applies key insights from what has been called the “ontological turn,” particularly the dual notions of interiority/soul/spirit and physicality/body and an extended notion of personhood, as proposed by A. Irving Hallowell and Philippe Descola, which includes humans as well as nonhumans. All My Relatives demonstrates how a new animist framework can connect and articulate otherwise disparate and obscure elements of Lakota ethnography. Stripped of its problematic nineteenth-century social evolutionary elements and viewed as an ontological or spiritual alternative, this reevaluated concept of animism for a twenty-first-century sensibility provides a compelling lens through which traditional Lakota mythology, dreams and visions, and ceremony may be productively analyzed and more fully understood.

Posthumus explores how Lakota animist beliefs permeate the understanding of the real world in relation to such phenomena as the personhood of rocks, ghosts or spirits of deceased humans and animals, meteorological phenomena, familiar spirits or spirit helpers, and medicine bundles. All My Relatives offers new insights into traditional Lakota culture for a deeper and more enduring understanding of indigenous cosmology, ontology, and religion.

“The subject of Lakota ontology, belief, and ritual has enduring value and significance for all who are interested in the Sioux, in the literature of Black Elk, and in Plains ethnohistory generally. . . . All My Relatives is very strong in its command of Lakota sources, notably the writings of the Delorias, of ethnohistorical records, and of relevant secondary sources.”—Jennifer S. H. Brown, professor emerita of history at the University of Winnipeg and editor of Ojibwe Stories from the Upper Berens River: A. Irving Hallowell and Adam Bigmouth in Conversation