Thread:User talk:WaitingforGodot/Creationist abuse... of Native American myths/reply

Oh for god's sake. or Wakan Tanka's sake, anyhow. Academically speaking, there is no description of what Wakinyan would have looked like, much less any real idea that they were "reptiles" and not birds or more likely "spiritual beings". These are a people with no written history and **even if** the world were only 6000 years old, you are claiming that a group of nomadic people could have "remembered" encounters that happened before the flood (again, going on the whole Creation Ministries theory here) and not beeen forgoten or changed in 4000 years? We have proof that the oral legends from so-called "first contact" changed within the 200 years before publication. Back to Wakinyan specifically. In lakota, it means "thunder". The very day to day thunder that bangs around our heads. It is also the word, pluralized, for so-called "thunder beings". But the context in which we know of thunderbeings is limited, and much influenced by western culture - like most religious concepts in Native Culture.

For what it's worth, i'm HIGHLY dubious of wakinyan being a "being" of sorts. Only one person really makes that claim - James R. Walker, who was informed by a lakota "holy man" (who just happened to have been kicked out of his own tribe) named George Sword. The scholar and linguist Ella Cara Deloria has found no evidence at all of Walker's very greek looking "mythology" of the Sioux. It's all over Wikipedia, but academics on this issue don't ever seem to reflect what real lakota people are saying or more critically - not saying.

Challenging Walker is a fool's task. but it makes no rational sense in context of everything else we know about lakota mythology. No one but this one "scholar" ever says these things; no one has ever found myths of these that do not come from Sword.

sighs... sorry, this is one of the battles I fought endlessly and which sent me out of academics.