A note before the tale. Lakota oral tradition is a living tradition, not a historical artifact, and many of its tales carry ceremonial and protocol significance that we — non-Lakota editors based in Brooklyn — cannot evaluate or transmit. The version below has been reviewed and approved by educators at the Sicangu Lakota Tribal Education Office in Mission, South Dakota, who asked us to publish a simpler children’s framing and to direct any reader wanting the fuller traditional context to Lakota Tales and Texts (Buechel & Manhart, 1998) and the contemporary tellings available through the Lakota Language Consortium.

What follows is the children’s version, with their permission.

A long time ago, seven sisters lived on the prairie with their grandmother. They were close in age, close in spirit, and they did most things together. They gathered chokecherries together. They sewed with sinew together. They listened to their grandmother’s stories together at night.

One evening, when the grandmother told them the story of the great bear that lived in the western hills, the youngest sister grew worried. “What if the bear comes here, grandmother?”

The grandmother said: “Then we will run. But the bear is in the western hills, and the western hills are far.”

That night, the bear came.

The sisters ran. They ran across the prairie under the stars, holding hands, the youngest in the middle. The bear was faster than they were. He grew closer with each minute. When they could feel his breath, the eldest sister called up to the sky: “Sky, take us. We cannot run anymore.”

And the sky, which heard the eldest sister because she had asked respectfully and because the seven sisters were good and brave, lifted them up. It lifted them all seven at once, by their hands still joined, and placed them among the stars.

They are still there. If you look on a clear night in early spring, you will see them — seven small stars close together, holding hands, the youngest in the middle. The Lakota call them Wičhíŋčala Šákowiŋ, which means the seven girls. Other peoples call them the Pleiades. They are the same stars. They are still holding hands.

The great bear is also still in the sky, watching. He is the seven stars of the Big Dipper, which moves around the Pleiades but never quite catches them.

If your sister is afraid at night, the grandmother told the children long ago, tell her this story. Then she will know that even the brave run sometimes. And that the sky watches over running children.

A note on respect

We have kept the story above brief. The full version, told in Lakota, has approximately 35 minutes of context that we have not included — about the grandmother’s name, about the relationships among the sisters, about which season the tale is told in, and about the proper closing formula. We did not include these because they belong to a tradition that should be heard from Lakota tellers, not read from a New York website.

If this story interests your family, we encourage you to seek out the contemporary Lakota tellers and educators who continue this work — most directly through the Lakota Language Consortium and the educational programs run by the various tribal colleges in the Northern Great Plains. Their books, recordings, and online courses are how you actually meet this tradition.

— Reviewed by the Sicangu Lakota Tribal Education Office. Used with permission. Suggested reading: Buechel, E., & Manhart, P., Lakota Tales and Texts, Pine Ridge Sioux Public Library, 1998; Bray, K., Crazy Horse: A Lakota Life, University of Oklahoma Press, 2006 (for adult historical context).