Inyan Kara Mountain

Inyan Kara's history spans from at least 10,000 years of indigenous presence through the treaty violations of the nineteenth century to ongoing Lakota demands for the return of the Black Hills. The mountain has been sacred ground, contested territory, and site of some of the most consequential events in the history of indigenous dispossession.

The Cheyenne, who inhabited the Black Hills from 1670 to 1876, associated Inyan Kara with the Great Race, a creation narrative that established the cosmic order between humans and animals. According to traditional accounts, buffalo and humans raced around the Black Hills to determine who would eat whom. The outcome established that humans would eat buffalo rather than the reverse, resolving the tension between revering animals as divine and needing them as food. This race, in some versions, took place at Inyan Kara itself.

The Lakota, who came to dominate the Black Hills region, incorporated the mountain into their own sacred geography. A 1940s Lakota map, studied by scholars, shows this geography adjusted to conform with views of the cosmos found throughout Native America, with a sacred center and peaks at each of the four semi-cardinal directions. Inyan Kara takes its place within this network as a site particularly associated with childbirth and as one horn of the Buffalo's Head formation that becomes spiritually alive each spring.