Wind Cave and the emergence

A cave that literally breathes, and the Lakota place of emergence

The Lakota call this place Oniya Oshoka, where the earth breathes inside, and in modern Lakota Maka Oniye, breathing earth. The name is not a metaphor. Air moves constantly in and out of the passages as the pressure inside the cave equalises with the pressure outside, and Wind Cave is one of the best known breathing caves anywhere.

The Park Service publishes the Emergence Story on its own site, and is careful about how. History in Lakota culture is carried in the spoken word, and there are many versions of this story that vary from band to band and family to family. The version the park presents comes from the Cheyenne Creek community on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, told by Wilmer Mesteth, a tribal historian and spiritual leader, to Sina Bear Eagle, who retells it.

In it, people lived underground in the Tunkan Tipi, the spirit lodge, waiting while the earth was made ready. The story has the trickster Iktomi and the double-faced Anog-Ite, both spirits banished to the surface for their part in an earlier deception, sending a wolf down through Oniya Oshoka carrying meat and decorated buckskin. Some people followed it up. Their leader Tokahe refused, saying the Creator had told them to wait. Those who went were taught to hunt too slowly, were caught by a winter they had never seen, found the way home closed, and were transformed into the first bison herd. When the earth was finally ready and Tokahe led the rest up, the Creator told them to follow the bison, from which everything they needed would come, and shrank the opening to the size it is now so that no one would forget where they came from.

Above ground the park holds the largest remaining natural mixed grass prairie in the United States, with several hundred bison on it. Below is one of the longest and densest caves in the world, and about 95 per cent of the world's known boxwork.