Wakan Tanka may be better translated as Great Mystery than Great Spirit
Many Indigenous peoples of Canada and the United States honour an all-pervading life force usually called the Great Spirit in English. Some Lakota voices argue that translation is misleading. Their term, Wakan Tanka, originally described a group of sacred powers beyond human understanding, closer to a Great Mystery than to a single god.
The idea differs from nation to nation, and tribes attach different, sometimes contradictory stories to it. Among the Lakota it is Wakan Tanka, and prayers often begin with Tunkasila, grandfather. The Haudenosaunee speak of the Creator; lacrosse captain Lyle Thompson has described it as living in everyone, and in the sun, moon, stars, water and earth. Algonquian peoples call it Gitche Manitou.
In Lakota, wakan means holy and tanka means great, so the phrase points to a sacredness present in every creature and object, a view resembling animism or pantheism. Before Christian missionaries arrived, the term referred to a collection of sacred beings whose ways were mysterious. That history led scholars, and the activist Russell Means, to prefer Great Mystery and to argue that Lakota spirituality was not originally monotheistic. Chief Luther Standing Bear, who lived from 1868 to 1939, described a single unifying force running through plains flowers, winds, rocks, birds and animals, making all things kin.
For Algonquian peoples, Manitou is a life force present in everything, including events, and it comes in paired forms, a good spirit and a bad one. Shawnee tradition holds that at creation the good spirit gave the land to the Indigenous peoples. Anishinaabe tradition names Michilimackinac, now Mackinac Island in Michigan, as Gitche Manitou's home and a destination for pilgrimages.
Missionaries saw a useful parallel with the Christian God and used it deliberately as a conversion tool; they borrowed the Anishinaabe word Gichi-ojichaag, which stressed an individual soul's link to the Great Spirit, for the Holy Spirit. Today belief is largely associated with the Native American Church, which blends a monotheistic God with animistic ideas and probably has more than a quarter of a million adherents.
Source: Great Spirit
