Mitakuye Oyasin

Mitákuye oyásʼiŋ (rendered in English-language sources variously as mitakuye oyasin) is a foundational phrase in Lakota ceremonial life, often translated all my relatives or we are all related. It closes prayers, ceremonies, and council deliberations across the Lakota and the broader Sioux traditions (Dakota, Nakota, Lakota — sometimes referred to collectively as the Oceti Sakowin, the Seven Council Fires).

What the phrase asserts

The phrase is not metaphor and not aspiration. It asserts a fact about the structure of the world. Every being — humans of every nation, four-legged animals, winged ones, those who swim, those who crawl, plants, stones, waters, fire, the wind, [[sun|the sun]] and the moon, the unborn generations, the ancestors — is in kin-relationship with the speaker. Not symbolically. Literally.

This claim has consequences. If the buffalo, the [[poplar|cottonwood]], the river, and the stones are kin, then taking from them is taking from family, and the protocols that govern human family relationships govern those takings too: ask, give thanks, take only what is needed, leave the rest, ensure continuation. The kinship-orientation produces the practices that western environmental ethics has been trying to derive from utility or rights frameworks, and in the Lakota frame those practices are downstream of the recognition, not upstream of it.

When the phrase is spoken

Mitakuye oyasin is the closing of:

• Pipe ceremonies (čhaŋnúŋpa) — the smoking of [[spirituality|the sacred]] pipe, central to Lakota religious life.
• Sweat lodges (inípi) — the purification ceremony in which heated stones in a covered lodge produce the steam through which prayers rise.
• Prayers of many kinds, both ceremonial and personal.
• Sun Dance (Wi Wanyang Wacipi) — the four-day annual ceremony of sacrifice and renewal.
• Vision quest (haŋbléčheya) — the multi-day solitary fast during which a young person seeks vision and direction.

In each case, the phrase functions as a closing gesture that re-locates the speaker within the full web of relations from which any prayer or ceremony draws its authority.

How it connects to broader Indigenous tradition

The Lakota articulation is one of many. The orientation it names — that humans are kin with the more-than-human world, that this kinship is a fact rather than a metaphor, that obligations follow from the recognition — runs through most Indigenous traditions worldwide:

• Haudenosaunee thanksgiving address (Ohenton Karihwatehkwen, “the [[haudenosaunee-thanksgiving-address|words that come before all else]]”) names the same web of kin in extended liturgical form, naming each being and offering thanks.
• Anishinaabe kinship-language for plants and animals (Brother Bear, Sister Maple) is the same orientation expressed in everyday speech.
• Diné (Navajo) hózhǫ́ — the harmony-and-beauty path that depends on right relationship across all kinds.
• [[ailton-krenak|Ailton Krenak]]‘s articulation in Brazilian Indigenous philosophy treats rivers, mountains, and forests as ancestors — the same structural claim in a different tradition.

The kinship orientation is the umbrella; mitakuye oyasin is one of its foundational ceremonial articulations.

A note on appropriation

Mitakuye oyasin is sacred and ceremonial in Lakota tradition. Non-Lakota use of the phrase has been criticized — by Lakota elders and writers including [[vine-deloria-jr|Vine Deloria Jr.]] and others — when it is treated as a slogan, a t-shirt phrase, a closing for non-Lakota ceremonies, or a generic Indigenous-spirituality marker. [[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: name the phrase honestly when discussing the cross-kind kinship orientation; treat it as a teaching from a living tradition; do not invoke it as one’s own closing or as a generic gesture.

Calling something kin is not the same as being in kinship with it. The phrase points at a structural fact about the world, but the practice of being a relative — making offerings, attending ceremony, contributing to the survival of the people who carry the tradition — is what makes the kinship real on any speaker’s part.

Why this matters for 0mn1.one

The platform’s commitment to serving every form of life (see [[0mn1one]] mission) is grounded in the same orientation mitakuye oyasin names. The phrase is one of the clearest articulations of that orientation in any tradition with substantial English-language documentation, and the platform takes Lakota teaching as one of the deep anchors for its kinship claim — while remaining clear that it is an outsider drawing on a living tradition, and bears its own responsibility for that use.

The structural moves of 2026-05-08 — Lenape backlinks across the East Coast bioregion footprint, sibling-bioregion peer-relationships, this entry — all rhyme with the orientation mitakuye oyasin names. The wiki’s structure is, in this sense, an attempt to instantiate the recognition: every page is in literal relation with every other page, the connections matter as much as the contents, and a vault that loses its kinship-relations has lost more than its connectivity.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Shares approach with: [[braiding-sweetgrass]]
• Parallels: [[seven-generation-principle]] · [[ahimsa]]

Sources

This entry currently rests on widely-available secondary characterizations of Lakota ceremonial language. Tier 2 priority for the [[vault-source-roadmap]]: primary or near-primary Lakota-authored sources on the phrase — [[vine-deloria-jr|Vine Deloria Jr.]]‘s God Is Red and Custer Died for Your Sins; the work of contemporary Lakota writers including Joseph M. Marshall III; the work of the Lakota Language Consortium; Pretty Shield’s biographies; the broader Oceti Sakowin literary tradition — should be ingested before this entry is treated as anchored interpretation rather than respectful outsider’s synthesis.

Lenses still to grow

• The Lakota-language layer — the morphology of mitákuye oyásʼiŋ, the precise semantic field of oyásʼiŋ (often glossed as they all are or all of them), the ceremonial register vs. the everyday register.
• The diaspora of the phrase — its movement out of strictly-Lakota ceremonial use into Pan-Indianism, into the AIM-era reclaiming of public Indigenous voice, into broader environmental and contemplative discourses, and the contested politics of that movement.
• The seven sacred ceremonies of Lakota tradition (the Wakan Wičhóȟʼaŋ) as the broader ceremonial context in which mitakuye oyasin lives.
• [[vine-deloria-jr|Vine Deloria Jr.]] as a person entry — the Lakota theologian, lawyer, and writer whose work made much of this tradition legible to non-Lakota readers without flattening it.