Medicine Wheel

About Medicine Wheel

Begin with the geometry: a stone circle on open ground, a central cairn, spokes radiating outward to a rim of further stones, four directional markers aligned to cardinal compass points. The structure can be described in a sentence — but any single description is partial. Medicine wheels are tribally specific. The Lakota *cangleska wakan* (sacred hoop) is not the Cheyenne sacred hoop is not the Crow ceremonial circle is not the pan-Indian universalist 'four-direction medicine wheel' that emerged in the 1970s-1980s through writers like Sun Bear and Hyemeyohsts Storm. The same geometry — circle, cross, four points — carries meanings that differ substantially between nations and that some elders and scholars (Vine Deloria Jr., Russell Means, the 1993 Lakota Summit V Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality) hold to be partly closed-tradition teachings, not appropriate for public popularization. The archaeological record gives one frame: stone-circle medicine wheels on the northern Plains include the Majorville Cairn in Alberta (Blackfoot territory, base construction dated to approximately 3200 BCE) and the Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming (dated minimum 1760 CE by dendrochronology, with broader estimates of construction between 300 and 800 years ago). Living oral traditions give another frame. The two do not flatten into a single 'medicine wheel' meaning.

Mathematical Properties

Stone-circle medicine wheels share a general geometric frame — central cairn or central point, surrounding stone ring, radial spokes, sometimes additional outer cairns — but the specific dimensions and the number of spokes vary by site. Of the sixty-seven recorded medicine wheels in Alberta, archaeologists have proposed several typological subgroups (Brumley 1988); the Subgroup 6 category, with a central cairn surrounded by an outer ring connected by spokes, contains only three known examples: Majorville in Alberta, the Jennings site in South Dakota, and Bighorn in Wyoming. The structural similarity across these three widely separated sites is one of the open questions in northern Plains archaeology.

The **Bighorn Medicine Wheel** is approximately 80 feet (24 meters) in diameter with 28 spokes radiating from the central cairn to a stone rim. Five additional cairns sit on or near the rim, and a sixth sits just outside the perimeter. The 28-spoke count corresponds to the 28-day lunar cycle in some interpretations and to the 28 ribs of a buffalo in some Cheyenne readings. John A. Eddy's 1974 analysis identified solstice and heliacal-rising alignments to cairns; subsequent astronomical analysis (including by Eddy himself in later work) has refined and partially complicated these claims.

The **Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel** has a central cairn 9 meters in diameter surrounded by a cobble circle 27 meters in diameter, connected by 28 spokes. The 3:1 ratio of outer-ring to inner-cairn diameter is consistent with the Bighorn structure.

Other medicine wheels — the Roy Rivers, Steel, British Block, and other Alberta sites — have varying numbers of spokes (some with no spokes, some with as few as four corresponding to the cardinal directions, some with more elaborate configurations) and varying overall diameters from approximately 5 meters to over 30 meters.

The four-direction cross-within-circle is the abstract geometric form most often associated with the 20th-century pan-Indian 'medicine wheel' teachings, but this is a generalized symbolic geometry rather than the actual archaeological-site geometry, which is typically more complex. Reducing the archaeological diversity to a single four-quadrant diagram is part of what the critical literature has objected to as flattening.

Architectural Use

Medicine wheels are themselves architectural — open-air stone-circle structures built into the landscape on the northern Plains. They are not features of buildings; they are buildings, in the sense of constructed places designed for ceremonial use. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel sits on Medicine Mountain at approximately 9,962 feet elevation, with views to the Big Horn basin below; the site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970 and is now jointly managed by the United States Forest Service and a council representing the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Eastern Shoshone, Sioux, Blackfeet, and other Plains nations under a 1996 Historic Preservation Plan that respects continuing ceremonial use and restricts visitor access during ceremonial periods.

The Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel sits on a grassy hill at 918 meters above an undisturbed prairie landscape overlooking the Bow River; it is on Blackfoot Nation traditional territory and is held as a sacred site (Iniskim Umaapi). The British Block Cairn, the Roy Rivers, and other Alberta sites are similarly placed on landforms with significant view-shed.

In modern times, four-direction stone or wooden medicine-wheel installations have been built at Indigenous cultural centers, schools, hospitals, and reconciliation sites across Canada and the United States. The Native American Healing Garden at the Wisdom Indigenous Center; the medicine wheels at the University of Lethbridge, the University of Saskatchewan, and other institutions; and the medicine wheel at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto are examples. These contemporary built medicine wheels are pedagogical and ceremonial spaces, drawing on the traditions of the communities involved in their construction.

The 20th-century pan-Indian 'medicine wheel' built at retreat centers, New Age festival grounds, and personal-development workshops — including those built under Sun Bear's Bear Tribe Medicine Society programs — sits in a different architectural and ceremonial frame and has been the subject of the appropriation critiques named above.

Construction Method

Archaeological medicine wheels were built by hand from local fieldstones, set on prepared ground at sites typically chosen for elevation, view-shed, and (in some cases) astronomical alignment. The Majorville cairn was built up over five thousand years across multiple cultural phases — successive generations adding stones and offerings to the central cairn — which means 'construction' is a continuous practice across millennia rather than a single building event. The Bighorn structure may have been built in a single major construction phase or accumulated over centuries; the dendrochronological dating of approximately 1760 CE from one cairn gives only a minimum date for that specific addition.

The physical method is straightforward: local fieldstones are placed in geometric arrangements — a central cairn, an outer ring, radial spokes, additional perimeter cairns. The stones are not mortared or shaped; they are placed and left. The geometric layout is achieved by sighting and pacing rather than by formal surveying instruments. The 28-spoke configuration at Bighorn and Majorville suggests deliberate count and arrangement, with the spokes spaced approximately evenly around the central cairn.

The **ceremonial preparation** of the site — who is permitted to participate, what songs are sung, what offerings are made, what fasting or purification precedes the work — is specific to the tradition that built the structure. These protocols are largely held by the communities themselves and have not been published in detail by Indigenous sources, which is the appropriate position for this kind of ceremonial knowledge. Outside-scholar reconstructions exist but should be treated cautiously.

The construction of **contemporary built medicine wheels** at cultural centers, schools, and healing-program sites typically involves Indigenous elders directing the placement of stones, ceremonial preparation specific to the elders' tradition, and consultation with the community whose territory the site occupies. The medicine wheels at the University of Saskatchewan, CAMH Toronto, and similar institutions were built under elder direction with appropriate ceremonial protocol.

The **20th-century pan-Indian medicine wheels** built at New Age retreat centers and under the Bear Tribe and Foundation for Shamanic Studies programs followed different construction protocols, drawing on synthesized rather than tribally-specific frameworks. These are noted here for the historical record; the appropriation critiques in *significance* and *spiritual_meaning* apply.

Spiritual Meaning

The spiritual meaning of any specific medicine wheel is **specific to the tradition that holds it**. There is no single meaning. Writing as if there were is part of what the critical literature has named as misrepresentation. With that frame held, the following are some of the named traditional readings, attributed to their specific sources:

In the **Lakota** tradition, the *cangleska wakan* — the sacred hoop or sacred circle — is the structure of all life. The four directions (West, North, East, South) are associated with specific powers, colors, animals, and stages of life; the Sky is above, the Earth is below, the central Tree is the axis (often the cottonwood, often the Sun Dance pole), and *Wakan Tanka* (the Great Mystery) is the source. Black Elk's account, as recorded by John G. Neihardt in *Black Elk Speaks* (1932) and by Joseph Epes Brown in *The Sacred Pipe* (1953), describes the sacred hoop as the structure that holds the people in proper relation to all beings — *Mitakuye Oyasin*, often translated 'all my relations' or 'we are all related.' The breaking of the sacred hoop, in Black Elk's account, is the historical and spiritual wound of the Lakota people in the aftermath of Wounded Knee. The restoration of the hoop is part of the work of Lakota spiritual life.

In the **Cheyenne** tradition, the prophet-figure Sweet Medicine brought the Four Sacred Arrows and the basic moral order of the Cheyenne people. The Legend of Sweet Medicine is said by some Cheyenne sources to have inspired the construction of the Bighorn Medicine Wheel. The four-fold structure of Cheyenne ceremonial life — the Four Sacred Arrows, the Four Directions, the Four Sacred Mountains — sits in this Sweet Medicine frame.

In the **Crow** tradition, the Bighorn site is held as sacred and as already-present at the time of Crow arrival in the region; Crow ceremonial use includes vision-quest practice and offerings at the site. The Crow Nation's relation to the Wheel is one of guardianship and ongoing ceremonial use rather than of origin-myth.

In the **Blackfoot** tradition, the Majorville site (Iniskim Umaapi) is connected to the *iniskim* (buffalo-stone) bundle-keeping tradition. The age of the site (5,200 years) and its location near the Bow River place it deep in Blackfoot ancestral geography.

In the **20th-century pan-Indian synthesis** popularized by Sun Bear and the Bear Tribe Medicine Society, and in derivative New Age literatures, the medicine wheel has been presented as a universal self-development tool: four directions for life stages, four colors for races (a particularly contested formulation), animal totems for birth months, and similar systems. Vine Deloria Jr. and the Lakota Summit V Declaration have argued that this synthesis displaces actual tribal-specific teachings and commodifies what was not for commodification. The Foundation for Shamanic Studies (founded by anthropologist Michael Harner) developed a separate 'core shamanism' framework that incorporated medicine-wheel material from a comparative perspective; this has been the subject of separate appropriation critique. Both are noted here for the historical record. Reading the medicine wheel as universalist self-development tool is not how the Plains-nation traditions read their own ceremonial structures.

The Satyori position on this page: when a teaching is held by a specific community to be partly closed-tradition, the responsible move is to name that fact, to cite the sources where the objection has been made on the record, and to leave the depth-content of the teaching to the communities that hold it. The geometric form can be described. The doctrinal interior is the communities' to share or not share.

Significance

Honest treatment of medicine wheels requires holding three distinct frames at once and not collapsing them. The first frame is **archaeological**. Stone-circle medicine wheels are a distinct site-type on the northern Great Plains, concentrated in Alberta (the most documented region, with sixty-seven recorded sites in some counts), with further sites in Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas. The Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel site (Iniskim Umaapi) in southern Alberta is the oldest known: a central cairn nine meters across surrounded by a twenty-seven-meter cobble circle connected by twenty-eight stone spokes, with base construction dated to approximately 3200 BCE by stratigraphic analysis of artifact types. The cairn was added to intermittently over five thousand years across six successive cultural phases, with offerings of sweet grass, willow, cloth, and tobacco found among the stones. The Bighorn Medicine Wheel in Wyoming, on Medicine Mountain at an elevation of approximately ten thousand feet, is approximately eighty feet in diameter with twenty-eight spokes radiating from a central cairn and five outer cairns around the rim. Dendrochronological analysis of wood from one of the cairns gave a minimum date of 1760 CE; researchers estimate the structure was built between 300 and 800 years ago. The astronomer John A. Eddy proposed in 1974 (in *Science*) that several of the cairns align with summer solstice sunrise and sunset and with the heliacal risings of certain bright stars, though the strength of these alignments has been debated in subsequent literature.

The second frame is **tribally-specific living tradition**. The Crow Nation, on whose ancestral territory the Bighorn Medicine Wheel sits, hold the site as sacred and have maintained ritual use there into the present; Crow Nation tradition states that the Wheel was already present when the Crow came into the area. The Cheyenne hold that the Legend of Sweet Medicine — the foundational prophet-figure of Cheyenne tradition who brought the Four Sacred Arrows and the basic moral order — inspired the Bighorn Wheel's construction. The Lakota *cangleska wakan* (sacred hoop or sacred circle) is a related but distinct tradition, more conceptual than necessarily site-built: the sacred hoop is the structure of all life and the relations between the four directions, the Sky, the Earth, the Tree (often the cottonwood or the Sun Dance pole), and *Wakan Tanka* (the Great Mystery) at the center. The Lakota Medicine Wheel as a teaching is described by writers like Black Elk (through John Neihardt and Joseph Epes Brown) as the structure that holds the people in proper relation to all beings — *Mitakuye Oyasin*, 'all my relations.' The Blackfoot have their own specific traditions tied to the Majorville site (Iniskim Umaapi) and the *iniskim* (buffalo-calling stone) tradition. The Cherokee, in their southeastern homeland, have separate Four Directions teachings that are not historically connected to the Plains stone-circle medicine wheels; Sun Bear's incorporation of Cherokee-inflected material into his pan-Indian medicine wheel system is one of the threads scholarship has criticized.

The third frame is **20th-century pan-Indian synthesis**. Sun Bear (Vincent LaDuke, of Chippewa/Ojibwe descent) founded the Bear Tribe Medicine Society in 1970 and published *The Medicine Wheel: Earth Astrology* (with Wabun Wind) in 1980, presenting a synthesized 'four-direction medicine wheel' system drawing on Cherokee, Plains, and other sources blended with Western astrological framing. Hyemeyohsts Storm (whose Cheyenne ancestry has itself been contested) published *Seven Arrows* in 1972 and *Lightningbolt* in 1994, presenting another synthesized medicine-wheel system. These works were widely read and shaped the popular New Age understanding of 'the medicine wheel' as a four-directional self-development tool. They are not, in the view of many Indigenous elders and scholars, faithful representations of any specific tribal tradition.

The critique of this third frame is direct. **Vine Deloria Jr.** (Standing Rock Sioux), in *God Is Red* (1973, revised 1992 and 2003), and across multiple essays and lectures, treated this kind of pan-Indian synthesis as appropriation that displaces actual tribal-specific teachings. In 1993, the Lakota Summit V — an international gathering of US and Canadian Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota nations — unanimously passed the *Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality* (principal authors Wilmer Mesteth, Darrell Standing Elk, and Phyllis Swift Hawk), endorsed by representatives from some forty Lakota/Dakota/Nakota tribes, naming Sun Bear and other figures and calling for an end to the commercial sale of Indigenous ceremony. The American Indian Movement has aligned with the same broader resistance; Russell Means and other AIM voices have spoken on these issues separately. The phrase 'plastic medicine men' comes from Ward Churchill's 1990 essay 'Spiritual Hucksterism: The Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men' (*Z Magazine* December 1990, reprinted in *Cultural Survival Quarterly* 14.4, 1990). **Suzanne Owen**, in *The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality* (Continuum, 2008), gives the fullest scholarly treatment of the phenomenon and its costs. **Sherman Alexie** has spoken and written publicly against the same dynamics. The position is not unanimous — some Indigenous teachers have taught medicine-wheel material publicly with the consent of their communities — but the objections are serious, named, and on the record. Treating them as side-note rather than as part of the page's frame would itself be the error these critics have named.

Connections

Medicine wheels share **four-directional structure** with several other geometric ceremonial forms, but the cosmologies are different and the parallels need careful framing. The **Tibetan Buddhist mandala** (Kalachakra, Vajrabhairava) is a four-directional cosmographic palace built and dismantled within Vajrayāna ritual; medicine wheels and Tibetan mandalas share centric four-fold geometry but the doctrinal contents are entirely different. Equating them ('all four-direction circles are the same teaching') is the kind of universalist move Vine Deloria Jr. specifically named as misrepresentation.

The **Lakota cangleska wakan** sits in relation to other Plains ceremonial structures: the **Sun Dance circle** (with the central cottonwood tree as the axis), the **sweat lodge** (the *inipi*, a domed structure with a central fire pit), and the **vision-quest hilltop** (often marked with stones or offerings). These are not 'the medicine wheel' but they share the Lakota cosmological geometry of center-and-four-directions and *Wakan Tanka* as the source.

The **Cheyenne Sacred Arrows** tradition — the four arrows brought by Sweet Medicine — gives Cheyenne ceremonial structure a four-fold geometry that connects to the Cheyenne medicine wheel reading of the Bighorn site, but it is a distinct ceremonial complex with its own protocols, not interchangeable with Lakota or Crow tradition.

The **Blackfoot iniskim** (buffalo-stone) tradition and the Majorville site (Iniskim Umaapi) sit in their own ceremonial frame connected to the *Iniskim* bundle-keeping tradition. The age of the site (5,200 years) precedes the historical separation of the modern Plains nations.

The **Aztec and Maya four-direction cosmologies** (the four world-trees at the cardinal directions, the *quincunx* structure) share four-fold geometry with the medicine wheel but are an entirely separate cultural lineage. The structural parallel does not licence treating them as variants of one tradition.

The pan-Indian universalist 'four-direction medicine wheel' as popularized by Sun Bear and the New Age movement is itself a connection-point of sorts, drawing on Plains, Cherokee, and other sources blended with Western astrological framing — but the connection is one of synthesis rather than continuity with any specific tribal tradition.

Further Reading

• Deloria, Vine, Jr. *God Is Red: A Native View of Religion*. Putnam, 1973; revised edition Fulcrum, 1992 and 2003.
• Owen, Suzanne. *The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality*. Continuum, 2008.
• Brown, Joseph Epes. *The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux*. University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.
• Neihardt, John G. *Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux*. William Morrow, 1932 (modern critical editions: SUNY Press, University of Nebraska Press).
• Eddy, John A. 'Astronomical Alignment of Big Horn Medicine Wheel.' *Science* 184 (1974): 1035-1043.
• Calder, James M. *The Majorville Cairn and Medicine Wheel Site, Alberta*. Archaeological Survey of Canada Paper No. 62, 1977.
• Brumley, John H. *Medicine Wheels on the Northern Plains: A Summary and Appraisal*. Archaeological Survey of Alberta, Manuscript Series No. 12, 1988.
• Churchill, Ward. 'Spiritual Hucksterism: The Rise of the Plastic Medicine Men.' *Z Magazine* December 1990; reprinted in *Cultural Survival Quarterly* 14.4 (1990); collected in *From a Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985-1995* (South End Press, 1996).
• Lakota Summit V. *Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality*. 1993. (Principal authors Wilmer Mesteth, Darrell Standing Elk, Phyllis Swift Hawk. Reproduced in Owen 2008 and widely available through Lakota and AIM archives.)
• Powers, William K. *Oglala Religion*. University of Nebraska Press, 1977. [Caveat: an outside-scholar treatment; should be read alongside Lakota-authored sources.]