The Breathing Hole: Wind Cave and the Lakota Origin

There is a hole in the limestone of the Black Hills, in the southern part of what is now Wind Cave National Park, where the air moves. Not a breeze, not a draft from a cave entrance, but a sustained column of air that changes direction based on barometric pressure. When the atmospheric pressure outside drops, air flows out of the hole. When it rises, air flows in. Nineteenth-century settlers who found the spot reported that the current was strong enough to knock a hat off a man standing nearby.

The Lakota people have a name for this phenomenon that predates any settler record of it. They call the cave Washun Niya, the Breathing Hole, and in Lakota oral tradition, this cave is where the Buffalo People, Pte Oyate, and the Lakota themselves emerged from the underground world into this one. The Black Hills, He Sapa, are at the center of Lakota sacred geography. This particular hole in the ground is one of the reasons.

The barometric breathing is real and measurable. The cave system behind it contains more than one hundred and fifty miles of mapped passages, making it one of the most complex cave systems in the world relative to the area it occupies. The passages connect in ways that even modern survey cannot fully explain, a labyrinth that required more than a century of systematic exploration to partially understand.

The National Park Service manages Wind Cave as a natural and recreational resource. The Lakota relationship to the cave is older than the park by a margin that is hard to state without the numbers becoming abstract. The oral tradition that connects the Lakota to Washun Niya is not a metaphor for the barometric breathing. It is, in the Lakota view, the more accurate account of what the place is.