Where legends endure, they do so fiercely. Tunka, the stone god, is the Sioux's oldest god, and men still carry oddly shaped pebbles, bits of flint, or lumps of fossil agate in their medicine bundles. They still pray to special sacred rocks and tell legends about them. Rivers, lakes, waterfalls, and mountains are the abodes of spirits and often appear as living characters in stories. Even today a Sioux or Cheyenne might say, "I felt the sacred pipe move in my hands. It was alive. Power flowed from it." Or, "When I touched the sacred sun dance pole, I felt that it was flesh, warm flesh." The ancient tokens and symbols still exist and are carefully preserved. Modern equipment is no match.

When the Sioux medicine man Lame Deer first travelled on a modern jet, he immediately related his Boeing 707 to the Wakinyan, the Thunderbirds, whose awesome power ignites the lightning. The airplane suffered greatly by comparison. To those used to the patterns of European fairy tales and folktales, Indian legends often seem chaotic, inconsistent, or incomplete. Plots seem to travel at their own speed, defying convention and at times doing away completely with recognizable beginnings and endings. Spinning out a single image or episode may be the salient feature of -- indeed, the whole reason for telling a tale.

Long ago Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote, "Language is thought incarnate; mythology soul incarnate. The one is the instrument of thought, the other the essence of thought. In mythology, language assumes personality and independence. Often the significance of the words becomes the essential idea." Thus the word for "sun" becomes the name of the sun god, the word for "moon" the name of the moon goddess. The words themselves take on potency, as the Sioux medicine man Leonard Crow Dog explains:

"Our modern Sioux language has been white-manized. There's no power in it. I get my knowledge of the old tales of my people out of a drum, or the sound of a flute, out of my visions and out of our sacred herb pejuta, but above all out of the ancient words from way back, the words of the grandfathers, the language that was there at the beginning of time, the language given to We-Ota-Wichasha, Blood Clot Boy. If that language, these words, should ever die, then our legends will die too."