Lakota names: Wicahpi, Wakinyan, Mahpiya

Lakota chief Touch the Clouds (c.1838-1905)
Touch the Clouds

Wicahpi, Wakinyan, and Mahpiya are a several of eye-catching names I spotted in some of the recent SSA baby name data. They’re all Lakota words:

  • Wicahpi means “star.” So far it has appeared just once, in 2005, as a girl name. Nearly all of the Wicahpis accounted for in that year were born in South Dakota specifically.
  • Wakinyan means “thunder,” though it also has ties to mythology. Another definition is “the cause and source of thunder and lightning, once supposed by the Dakotas to be a great bird” (i.e., a thunderbird). Wakinyan has appeared several times in the data during the 2000s, always as a boy name.
  • Mahpiya means “clouds.” It was also “the word the missionaries chose to translate the Christian concept Heaven and can mean the night sky or the heavens in an astronomical sense.” It has appeared just once in the data, in 2018, as a girl name.

I don’t think they were traditionally used as standalone personal names among the Lakota, but they were certainly used as elements in personal names, such as:

  • Star Face (Wic’ahpi Itet’un)
  • Walks with Stars Woman
  • White Thunder (Wakinyan Ska)
  • Fire Thunder (P’eta Wakinyan)
  • Thunder Horse (Wakinyan T’asunke)
  • Thunder Face (Ite Wakinyan)
  • Big Thunder (Wakinyan T’anka)
  • Little Thunder (Wakinyan Cik’ala)
  • Red Cloud (Mahpiya Luta)
  • Touch the Clouds (Mahpiya Icahtagya)

Which of the three do you like best?

Sources:

  • Buechel, Eugene, and Paul Manhart, eds. Lakota Dictionary: Lakota-English/English-Lakota. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
  • Hollabaugh, Mark. The Spirit and the Sky: Lakota Visions of the Cosmos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017
  • Ingham, Bruce. English-Lakota Dictionary. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2001.

[Latest update: 7/2022]

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