“'All my relatives'—a Lakota prayer phrase expressing kinship with every living thing, not just humans.”
Mitakuye-oyasin is a Lakota phrase spoken at the close of ceremonies. Mit- (my), takuye (relatives), oyasin (all). All my relatives. The phrase expresses an understanding of kinship that extends beyond the human. The rocks are relatives. The trees are relatives. The animals are relatives. The thunder is a relative. Everything alive is part of the same family.
This is not metaphor in Lakota worldview. It is ontology—the actual structure of existence. All things are related because all things came from the same source, the same wakan (sacred mystery). To acknowledge 'all my relatives' is to state a truth about how the world is organized, not to express a sentiment.
The phrase appears in ceremonies like the inipi (sweat lodge). After the heating, the purification, the prayers, the participants say mitakuye-oyasin. We are ending this ceremony. We are returning to the world. We remember that we are part of everything. Everything that exists is part of us.
The concept resists Western categories. It is neither religion (which names specific beliefs) nor ecology (which is Western science) nor philosophy (which is individual thinking). It is a way of being in relation. The word carries knowledge that settler society is only beginning to learn: that separation from nature is not natural, that kinship with all life is the default state, that 'all my relatives' is not poetry—it is how things are.
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Today
Mitakuye-oyasin means nothing if you think of it as poetry. It means everything if you understand it as a statement about how the world actually works: all things are relatives. This understanding comes from thousands of years of living with the land, not from ideology.
Western thought has spent centuries separating humans from nature, self from other, spirit from matter. The phrase mitakuye-oyasin offers a different logic. It does not ask permission to believe. It simply states: we are all related. That is the structure of existence.
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