Atep

The name of the calumet or “peace pipe” in the Siouan language. The
Atep was and is the single most sacred object among all Native American tribes,
and smoked only ritually. It was given to them by the Great Spirit (Manitou)
immediately after a catastrophic conflagration and flood destroyed a former world
or age, which was ruled over from a “big lodge” on an island in the Atlantic Ocean.
The survivors, who came from the east, were commanded by the Great Spirit
to fashion the ceremonial pipes from a mineral (Catlinite) found only in the southwest
corner of present-day Minnesota (Pipestone National Monument) and
Barron County (Pipestone Mountain), in northwestern Wisconsin. In these two
places alone the bodies of the drowned sinners had come to rest, their red flesh
transformed into easily worked stone. The bowl represented the female principle,
while the stem stood for the male; both signified the men and women who
perished in the flood. Uniting these two symbols and smoking tobacco in the
pipe was understood as a commemoration of the cataclysm and admonition to
subsequent generations against defying the will of God.
The Atep was a covenant between the Indians and the Great Spirit, who
received their prayers on the smoke that drifted toward heaven. It meant a reconciliation
between God and man, a sacred peace that had to be honored by all
tribes. The deluge story behind the pipe, the apparent philological relationship
of its name to “Atlas” or things Atlantean—even the description of the Indians’
drowned ancestors as red-skinned (various accounts portray the Atlanteans as
ruddy complected)—confirm the Atep as a living relic of lost Atlantis.