He used these powers from the time he was seventeen (1880) until he joined the Catholic Church in 1904 8. When he was nine, Black Elk had a great vision which gave him extraordinary powers as a healer and prophet. These events, exciting as they were, meant less to Black Elk than his spiritual experiences. And in 1890 he took part in the Ghost Dances that led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, the last fight between the US Army and Indians until the second Wounded Knee took place during the Red Power movement of the 1970s. In 1886 he went on tour with Buffalo Bill, performing in New York at Madison Square Garden, and in England for Queen Victoria. In 1876 he was at Little Big Horn for Custer’s “Last Stand”, though he claims he did not see Custer. Still, despite the intermittent battles with the whites, the Sioux maintained their traditional lifestyle, following the buffalo across the Great Plains, holding an annual Sun Dance, teaching their culture to their children.ħBlack Elk participated in some of the remarkable events of his time. Obviously for Black Elk and the Sioux, the Winning of the West for white settlers meant the loss of much of the land, freedom, and culture of the Indians.ĦBlack Elk describes his early years as an idyll, but by the time he was a teenager thousands of settlers were moving through Lakota territories, and skirmishes occurred with increasing frequency. After the War ended Americans poured westward to effect what Hollywood and others have called the “Winning of the West”. The Civil War had a year and a half to run. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, Lincoln (.)ĥBlack Elk, a Lakota Sioux of the Ogalala band, was born in what is now Wyoming 6 in December 1863, or as he and John Neihardt, his collaborator, more poetically put it, “in the Moon of the Popping Trees” during the “Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed” 7. Since Ernest Renan there has been an industry devoted to finding the historical Jesus recently a similar enterprise, though on a much smaller scale, has grown up around Black Elk. John Neihardt is to Black Elk what Plato was to Socrates, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were to Jesus. Black Elk, however, seems to have found a permanent place in the religious canon, ranking with the most influential American religious figures, men like theologian William James and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons.ĤThe quest for the historical Black Elk is difficult because like Jesus and Socrates, Black Elk left no written works, but was quoted extensively. Coming along as late as it did, millennia after the establishment of the world’s major religions, America has not produced many major religious figures-it seems instead to produce spectacular but evanescent celebrities like Aimee Semple McPherson, Father Divine, Billy Sunday, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker who strut and fret their hour upon the stage before being consumed by scandal. He was a remarkable man, one who was, in the words of Clyde Holler, “an authentically American religious genius” 5. Black Elk deserves better than that, hence the efforts of scholars like Michael Steltenkamp, Clyde Holler, and Raymond DeMallie, following up on McCluskey and Castro, to identify the real Black Elk as opposed to the mythic figure depicted by Neihardt 4.ģBlack Elk certainly merits the attention. While Neihardt felt great affection and respect for Black Elk, he did not really understand him, and he made the highly complex religious figure into a simplistic if sympathetic symbol of the defeat of the traditional Indian way of life. Neihardt omits forty years of Black Elk’s life because he feels that white readers would find Black Elk’s traditional religious experiences inauthentic if they knew he was relating them after he became a Catholic. Neihardt’s book is a truncated and somewhat elaborated account of a man who had a career as a Sioux shaman, and later converted to Christianity. While not an outright fraud like Little Tree, written by a white Alabamian with ties to the Ku Klux Klan 2, or Red Fox, in which someone posing as a Sioux invented a life for himself 3, it turns out that Black Elk Speaks is not true to the full life of its protagonist. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1 (.)ĢStarting in the 1970s with the efforts of Sally McCluskey and Michael Castro, a group of scholars have raised questions about the authenticity of Black Elk Speaks 1. 4 See Michael Steltenkamp, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala.3 See Vine Deloria, God is Red, n° 4, Golden North American Press, 1992, 44.1 Sally McCluskey, “Black Elk Speaks: And So Does John Neihardt”, Western American Literature 6: 231- (.).
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