![]() ![]() Thus it is a good thing the book has remained in print in a relatively cheap paperback (now 5 times my $1.95 version). ![]() It was always welcomed by Native Survival School kids, most of whom didn't do much reading, to whom I gave many copies over the years. At powwows, there was often someone reading it to people around a cooking fire. It might be the only book you would see in someone's home (the only book that had ever been there), it might be carried as the single possession of a travelling youth. Neihardt had a poet's, not an anthro's, way with words, catching the rhythm and images of Black's Elk's narrrative, looking for the beauty and the power of it, not to box it up for some pseudo-science. Too, it is one of the few detailed personal eyewitness accounts of spirituallife history by a Native person, told by him for Native people of the future, rather than for white historians and anthros. Especially Lakotas, of course, but many from other tribes felt - feel - Black Elk's visions have something to say to all. Most were realizing for the very first time the importance of prayer, and the fact that this brought people togethr across racial, cultural, and historical lines to share a common purpose and values,įor a decade afterward, Black Elk Speaks was almost a talisman in the homes and hearts of Indian people who wanted to relearn spirituality. and Canada, some who had never experienced any kind of Indian spiritual life attended, and resolved to go back home and create such rebirths of their own peoples by whatever methods they could find. Visiting youths and elders from hundreds of other tribes across the U.S. Many learned of the Black Elk Book there and then, with the guns and troops around them, with the deaths and hope, and explicit declarations that the Oglala (and Lakota) Nations were here reborn. He and his wife Grace led a ghost dance, purification rites (inipi, sweat lodge) and did much teaching. Wallace Black Elk, a collateral descendant of "the" Black Elk, was the principal spiritual teacher within the beseiged village. and Canada visited, sneaking through the military cordons, both to support what was happening there and to learn how to implement and fight for sovereignty for their own tribes. When the AIM occupation and seige of Wounded Knee occurred in 1973, during those few months thousands of young Indian people from all over the U.S. This book, this record, becam the seed of a rebirth of Lakota spiritual life and ways. O make my people live!"īlack Elk's prayer was heard and answered. ![]() "Hear me in my sorrow, for I may never call again. It was a beautiful dream." At the very end, Neihardt accompanies Black Elk to th top of sacrerd Harney Peak in the Black Hills, where the old man prays, crying that he has failed to fullfil his vision and make the white tree bloom. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud in was buried in the blizzard. When I look back now from the high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women lying heaped and scattered all along th crooked gulch. The resulting book describes Black Elk s traditional boyhood, his great vision, several famous battles including Custer at Little Bighorn, ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee: Neihardt corresponded with Black Elk through his son Ben, and returned in May of 1931, where he was graciously received. Later, he adopted Neihardt, and gave him the name Flaming Rainbow, which came from one of his major visions, the one he felt he had faild to fulfill in his life, but perhaps could pass on for the future, via Neihardt's book. Sensing that a poet was a different kind of writer from reporters or anthros who had bothered him unsuccessfully before, Black Elk gave Neihardt a token, and began to recount his life. But in researching for his long poem Twilight of the Sioux he visited Pine Ridge reservation in 1930, wanting to meet a "Medicine Man" who had been active in the Ghost Dance movement of the 1880's. Neihardt was an epic poet whose turgid epics of the West and Indians are all but unreadable today. Neihardt, Bison Book, University of Nebraska Press, Available from The Mail Order Book Catalog, 80. BLACK ELK SPEAKS: BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX, as told through John G. ![]()
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