About book Black Elk Speaks: Being The Life Story Of A Holy Man Of The Oglala Sioux (2004)
“History is written by the victors, not by the vanquished.”Rarely do we have an opportunity to view history from the perspective of the vanquished. “Black Elks Speaks”, by John Neihardt, gives us another window through which we may look at the past. Neihardt’s window shows us a completely different view of history. A view in which honor and dignity belongs not to the victors, but to the vanquished.“Black Elk Speaks” grants a Lakota medicine man named Black Elk a voice, and every reader an opportunity to revisit the past. Be warned that this is not a pretty past, it is a troubled one, but one from which each of us can learn a great deal.Black Elk has a powerful voice, and Neihardt’s work lets us hear it. Listen carefully and you’ll hear the rustling of the winds, you’ll see the symbols he sees, and you’ll understand that deep down, Black Elk was simply a human – just like you or I.Black Elk, was one of the vanquished. As a youth, he survived the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. Fourteen years later, in 1890, he managed to escape death at the Wounded Knee Massacre. Neihardt’s work is presented as a narration of Black Elk’s words, it includes but is not limited to these incidents.I have long held that there are two sides to truth. “Black Elk Speaks” is the other side of the truth Americans generally see. Through Neihardt’s lens the glorious past does not look as glorious, it looks downright shameful.What is “Black Elk Speaks”?It is not some fanciful romanticized Cowboys and Indians tale of the sort on which I was raised. It is another version of the truth, one in which an honorable, dignified, and ancient culture were systematically cheated, misled, murdered, and ultimately destroyed in the name of western progress.It is a powerful revelation of how misuse and abuse of power inevitably results in tragedy. It is a tale of rampant greed allowed to go entirely unchecked. It is a tale of a government spurring its people on, allowing them to ride roughshod over those who get in the way of their vision of progress. It is a tale of symbolism misunderstood. It is a tale of tragedy.Is “Black Elk Speaks” a fun read? Absolutely not. It disturbed me deeply to learn that, in regard to US History, I had never been told the whole truth. Equally disturbing is the realization that came with this knowledge, that many of the supposed truths I had accepted were so badly biased toward one side that they amounted to outright lies.Why read something that isn’t enjoyable? Where do you derive enjoyment and satisfaction, from learning, or from being blissfully unaware?If we can’t learn from the past, then we should hold no hope for the future. Black Elk Speaks grants us a glimpse of a past in which many mistakes were made. It really is a learning opportunity for the future.“Black Elk Speaks” is not a “story” or a “tale”, it is another peoples’ truth.If you're interested, you may find my further thoughts on “Black Elk Speaks” on my blog, located on the web at cgayling.com
John G. Neihardt met Black Elk in 1930. When they met, Black Elk recognized Niehardt as the man he must teach his vision to, so that it might be saved before he died. Niehardt reflects, "His chief purpose was to 'save his Great Vision for men.'"pg. xix At this time Black Elk was old, going blind and he lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place in 1890. Black Elk was a holy man, a visionary and a healer. He was also related to Crazy Horse through his father. Black Elk Speaks is the true history of the conflicts between the U.S. Government and the Plains Indians from the Native American perspective. Black Elk begins by describing his childhood and his sacred vision and from there he details the coming of the white man to the Black Hills, and the battles that ensued like The Battle at Little Big Horn. He talks about Crazy Horse and how he died, the killing of the buffalo and the Native way of life, and the horrible reservations they were forced on. He teaches about the coming of the Indian Messiah, Wovoka, and The Ghost Dance, Black Elk participated in, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Everyone who travels to the Black Hills in South Dakota needs to read Black Elk Speaks. It will provide you with a comprehensive history of the area as well as important geographical places sacred to the Plains Indians. You will learn about the spiritual world of the Lakota, the medicine wheel, the six grandfathers, the importance of visions and the four directions. I read many parts of this book to my children as we traveled to the places that Black Elk speaks about in the book.Reading Black Elk Speaks was an amazing experience for me while in the Black Hills. I spent some time on the Pine Ridge Reservation (where Black Elk lived) while in the Badlands. I drove for miles and miles and noticed how beautiful the landscape is but could not believe how sparse and desolate the reservation appeared. I wanted to go to the site of Wounded Knee. We stopped at the Indian cultural center and I talked to the man working there. It was 7 pm at this time, we needed gas and food and we were still 2 hours away from where we were staying in Hill City. We got gas another 10 miles up the road where there were two pumps, and a long line to get gas and they accepted cash only. The convenience store seemed like the only store in a 40 miles radius (at least from where I drove from). Black Elk Speaks shows the hope and pride of an Indian nation fighting to preserve their traditional way of life. Today, the people are living on a reservation that is extremely poor, has a high alcoholism rate, a high dropout rate and are still fighting to maintain their cultural rights. We need to return to Black Elk's vision and embrace it.
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I'm trained to be suspicious of stories like this: an old Lakota shaman decides to tell all about his previously secret visions to a white poet so he can write them in English and publish them. ??! But a shallow-digging internet search does not turn up anything suggesting against this, so okay.So, okay. Black Elk fought in the Battle of the Little Bighorn AND the Wounded Knee Massacre, AND travelled to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, AND he was a powerful shaman who was taken on numerous spirit journeys. This book is a memoir of the first thirtyish years of his life, not-so-ghostwritten by John Neihardt, a white Nebraskan poet. (Earlier editions list Neihardt as the sole author, while later editions list Black Elk or both of them.) The story is amazing, obviously, and the language (however accurate) is beautiful. The parts that really push it over the edge for me are the passages when Black Elk speaks about his heartbreak over the sense that he failed to live up to his calling as a savior of his people--the way his intensely personal spiritual experiences are completely inseparable from his historical understanding and lived experiences of famous events. I don't think I've encountered another work that has so grounded and humanized historical events for me.
—Kat
Something about this book didn't resonate with me the way I was hoping for. Perhaps this has to do more with my expectations than with anything else; it is, as the back cover states, arguably the most important religious work of the 20th century. However there is much less in here in the way of detail about the religious practices of the Olgala Sioux than I had anticipated, and perhaps this can shed some light on how it fell short in my estimation.Black Elk Speaks is a biography of Nicholas Black Elk. Starting from his early life, tracing his formative development through to his striking vision, his further development as a holy man and a warrior fighting against the encroachment of the "Wasichu", giving a fascinating account of his travels with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show through America and Europe, and ending with the defeat of the Sioux at Wounded Knee. It's hard to critique a biography in terms of its content, as the author (in this case both John G. Neihardt and Black Elk himself) is limited by the facts of history and not by his own imagination.That said, reading Black Elk Speaks was not the revelatory experience that I had anticipated, and while its message lamenting the loss of the traditional way of Sioux life and reaching for a kind of solidarity between cultures was not lost, I would have liked to hear much more about that traditional way of life than I found in this book. What I found was more in the way of a historical tale of the end of a nation and less in the way of a description of that nation's way of life, or what it was that made this way of life worth preserving. Perhaps Black Elk Speaks would speak more directly and poignantly to someone well-versed in the ways of the Oglala Sioux, but I as an outsider unfamiliar with this way of life, was given a brief glimpse of it and was left hungry for more.Perhaps it will speak to me more directly if I choose to re-read it at some point after having learned more about the Sioux and their religious practices, their societal customs and the philosophical dimensions of their thinking. This is not to say it wasn't quite enjoyable; it certainly was. As it is though, my impression of Black Elk Speaks is that as a work of history, a biography, a philosophical statement about what ultimately matters, and an idiosyncratic account of a series of mystical experiences, it tries to accomplish too much in too short a space, and left me wanting more than it had to offer.
—Mike Maxwell
This was my third time reading this book, and every time I come away with something new. I highly recommend this to anyone studying religion. I highly recommend this book to every single American citizen. It should be required reading in public schools. The Lakota people have a vibrant, exciting, living religious tradition, and the fact that Black Elk's story was recorded is a gem and a blessing. Not only is it because of the religious tradition is this book important. It is also important because Black Elk was a surviving eye witness to the Wounded Knee Massacre, as well as Little Big Horn and other important battles of his time. Most importantly, history is usually written by the victors. Yet, we have Black Elk's story. Read it with awe and with reverence.
—Joan DeArtemis
