Visit our companion site,
American Passages. Produced in conjunction with Oregon Public Broadcasting, this rich site includes an archive featuring over 3,000 images, audio clips, presentation software, and more.
Instructors now have an easy way to collect students’ online quizzes with the Norton Gradebook without flooding their inboxes with e-mails.
Students can track their online quiz scores by setting up their own Student Gradebook.
Authors
Black Elk (1863-1950)
« back to list of Authors
Raymond J. DeMallie’s The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John Neihardt (1984) offers the complete texts of the interviews that went into the construction of Black Elk Speaks and provides much useful commentary. Further interviews with Black Elk can be found in Joseph Epes Brown’s The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux (1953). A valuable study is Julian Rice’s Black Elk’s Story: Distinguishing Its Lakota Purpose (1991). Father Michael Steltenkamp’s Black Elk: Holy Man of the Lakota (1993) may be read alongside Clyde Holler’s Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism (1995). William Powers’s acute essay “When Black Elk Speaks, Everybody Listens” can be found in Christopher Vecsey, ed., Religion in Native North American (1990). The Lakota scholar and activist Vine Deloria Jr. has edited A Sender of Words: Essays in Memory of John G. Neihardt (1984), which contributes to a fuller understanding of Neihardt’s work on his own in addition to his work with Black Elk. Holler edited an essay collection, The Black Elk Reader (2000); and Esther Black Elk DeSersa’s Black Elk Lives: Conversations with the Black Elk Family appeared in 2000 as well.
Nicholas Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota and a shamanic healer who had had a vision at the age of nine that he could help restore his people to their native ways. Black Elk witnessed the fall of General George A. Custer at Little Big Horn River in 1876, toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show starting in 1886, and returned home in time to witness the rise of the Ghost Dance movement at Pine Ridge. Though skeptical at first, Black Elk placed great hope in the powers of the Ghost Dance, only to have his dreams shattered by the tragic massacre at Wounded Knee Creek in 1890. John Neihardt, a poet laureate of Nebraska, first sought out Black Elk in 1930; with Black Elk's son translating and Neihardt's daughters transcribing, Neihardt recorded Black Elk's story in Black Elk Speaks (1932), which remains the best-known Native American autobiography.
Questions for Discussion and Writing
Black Elk Speaks, now one of the best-known narratives by a Native American from the Great Plains, can be challenged as an imperfect or adulterated text: Black Elk spoke in Lakota; his son Ben translated what he said into "Indian English," and John Neihardt, a professional poet, rendered what he heard into standard English. However, the lineaments of this narrative seem clear, no matter how many layers of translation and interpretation they pass through -- and Black Elk's idea of a self, of autobiography, and of an individual life challenge and expand our thinking about all three.
1. At the opening of The Great Vision, Black Elk skips four years of his childhood with the summary observation, "There were winters and summers, and they were good." What do moments like this suggest about chronology, and significance, as this Lakota elder transforms memory into narrative?
2. Black Elk's vision is long and complex and full of images and mystical symbols. Does Black Elk know the specific signification of each one? How does he confront mystery and the psychological and spiritual predicament of not knowing or understanding all that he experiences?
3. Compare and contrast what constitutes a life-transforming or life-defining experience -- for Benjamin Franklin, for Frederick Douglass, and for Black Elk.
