Black Elk

Black Elk (Heȟáka Sápa, Black Elk) was born in 1863 along the Little Powder River in present-day Wyoming, into the Oglala Lakota thiyóšpaye (extended family band). He was a second cousin of Crazy Horse. His childhood years coincided with the last period of free Lakota life on the northern Plains; he was at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 (age twelve, helping in the rear), at Crazy Horse’s death in 1877 (age fourteen), at the 1890 Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee (age twenty-seven, where he was wounded). He lived another sixty years after Wounded Knee, on the [[pine-ridge|Pine Ridge Indian Reservation]], mostly in poverty.

The vision

At age nine — in 1872, before the catastrophic decade — Black Elk fell seriously ill and underwent what he later described as a major visionary experience. The vision involved being taken up to the top of the highest mountain (later identified with Harney Peak in the Black Hills), receiving teaching from the Six Grandfathers (the powers of the four directions plus sky and earth), and seeing the Lakota nation’s hoop and many hoops together. He came back from the vision with what he understood as a charge to bear it for his people; he did not speak of it for many years, struggling with what to do with what he had received.

In his late sixties, in 1930, he met the Nebraska poet John G. Neihardt through a mutual acquaintance on the reservation. Black Elk decided — for reasons that have been variously interpreted — to give Neihardt the vision and the broader account of his life, with his son Ben Black Elk translating. The result was published in 1932 as Black Elk Speaks.

Black Elk Speaks

The book sold poorly on first publication (the year was 1932, the depth of the Depression). It was reprinted in the 1960s and 1970s during the period of growing American interest in Native traditions and became one of the most-read indigenous-spirituality texts in any language — required reading in many religious-studies courses, widely cited in the New Age and broader contemplative literatures, profoundly influential on three generations of non-indigenous readers.

The book is remarkable for the directness and the lyric quality of the prose (Neihardt was a serious poet and the editing is substantial), for the visionary depth of the central vision, and for the closing recognition Black Elk gives — that the great vision was given but the flowering tree it pointed toward did not bloom; that the people’s hoop was broken and his work had failed. The closing pages, on a return to Harney Peak with Neihardt, are among the most affecting passages in the literature of indigenous defeat.

The Sacred Pipe

Twenty-one years after Neihardt’s book, the religious-studies scholar Joseph Epes Brown spent the winter of 1947–48 with Black Elk on [[pine-ridge|Pine Ridge]] and recorded a more systematic account of seven major Lakota ceremonies — the Sacred Pipe, the Sweat Lodge (Inípi), the Vision Quest (Haŋbléčheyapi), the Sun Dance (Wiwáŋyaŋg Wačhípi), the Hunká (making of relatives), the Iníhaŋbla (girl’s coming-of-age), the Wanáǧi yuhápi (keeping of the soul). Published in 1953 as [[spirituality|The Sacred]] Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux, the book has been a major source for Lakota ceremonial study and continues to be widely used.

The Catholic question

A crucial fact about Black Elk’s biography that the Neihardt and Brown books substantially understated: from 1904 to the end of his life — for forty-six of his eighty-seven years — Black Elk was a practicing Catholic catechist (Ákičita Wakȟáŋ, Sacred Soldier), instructing other Lakota in Catholic Christianity at [[spirituality|the Holy]] Rosary [[mission-district-sf|Mission]] on Pine Ridge. He converted in 1904 (the traditional account: a Jesuit priest’s intervention saved a young person’s life through prayer when Black Elk’s traditional intervention had failed); he was active in Catholic missionary work for decades; he is documented as having instructed several hundred Lakota in the faith.

The relationship between his Lakota spiritual life and his Catholic life has been read in opposing ways:

• The Neihardt-influenced reading: Black Elk gave Neihardt the real tradition, his deeper truth, while the Catholic life was a survival strategy in the harsh reservation context. The vision and the seven rites are the substance; the Catholicism is incidental.
• The Catholic-influenced reading: Black Elk genuinely held both traditions, found the Catholic faith confirmed and deepened the Lakota teaching he had received, and lived as a fully integrated bicultural Catholic-Lakota practitioner. Recent biographies (Damian Costello, Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism, 2005; Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, 2016) substantially complicate the simpler readings in this direction.
• The Lakota-renewal reading: Recent Oglala scholars and elders have questioned whether either the Neihardt or the Brown texts adequately convey what Black Elk was actually teaching, and have argued for engagement with the continuing Lakota tradition itself rather than only with the Western-mediated texts.

[[0mn1one|The platform]]‘s posture: read Neihardt and Brown as foundational sources without taking them as final; engage the Lakota tradition through living practitioners and elders to the extent invited; recognize that the question of how Black Elk held his two traditions is not finally resolvable from outside.

Honest about reception

A further note. Black Elk Speaks and [[spirituality|The Sacred]] Pipe have been read for nearly a century by non-indigenous readers, often in ways that have produced what [[vine-deloria-jr|Vine Deloria Jr.]] called plastic medicine men — non-indigenous spiritual entrepreneurs claiming to teach Lakota ceremony for fees. The contemporary Lakota tradition has substantial and well-developed concerns about appropriation, and the platform’s posture is to engage the texts with awareness of these concerns: read deeply, name sources, support indigenous land-back movements, and do not claim what is not given.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[spirituality]]
• Member of: [[person]]

Sources

1. John G. Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. William Morrow, 1932 (multiple subsequent editions; the 2008 Premier Edition includes restored material). Source class: book / primary as-told-to.
2. Joseph Epes Brown. [[spirituality|The Sacred]] Pipe: Black Elk’s Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. Source class: book / primary as-told-to.
3. Raymond J. DeMallie. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Source class: book / scholarly edition of the original Neihardt transcripts.
4. Damian Costello. Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism. Orbis, 2005. Source class: book / contemporary scholarly study.
5. Joe Jackson. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016. Source class: book / contemporary biography.

Lenses still to grow

• The Six Grandfathers vision as a piece of contemplative-cosmological theology in its own right.
• The seven Lakota rites in detail — they deserve substantial separate treatment, ideally in dialogue with contemporary Lakota practitioners.
• The Catholic-Lakota integration as a continuing question of indigenous Christianity.
• [[vine-deloria-jr|Vine Deloria Jr.]] on appropriation and on Black Elk’s reception (Deloria’s foreword to later editions of Brown is a major short text).
• Crazy Horse as Black Elk’s cousin and the period of late free Lakota life.
• The Wounded Knee massacre in detail.