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The Real Black Elk
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10270 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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12 / 1993 |
2,792 Words |
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Ron McCoy
Ron McCoy is professor of history at Emporia State University
(Kansas). His article "She of Myth and Memory: The Remarkable
Legend of Sacagawea" appeared in the March 2002 issue of The
World & I. |
BLACK ELK?
Holy Man of the Oglala
Michael F. Steltenkamp
Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993
240 pp., $19.95
Few Native Americans enjoy as much name recognition as Black Elk (1861-1953), an old-time Lakota medicine man whose life provides the grist for Black Elk Speaks, poet John Neihardt's classic love song to nineteenth-century Plains Indian life.
The basic Black Elk catechism is widely known. Born in 1861, he was present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and later traveled with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show to Europe. He participated in the millenarian Ghost Dance of 1890, which sought to reinstate the vanished buffalo culture and eradicate Euroamerican influence; that same year he witnessed the resultant slaughter at Wounded Knee. Then, he lived on into the mid-twentieth century.
At the age of nine Black Elk experienced a prophetic vision of such mind-boggling complexity that he seems to have spent much of the rest of his life trying to sort it all out. This vision, rich with such symbols as a hoop that keeps the Lakota nation together and a flowering sacred tree, caused Black Elk to perceive of himself as an intercessor between his people and the powers of the universe--the Six Grandfathers.
Through the effects wrought by a pair of books, Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932) and religion professor Joseph Epes Brown's The Sacred Pipe (1953), this member of the Oglala tribe of the Lakota nation attained worldwide renown as a sage. Yet his legend is bathed in pathos, for, the litany runs, he lingered on long after the buffalo-hunting way of life vanished. Yet his fresh-from-the-mountaintop vision has universal appeal and for Native Americans often holds special meaning. So much so that Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins and God Is Red, would write in an introduction to a 1979 edition of Neihardt's book that for "the contemporary generation of young Indians who have been aggressively searching for roots of their own in the structure of universal reality . . . [Black Elk Speaks] has become a Northern American bible of all tribes."
Neihardt first visited Black Elk in August 1930 at his home on Pine Ridge Reservation, South Dakota. It was an encounter fraught with import. "Black Elk was a 'kind of preacher,' I was
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