Black Elk: Vision and Witness

In nineteen forty-seven, a religious studies scholar named Joseph Epes Brown traveled to the Pine Ridge Reservation south of the Black Hills to sit with an elderly Oglala Lakota holy man named Nicholas Black Elk. Brown was directed there by John G. Neihardt, a Nebraska poet who had already published a book of their conversations. What Brown and Neihardt captured from Black Elk became two of the most significant texts in the literature of Native American spirituality and American history.

Black Elk was born in December eighteen sixty-three, near the Little Powder River. He was a second cousin of Crazy Horse, and he was twelve years old at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He was present at Wounded Knee on December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety, when the Seventh Cavalry massacred between two hundred fifty and three hundred Lakota people, most of them unarmed. He was wounded that day. He survived to see the Lakota world remade entirely in the span of one human lifetime.

Neihardt's 'Black Elk Speaks,' published in nineteen thirty-two, recounts a great vision Black Elk received at age nine, in which he was taken by Thunder Beings to the center of the world, which was Harney Peak, in the Black Hills, and shown the sacred hoop of his people. The book was largely ignored on first publication, went out of print, and was rediscovered in the nineteen sixties and seventies when it became a foundational text of the American Indian Movement and of a broader spiritual reckoning in the United States.

Scholars have debated how much of the book is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt's literary shaping. The book was translated through an interpreter, Black Elk's son Ben. These questions matter. What is not in question is that Black Elk was a witness to the end of one world and an astonishing survivor who found a way to pass his knowledge forward. His cause for canonization was opened by the Catholic Church in two thousand seventeen, giving him the title Servant of God, an unusual recognition for a man whose deepest loyalties were always to the Lakota sacred way.