Black Elk Speaks (32 page)

The power of Neihardt’s book to move readers to an appreciation of Black Elk’s sense of the other world, the reality of his visions, and the tragedy of his people is undeniable. Whether read in English or the half-dozen other languages into which the book has been translated,
readers respond viscerally to Black Elk Speaks. Because the book speaks so eloquently about our common humanity and fulfills our desire, in Neihardt’s words, “to learn a little more in a world where so very little can be known” (
BES
, xii), it has become a religious classic, the paradigm of American Indian religions, and Black Elk an icon of the wise and holy medicine man.

For the first three decades after its publication Black Elk Speaks attracted an audience primarily of scholars interested in other cultures and specialists in American literature. When it was reprinted in paperback in 1961 it soon drew a countercultural audience of youths who found in the book an alternative to the alienation of twentieth-century industrial culture. Many of them, in turn, passed on their enthusiasm to their children and grandchildren, with each new generation finding in Black Elk an antidote to their discontents and a promise of meaningful connection to the world in a cosmic sense.

The popularity of Neihardt’s book inevitably drew the attention of scholars, who, over the past four decades, have fashioned a veritable industry in analyzing and commenting on Black Elk. Two other works also present material dictated by Black Elk, and they, too, have been part of the scholarly debate.

The first is Neihardt’s When the Tree Flowered: An Authentic Tale of the Old Sioux World (1951). In 1944, while employed by the Office of Indian Affairs, Neihardt once again visited Black Elk, who told him a series of stories that constituted a history of the Lakotas. Distressed that Black Elk Speaks, in its initial edition, had failed to find a popular audience, Neihardt decided to try again.
When the Tree Flowered
combines incidents from the life of another aged Oglala, Eagle Elk, with a reworking of Black Elk’s story of his travels with Buffalo Bill and of the Ghost Dance. The time frame of the two books is the same, but When the Tree Flowered takes a broader view of Lakota society and is somewhat less focused on the spiritual aspects of Lakota culture. Unlike the earlier book, it employs a non-Indian narrator to frame Eagle Elk’s first-person narrative, telling the story as a series of visits to the old man.

The second work is Joseph Epes Brown’s
The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk’s
Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux
(1953). In 1947 and 1948, Brown, a student of comparative religion, was moved by reading Black Elk Speaks to seek out the Oglala holy man. Brown visited Black Elk, who welcomed him as he had Neihardt, adopting him and enlisting him to write a book recording the traditional ceremonies of Lakota religion. While Black Elk had described to Neihardt ceremonies based on his personal visions, he had not touched on the communal rituals central to Lakota religious practice. Black Elk was in truth the aged sage Neihardt had portrayed; now, toward the close of his life (he died at age 86 in 1950), the material that he dictated to Brown reflected a mature integration of Lakota tradition with Catholicism. For an obvious example, throughout Neihardt’s interviews, Black Elk consistently used six as the sacred number; when he worked with Brown, the sacred number was seven, and his account of the seven Lakota rituals is structured in a way that parallels the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.

These three works—
Black Elk Speaks, When the Tree Flowered, and The Sacred Pipe
—are the primary texts around which debate swirls endlessly.

Because I have myself contributed to the Black Elk literature, it may be fair to state my involvement. I learned of Black Elk through
The Sacred Pipe
, which I purchased in a bookstore in Rochester, New York, in 1960. It led me to
Black Elk Speaks
, which I found in the public library, but loved so much that I located and purchased a copy from the catalog of an antiquarian bookseller—my first such purchase. The next year I found in Lowdermilk’s bookstore in Washington, D.C., a copy of the British edition of
When the Tree Flowered
, published under the title
Eagle Voice
. Reading and rereading these volumes throughout my high school years played a major role in my choice of a career in anthropology.

As a college student I was fortunate to have been able to spend three summers in the mid-1960s working in the old Bureau of American Ethnology Archives at the Smithsonian Institution. Surrounded
by original manuscripts documenting generations of scholars’ work studying American Indians, I was deeply impressed by the wealth of knowledge they contained. Sitting at a desk behind the rose window of the Smithsonian Castle—a desk I could use after hours and on the weekends—and reveling in the heady sense of direct contact with history, I wrote to Neihardt asking whether it would be possible to read the original transcript of his interviews with Black Elk. He graciously agreed to allow a photocopy to be made from the original in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri. The notes amazed me with the treasury of ethnographic detail they contained.

I returned to the transcript again and again, referring to them in college term papers, in my Ph.D. dissertation, and in some of my early publications. They form such an important source for the anthropological study of Lakota culture that I was convinced that they should be published. Finally, in 1980, when I had gained tenure at Indian a University, I felt in a position to undertake the job. I proposed the project to Hilda Neihardt who allowed it to proceed and ultimately gave permission to publish not only the 1931 interviews, but also those from 1944, for which she had served as her father’s stenographer. The book, called
The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt
(1984) includes a biographical introduction about Black Elk and a complete and corrected version of the 1931 notes based on a retran-scription of Enid’s original shorthand. While the publisher wanted a title that would attract attention, perhaps “Black Elk Speaks Again,” I preferred something that reflected the message that Black Elk wished to send, so I based the title on his statement, “the sixth grandfather was myself, who represented the spirit of mankind” (so, 141). For the subtitle I wanted to avoid “interviews” and thought about Black Elk’s statement to Neihardt at their first meeting in 1930: “He has been sent to learn what I know, and I will teach him”
(BES).

The Black Elk literature has become impressively large in size and scope, ranging over and between disciplines as diverse as anthropology, Native American studies, literature, rhetoric, philosophy, history, and
religious studies. This is not the place to attempt a systematic review. Readers can gain a good sense of the variety of issues and approaches involved from
The Black Elk Reader
, edited by Clyde Holler (2000).
³
Here I wish to focus on two debates that shaped this literature and that are relevant for readers of
Black Elk Speaks
. First is the authorship of the book, which inevitably leads to the question of authenticity. Second is Black Elk’s identity as a Catholic and the question of Christian influences on his account of traditional Lakota religion.

The question of authorship and authenticity began with one of the first reviews of
Black Elk Speaks
in 1932, which accused Neihardt of inventing the narrators of the book: “perhaps them ain’t Indians at all…how could they talk that way?“
⁴
Most reviewers, however, went to the other extreme and accepted the book as a transcript of Black Elk’s words, understanding Neihardt’s role to have been that of a recorder. They, like readers of the book in general, took the words on the title page literally: “the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Ogalala Sioux told to John G. Neihardt.” To counter this misunderstanding, beginning with the 1972 edition, Neihardt reworded the title page: “told through John G. Neihardt.”

Scholarly debate over authenticity began in the early 1970s, with the first critics being students of literature. Robert Sayre was apparently the first to compare parts of the book with Enid’s transcript, on the basis of which he concluded that Neihardt had been faithful to Black Elk’s words and intentions. Sally McCluskey interviewed Neihardt and asked directly for his assessment. The reply was definitive: “Black Elk Speaks is a work of art with two collaborators, the chief one being Black Elk. My function was both creative and editorial.” Note that he does not say “two authors,” for the writing of the book was entirely Neihardt’s. The only parts of the text that he left largely unchanged from the interview transcript are the song lyrics. As to the voice in which the work is written “it is absurd to suppose that the use of the first person singular is not a literary device.” Neihardt is absolutely clear in stating his approach to writing the book: “The beginning and ending are mine; they are what he would have said if he had been
able.” Neihardt perceived that Black Elk was unable to express fully his thoughts and emotions through a translator. Even though the translator was Black Elk’s son Benjamin, he was completely unfamiliar with his father’s traditional religion, and this, combined with the limitations of his English, made translating Black Elk’s words a challenging task. It therefore became the poet’s duty to synthesize what Black Elk would have said, had he been an English speaker with a literary bent. Neihardt is very specific about his writing method: “At times I changed a word, a sentence, sometimes created a paragraph. And the translation—or rather the transformation—of what was given me was expressed so that it could be understood by the white world.”
⁵

In 1983, Michael Castro published an insightful and well-reasoned essay on Neihardt and Black Elk that dealt in part with the process of writing
Black Elk Speaks
, focused particularly on the great vision. Using Enid Neihardt’s transcript, he compared Neihardt’s additions, and was the first contributor to the Black Elk literature to discuss his deletions. Castro characterizes those editorial strategies as follows: “Unlike most other poets who took liberties in translating Indian materials, Neihardt’s changes tend to read like extensions of the informant’s consciousness, reflecting less the white writer’s independent and impressionistic judgment than a hard-earned mutual understanding and trust.”
⁶
His discussion of deletions focuses on the omission of the vision scenes devoted to war and the power to destroy.

Brian Holloway, a professor of English, in
Interpreting the Legacy: John Neihardt and
Black Elk Speaks (2003), discusses the responses of literary critics to
Black Elk Speaks
, especially in terms of authorship and of the genre of American Indian autobiography. Of special value is Holloway’s own analysis of the ways in which
Black Elk Speaks
fits into the broader picture of Neihardt’s literary work, and in particular his mysticism. Neihardt once commented that “the essence of religion is mystical experience” (p. 61), and it is the common bond of mystical experience that forged his relationship with Black Elk and led the poet to consider telling Black Elk’s story as “a sacred obligation” (p. 2).

The heart of the book has the greatest relevance for anyone wishing
to understand the making of
Black Elk Speaks
. Here Holloway presents a selection of photocopied pages of Enid Neihardt’s interview transcripts together with the corresponding pages of Neihardt’s handwritten manuscript, with corrections, strikeouts, and additions, that allow a reader to see step-by-step the transformation of the raw material into the published book. Holloway discusses the literary voice that Neihardt created for this work, arguing that it skillfully reproduces oral narrative and demonstrating its influence on later writers.

A more recent interpretation by Dana Anderson from a perspective of rhetorical theory contributes to an understanding of Black Elk Speaks by examing alternative identities. He examines issues of authenticity, the dynamics of Christian conversion, and presents an insightful summary of the relevant literature.

Turning to the debate over Christianity, there is no questioning the fact that the Oglalas, the people of Pine Ridge Reservation, knew Nicholas Black Elk from 1904 until his death in 1950 first and foremost as a leader in the Catholic Church. In his younger years he served as a missionary to other tribes and for much of his life he served his community of Manderson as a catechist. Black Elk taught generations of children to say the rosary and gave them their first lessons in Catholic dogma. It is therefore not surprising that when copies of Black Elk Speaks circulated at Pine Ridge in 1932 the Jesuit missionaries were infuriated. They blamed Neihardt for failing to carry Black Elk’s life story forward to his conversion to Catholicism and repudiation of the old system of belief. In a document written in Lakota and translated into English in 1934, Black Elk affirmed his commitment to the faith.