Black Elk Speaks (33 page)

Because of his identification with the church, some critics cast doubt on the authenticity of the material Black Elk told Neihardt, and the Catholic priests at that time claimed that the vision accounts were amalgams of stories Black Elk had learned from others. Many years later, Michael F. Steltenkamp, a young Jesuit priest who was a graduate student at Michigan State University, recorded reminiscences of Black Elk from individuals who had known him. They became the
basis for his dissertation, later published as
Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala
(1993). They included stories told by Black Elk’s daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, a staunch Catholic who spoke of her father’s activities in the Church and of his use of the Two Roads Map, a pictorial catechism in the form of a scroll that was used to teach Christian doctrine without requiring any written text. Steltenkamp argued that the two roads of the catechism—one leading to heaven, the other to hell—might have been amalgamated by Black Elk into the memory of his childhood vision. (This argument leaves unresolved how the circular form of the vision could be merged with the linear form of the catechism.) Rather than conceptualizing traditional religious practice and Catholicism as two stages of his life, Steltenkamp’s interpretation opens the possibility that Black Elk blended the two and that Neihardt, since he was unprepared to recognize Christian influences in Black Elk’s narrative, simply failed to understand them. In short, for some Jesuits, Black Elk exemplified fulfillment theology, in which native traditions are interpreted as laying the moral foundation for the eventual introduction of Christianity.
⁷

More recently, writing in a postcolonial framework, Damian Costello argued in
Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism
(2003) that, under the tutelage of the Jesuit priests, Black Elk’s generation developed a creolization of Native and Christian traditions (p. 50). While this is undoubtedly true, the implications that Costello draws seem implausible. Drawing particularly on parallels to the Book of Revelation, Costello characterizes Black Elk’s great vision as “christio-logical,” a “salvation history” in which “Black Elk redescribed the Lakota tradition to avoid contradiction with the Christian story and also to show how Christ permeated the entire Lakota tradition as its central theme” (p. 93).

Many writers conceptualize Black Elk as having accepted Christianity without forsaking the old religion; see, for example, Marie Therese Archambault,
Meditations with Black Elk
. Others, like Ed McGaa, in
Mother Earth Spirituality
, are concerned to defend Black Elk against the charge that he had forsaken his traditional religion. In
Black Elk’s Story
:
Distinguishing Its Lakota Purpose
, Julian Rice argues—to me, unconvincingly—that Black Elk’s main concern was to perpetuate Lakota tradition, and that his apparent adherence to Christianity was entirely opportunistic. Clyde Holler, a philosopher of religion, argues persuasively in
Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism
that Black Elk drew creatively on both religions to forge his own spiritual path. Frank Fools Crow, a nephew of Black Elk’s and also a holy man, is reported to have told the writer Thomas Mails, “Black Elk told me he had decided that the Sioux religious way of life was pretty much the same as that of the Christian churches, and there was no reason to change what the Sioux were doing.”
⁸

Ultimately, the two issues of authenticity and Christianity impinge on the appreciation of
Black Elk Speaks
. In their harshest forms, critics dismiss the book completely. Anthropologist William K. Powers declares that “in
Black Elk Speaks
and other books written by white men for a white audience, the ideas, plots, persons, and situations of these books have been constructed to conform to the expectations of a white audience.”
⁹
Julian Rice suggests that
Black Elk Speaks
“may perhaps be relegated to the ranks of nineteenth century curios, reflecting white misconceptions of Indians.”
¹⁰
The contrast between these evaluations and that of wine Deloria, Jr., the Lakota scholar, activist, and religious thinker, is stark. Writing in a foreword to the 1979 reprint, he characterized
Black Elk Speaks
as “a religious classic, perhaps the only religious classic of this century.” Deloria observed that “Present debate centers on the question of Neihardt’s literary intrusions into Black Elk’s system of beliefs… It is, admittedly, difficult to discover if we are talking to Black Elk or John Neihardt.” But for Deloria, this question is of little relevance: “The very nature of great religious teachings is that they encompass everyone who understands them and personalities become indistinguishable from the transcendent truth that is expressed. So let it be with
Black Elk Speaks
.”
¹¹

Not everyone shares Deloria’s sense of equanimity. Perhaps it is my nature as an anthropologist to try, to whatever extent possible, to
disentangle the voices. For that reason, I was eager to take up the invitation to prepare this annotated edition. Interested readers who follow the footnotes will find facts and figures, explanations of matters Neihardt left implicit, Lakota words and phrases, identification of those sections written by Neihardt and those that vary from the interview notes, and bibliographical suggestions that lead into the vast literature of which
Black Elk Speaks
forms a part. I have undertaken this with a kind of remorse, realizing that the aesthetic pleasure of reading the book for the first time is, to quote once again Vine Deloria, Jr., “That it speaks to us with simple and compelling language” (xvii). My goal, simply, has been to produce the kind of edition of the text that I would like to have had when I first read it many years ago.

So, with apologies to Deloria, and to Neihardt himself, I have taken on the job of explicating authorship.

The annotations I have added throughout the text provide comparisons between the book as published and the transcript of the interview notes. Recognizing the impracticality of sentence-by-sentence or even paragraph-by-paragraph comparison (truly devoted readers can perform that task for themselves by comparing the book with the transcriptin
The Sixth Grandfather
), I have limited myself to points that I found significant or just interesting. Such comparison makes apparent material in the book that is either lacking in the transcript or has been substantially reworked. Limited as we are to the written sources, it is possible that some of the material lacking in the transcript did originate in the interviews. Such is apparently the case with the story of High Horse’s courting (
chapter 6
), which is not found in the transcript. While some anecdotes and details may have been preserved in Neihardt’s memory, it is very clear that he depended closely on the transcript to write the book. He promised Black Elk to use as much of his language in the book as possible, and he was faithful to that promise.

The bulk of the material found in Black Elk Speaks that seems to be written entirely by Neihardt, without reference to the Black Elk interviews, is of two kinds: historical events and cultural context. Both
types of additions were necessary in order to make the book accessible to readers who have neither previous knowledge of the history of Indian-white relations on the northern plains nor any understanding of Lakota culture.

When Black Elk and the other old men told their stories, Neihardt did not interrupt the flow of their narratives with questions. The transcript records very few occasions when Neihardt asked any questions at all. Black Elk was prepared to tell his life story and knew in advance the topics about which he would speak. He spoke about himself and his people, but said relatively little about their relationship with the white people beyond military engagements, from the Fetterman Fight (Battle of the Hundred Slain) at Fort Phil Kearny in 1866 to the Wounded Knee Battle in 1890. It was therefore up to Neihardt to fill in the historical context in which these military encounters occurred. Based on his reading of the literature and correspondence with old frontiersman that had formed the basis for his
Song of the Indian Wars
, Neihardt was able easily to add material on the building of the Union Pacific Railroad in the 1860s; the 1868 treaty that created the Great Sioux Reservation; the military expeditions into the Black Hills in 1874 and 1875 and the discovery of gold; the subsequent influx of miners into the Hills; the government order for the Lakotas to return to their agencies before January 31,1876, or be considered hostile; Reynolds’ attack on a Sioux and Cheyenne camp on March 17,1876; Miles’s attack on American Horse’s village at Slim Buttes, September 9,1876; the Black Hills Agreement in September 1876; the Battle of Wolf Mountains, January 8,1877, a fight with Miles’s troops; the surrender of Crazy Horse at Fort Robinson in May 1877 and his death there on September 5 of that year; the destruction of the buffalo herds in the early i88os; the corruption at the Lakota agencies that led to hunger and despair; the 1889 Agreement by which the Lakotas surrendered a large part of their reservation and were reduced to five smaller ones; the origin of the Ghost Dance among the Paiutes; the death of Sitting Bull, December 15,1890; and the description of the dead at Wounded Knee, December 31,1890. This historical background bolstered Black Elk’s narrative
and transformed it from Black Elk’s story to the story of the Lakotas as a people, with Black Elk as their representative and spokesman.

Neihardt’s additions that provide cultural context were more modest. The most substantive of them is the account of the Sun Dance (
chapter 8
). Both Black Elk and Standing Bear told Neihardt about the pranks boys played on adults during the Sun Dance, but they did not describe the ceremony itself. Neihardt also added a discussion of the relationship between vision experience, public performance of the vision, and use of powers granted in the vision to cure the sick (
chapter 18
), and added some explanatory comments about the heyoka and elk ceremonies.

Less easy to specify is the manner in which Neihardt shaped the narrative. While being faithful to the transcript of what Black Elk said, the story is told, as the revised title page reads, “through John G. Neihardt.” By his choice of words and by the selection of material he decided to omit, Neihardt necessarily interpreted Black Elk’s meanings, both literal and emotional. To the extent practical, I have added annotations to draw attention to those choices, which reveal a writer grappling with his art.

Neihardt justifies his role along two grounds. One is empathy. Their common vision experience leads Neihardt to read into Black Elk’s experience meanings and emotions similar to his own. He transforms Black Elk’s “other world” into his own concept of the “outer world,” doing so apparently naturally, perhaps unconsciously. The other factor is the language barrier. Speaking through his son Benjamin as translator, the meaning of what Black Elk said was sometimes obscure. It was necessary for Neihardt to hone expression and explicate meaning. By choosing to write in the first person, he took on himself the burden of speaking for and as Black Elk—literally taking over the burden of his vision—creating a literary Black Elk that, as Neihardt later expressed it to McCluskey, was “a work of art with two collaborators.”

Black Elk as a literary character created by Neihardt may be characterized as humble; dedicated to a higher purpose in life; a sage whose
wisdom is universal, transcending time and cultures; a primitive thinker, outside the systems of Western knowledge and Christian theology; a man who quietly suffered outrage at the mistreatment of Indians and whose life epitomized the pathos of a dying people. In combination with the exoticism of Lakota culture and the sense of inevitable doom in the face of modern civilization, the narrative appeals in a fundamentally human sense, even to readers with no specific interest in learning about American Indians.

Neihardt underscores Black Elk’s humility from the very start of the book: “what is one man that he should make much of his winters“?
(BES,
1). As for his famed powers as a medicine man, he takes no personal credit: “it was not! who cured. It Was the power from the outer world”
(BES,
163).

That mankind has a higher purpose in life is fundamental to the persona of the literary Black Elk: “the thoughts of men… should rise high as eagles do”
(BES,
xviii). Yet all one can do is strive for understanding, which is always beyond human grasp. Neihardt has Black Elk say, speaking of the symbolism of the pipe: “because it means all this, and more than any man can understand, the pipe is holy”
(BES,
2). No matter how much a person learns about the holy, as in vision experiences, we are only human and fall short of our potential: “It is hard to follow one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows. Among those shadows men get lost”
(BES,
202). None of these sentiments are expressed in the transcript; they are authored by Neihardt, expressing in words what he felt Black Elk’s meanings to be.

The universality of Black Elk’s teachings gives them their special literary significance. The literary Black Elk wishes to share his vision of the universe: “It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit”
(BES,
1). What was true in Black Elk’s youth, his great vision experience, must still be true, no matter how drastically life has changed: “if the vision was true and mighty, as I
know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost”
(BES,
2). The vision relates not just to the Lakotas, but has universal meaning: “And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy”
(BES,
33).