Black Elk Speaks (34 page)

While he was with Black Elk and the other Lakota elders, as Neihardt wrote shortly after his visit, he “was able to lose himself in the consciousness of those essentially primitive men” (
SG
, 49). Fundamental truths become obvious: “Is not the sky a father and the earth a mother, and are not all living things with feet or wings or roots their children?”
(BES,
2). These truths are arrived at without outside influence, even though Black Elk (the literary figure), may have heard bits of the white men’s knowledge: “the Power of the World always works in circles, …. This knowledge came to us from the outer world with our religion The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars”
(BES,
155). Neihardt uses “Power of the World,” “the powers that are one Power,” and “Spirit of the World,” and “Spirit,” as alternate translations for Black Elk’s “Great Spirit,” the literal translation of the Lakota designation,
, a subtle change that lends a universal sense.

Even though the literary Black Elk is devoted to harmony with all creatures and all peoples, he nonetheless expresses his bitterness toward the whites for taking the Lakotas’ lands and destroying their way of life. In the Dog Vision, when the spirit riders kill the dogs, Black Elk comments: “I saw that the dogs’ heads had changed to the heads of Wasichus”
(BES,
147). This personification of the enemy as white men is not found in the transcript, but Neihardt uses it to transform the vision into a powerful symbol of the Lakotas’ disdain for the whites. After the death of Crazy Horse, Black Elk says, “now they were going to pen us up in little islands and make us be like Wasichus”
(BES,
115). Then came the extermination of the buffalo: “That fall [1883], they say, the last of the bison herds was slaughtered by the Wasichus. I can
remember when the bison were so many that they could not be counted, but more and more Wasichus came to kill them until there were only heaps of bones scattered where they used to be. The Wasichus did not kill them to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy”
(BES,
171). Confined to the reservations: “Hunger was among us often now, for much of what the Great Father in Washington sent us must have been stolen by Wasichus who were crazy to get money. There were many lies, but we could not eat them”
(BES,
171-72). Greed was intrinsic to the white men’s character. Speaking of his experiences with the Buffalo Bill Show in the East and in Europe, the literary Black Elk observes, “I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken”
(BES,
174). Commenting on the 1889 Agreement, Black Elk says: “So the flood of Wasichus, dirty with bad deeds, gnawed away half of the island that was left to us”
(BES,
185). This critique of white civilization is a major theme in the book, but it is Neihardt’s critique, written on Black Elk’s behalf.

The theme of despair and the death of the Lakota people permeates the narrative. Black Elk’s pathos epitomizes that of his people: “And now when I look about me upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy. I wonder why it came to me, a pitiful old man who can do nothing…. It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation; but I have done nothing with it”
(BES,
143). Through repetition, Neihardt drives this theme home. The literary Black Elk says: “The people were in despair. They seemed heavy to me, heavy and dark; so heavy that it seemed they could not be lifted; so dark that they could not be made to see any more”
(BES,
171). Five times in the book Black Elk characterizes himself as a “pitiful old man,” and Neihardt heightens the sense by giving the impression of Black Elk’s great age: “now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop”; “When I look back now from this high hill of my old age”
(BES,
1, 218). This is an effective literary device, but Black Elk was only sixty-seven years old and not once in the transcripts does he refer to himself as a pitiful
old man. Yet an aged narrator is better able to represent in his person the symbols of the dying nation, the tree that withered and died, the hoop of the people that was broken and scattered.

Another perspective on Neihardt’s portrayal of Black Elk is provided by focusing on the material he omitted in the process of creating
Black Elk Speaks
. Comparison of the interview transcript, published in
The Sixth Grandfather
, with the book reveals some of Neihardt’s decisions as to which material to cut out. Cuts were necessary, given the length of the transcript and the necessity for Neihardt to add material on essential events and topics that Black Elk had failed to discuss. Many of the cuts eliminated detail that, while historically and ethno-graphically important, cluttered the narrative and made it harder to read. But having characterized Black Elk in the preface of the book as “a saint in the deeper meaning of that term, as signifying a rare form of genius”
(BES,
xiii), some of the cuts seem motivated by the desire to make Black Elk both empathetic and believable.

In relating Black Elk’s great vision, for example, Neihardt omitted the parts directly relating to warfare and emphasized, instead, those relating to healing. He made no mention of the episode in which Black Elk and his companions attack a being in the midst of flames that transforms into a dog after Black Elk kills it. Black Elk commented to Neihardt, “This meant that when you go to war you should kill your enemy like a dog” (so, 122). Neihardt also omitted the entire episode in the vision in which he saw warfare personified as a horned man, painted black, with lightning flashing all over his body as he moved. The man transformed into another sacred herb that Black Elk was given, the soldier weed of destruction, which had the power to kill indiscriminately. This episode occurs in the fourth ascent of the vision, when Black Elk returns from the center of the world to the Six Grandfathers. He meets four riders on different colored horses (bay, gray, sorrel, and white), each wearing a headdress of living eagles and other animals; the sorrel rider carries a lance that is a living serpent. Even though this is one of the most powerful visual images in the vision, Neihardt omits it. The riders represent a time in the
fourth ascent when there would be warfare throughout the world. In the vision, Black Elk was told that he would be thirty-seven years old and that by using the soldier weed he would defend his people, even though it would kill many men, women, and children. Black Elk told Neihardt that he refused to cause such destruction and said that when he reached that age, he gave up his vision and joined the Catholic Church (SG, 135-37).
¹²

Neihardt includes in the book the story of Black Elk’s first cure as a medicine man, a remarkable account that reveals the psychological process by which he moved from the abstraction of the vision to the ritual acts of curing, convincing himself, as well as others, that he had the power to heal. However, Neihardt omits a central part of Black Elk’s system of shamanic curing. When, in his great vision, he returns to the Six Grandfathers, the Grandfather of the North gives him a cup of water to drink in which there is a tiny man, painted blue, holding a bow and arrow. When Black Elk drank the water, as his grandfather instructed him, he drank down the man as well, transformed into a fish that represented the healing power of the water. During his first cure, Black Elk felt the blue man moving in his chest, then felt him in his mouth as he drew through the patient’s body the healing power of the North wind, removing the sickness. Black Elk commented that whenever he was curing a patient, “I could actually make this little blue man come out and swim in the cup I used”
(SG,
139). An in-dwelling spirit being is an element of shamanism found widely throughout North America, as is the concept of illness caused by an intrusive object, and curing by sucking it out. Clearly, the blue man was central to Black Elk’s healing rituals. Doubtless Neihardt sensed that including this aspect of Black Elk’s story in the book would test the reader’s credulousness and render the literary Black Elk unbelievable.

In the same vein, not wanting Black Elk to seem gullible or simply superstitious, Neihardtin some instances softens Black Elk’s accounts of seemingly miraculous events. For example, in describing the pictographs seen high on Deer Rocks that the Indians believed foretold Custer’s defeat, Neihardt writes: “There was a picture on it then, of
many soldiers hanging head downward; and the people said it was there before the rubbing out of Long Hair. I do not know; but it was there then, and it did not seem that anybody could get up that high to make a picture”
(BES,
103-4). In comparison, the transcript reveals no shade of doubt about the picture’s mysterious origin: “Next we stopped at a sacred place where a big rock bluff was. The Indians claim that before the Custer fight the whole thing was pictured on it. No man could possibly get up to where the picture is”
(SG,
198). Similarly, when Black Elk returns to the preparation tepee after the Horse Dance, Neihardt has him say: “we saw the prints of tiny pony hoofs as though the spirit horses had been dancing while we danced”
(BES,
138). The transcript, however, is definitive as to the source of the hoof prints: “On the fresh dirtwe could see small horse tracks all over the tipi floor. The spirit horses had been dancing around the circle of the tipi”
(SG,
224).

Another example involves an omission. In fall 1875, as Neihardt has Black Elk tell it: “I went up into the [Black] Hills alone and sat a long while under a tree. I thought maybe my vision would come back and tell me how I could save that country for my people, but I could not see anything clear”
(BES,
65). In fact, according to the transcript, Black Elk did experience a vision on this occasion: “I went up into the Black Hills alone and had another vision under a tree and found out that the duty I was to do was to come to me and that I would probably save the Black Hills. It looked as though it were impossible, but I was anxious to perform my duty on earth”
(SG,
164). Perhaps because this vision inevitably led back to the herb of destruction in the great vision, Neihardt chose to omit it.

One final instance is worth noting. Early in 1877, just before his people go to Fort Robinson to surrender, Neihardt’s literary Black Elk comments: “I thought and thought about my vision, and it made me very sad; for I wondered if maybe it was only a queer dream after all”
(BES
, 108). The corresponding passage in the transcript seems to relate to the fall of 1877, after the killing of Crazy Horse, when his people left the agency and headed north: “I recalled my vision now and then and
wondered when my duty was to come” (so, 204). Nowhere in the transcript does Black Elk express any doubt about the significance of his great vision. And whereas Black Elk Speaks leaves the nature of Black Elk’s “duty” unspecified, it seems clear from the transcript that Black Elk understood his duty to be saving the Black Hills.

In writing Black Elk’s story Neihardt created some powerful images and crafted many quotable sentences. Some are well-crafted versions of old stereotypes: “It [the land] was ours already when the Wasichus made the treaty with Red Cloud, that said it would b e ours as long as grass should grow and water flow”; “only crazy or very foolish men would sell their Mother Earth”; “could we believe anything the Wasichus ever said to us? They spoke with forked tongues”
(BES,
15,106, 203). Others are lyrical and deeply evocative. For example, regarding Crazy Horse: “It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, itwillbegoodtobe”
(BES,
114). Regarding the heyoka: “You have noticed that the truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering, and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping”
(BES,
149). The importance of the nation’s unity: “The life of the people was in the hoop, and what are many little lives if the life of those lives be gone?”
(BES,
172). The inexorable greed of the whites for Lakota land: “So the flood of Wasichus, dirty with bad deeds, gnawed away half of the island that was left to us”
(BES,
185). The victims of Wounded Knee: “The snow drifted deep in the crooked gulch, and it was one long grave of butchered women and children and babies, who had never done any harm and were only trying to run away”
(BES,
212).