Black Elk

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BLACK ELK

BLACK ELK (1863–1950) was a Lakota spiritual leader known in Lakota as Hehaka Sapa. Few American Indian spiritual leaders have gained greater national and indeed international recognition than this Oglala Lakota. Although Nicholas Black Elk was well known by his own people as a holy person (wicasa wakan), it was the poetic interpretation given to his life in Black Elk Speaks (1932) by John G. Neihardt that caught the imagination of a much wider public. A second book, on the seven rites of the Lakota, was dictated at Black Elk's request to Joseph Epes Brown. This work, The Sacred Pipe (1953), further stimulated interest in the man and his message, which became, especially during the 1960s, meaningful symbols for a generation seeking alternate values.

Of the Big Road band of Lakota, Black Elk was born in December 1863 on the Little Powder River in present-day Wyoming. During this time his people hunted west of the Black Hills (Pa Sapa in Lakota) until 1877, when they were forced to move east to their present reservation at Pine Ridge in South Dakota. At thirteen Black Elk was present at General George Custer's defeat at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He remembered the murder at Fort Robinson of his relative, the great warrior and spiritual leader Crazy Horse, and recalled the years when his people sought refuge with Sitting Bull's band in Canada. He was also present at the tragic massacre at Wounded Knee (1890), which nearly ended the revivalistic Ghost Dance movement.

Against that background of traumatic historical events, Black Elk at the age of nine received the first of a long series of sacred visionary experiences that set him upon a lifelong quest to find the means by which his people could mend "the broken hoop" of their lives, could find their sacred center, where "the flowering tree" of their traditions could bloom again. This first of many vision experiences was of terrifying Thunder Beings, the powers of the West; whoever received their power was obliged to become a heyoka, or sacred clown. Shaken by his experience, Black Elk could not bring himself to reveal the vision until he reached the age of seventeen. Then he confided it to the holy man Black Road, who instructed Black Elk in the spring of 1881 to enact part of his visionary experience, the Great Horse Dance, so that the people might share in the power of his vision.

It was in part his mission to find a means to help his people that led Black Elk to join Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1886. He appeared in New York and then in England in 1887–1888 for the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria, whom he apparently met. He subsequently joined another western show and toured France, Germany, and Italy, finally returning to South Dakota in 1889.

Shortly after his return Black Elk married Katie War Bonnet, and they soon had children. From 1889 to about 1904 Black Elk gained much respect among his people as a curer, spiritual counselor, and ceremonial leader. It was also during this time that Black Elk was introduced to the Ghost Dance. He gained new inspiration through the similarities between the dance and his own vision: dancers surrounded a sacred pole seeking promises of renewal. After Wounded Knee and the end of the Ghost Dance, Black Elk turned his back on white culture, pursuing his work as a traditional Lakota holy man. During one healing ceremony on the Pine Ridge Reservation, a priest broke into the ceremony, destroying his sacred objects and accusing Black Elk of doing the work of Satan. Black Elk's patient recovered, but the priest died shortly thereafter in a riding accident.

Despite this experience, in 1904, following the death of his wife, Black Elk sought out the teachings of the Catholic Church. Shortly thereafter Black Elk became an important figure in the local parish, working as a catechist. While Black Elk's conversion was certainly sincere, the decision was also pragmatic. As a catechist of the church, Black Elk was able to maintain his social role as traditional Lakota spiritual leader. Further, with the suppression of traditional men's and women's sacred societies, a central feature of classical Lakota religious and cultural life, Lakota community and social structure were threatened. Catholic men's and women's societies offered an alternative, providing many of the same social and cultural functions.

As a catechist in the Society of Saint Joseph, Black Elk continued his traditional role as holy man: counseling and advising the people, praying and singing for them, instructing children, visiting the sick, and coordinating spiritual societies. As most priests were rarely able to visit outlying communities and spoke little Lakota, they relied heavily on such catechists as Black Elk, who soon became one of the most influential figures in reservation religious life. His work as a catechist also supplied him with financial support and other resources, resources that he immediately distributed to those in his community who were in need, a gesture characteristic of a traditional Lakota spiritual leader.

As Julian Rice argues, Black Elk's life work and cooperation with Neihardt and Brown can also be understood through the lens of traditional Lakota spiritual leadership. As a holy man and religious leader, whether traditionalist or Catholic, Black Elk's obligation was to the protection and well-being of his people. Throughout his labors, as a yuwipi ceremonialist, a catechist, or as a collaborator with Neihardt and Brown, Black Elk worked for his people's cultural and spiritual survival.

Black Elk knew something of the power of the printed word. He was thus willing to give in his two books details of his visions as well as accounts of the rites and metaphysics of his people. However, Raymond DeMallie has argued that Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks presents an inaccurate image of Black Elk. Neihardt viewed the Lakota as players in a tragic epic, in which Native people were vanishing before the destructive march of civilization. He placed Black Elk within this tragic story when he wrote: "With running tears I must say now that the tree has never bloomed. A pitiful old man, you see me here, and I have fallen away and have done nothing. Here at the center of the world, where you took me when I was young and taught me; here, old, I stand, and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather!" (p. 273).

However, the transcript of Black Elk's actual words to Neihardt is not so bleak, instead presenting a man determined to work for his people's renewal, and his hope that through sharing his vision this might be accomplished:

At that time I could see that the hoop was broken and all scattered out and I thought, "I am going to try my best to get my people back into the hoop again.… You know how I felt and what I really wanted to do is for us to make the tree bloom. On this tree [of life] we shall prosper … therefore we shall go back into the hoop and here we'll cooperate and stand as one … our families will multiply and prosper after we get this tree to blooming." (DeMallie, 1984, p. 294)

Black Elk sought the means for this cultural renewal within both traditional Lakota spirituality and the Catholic Church. Contemporary scholars disagree over the degree to which Black Elk's conversion was merely pragmatic, a recognition of the need to survive in a rapidly changing world. Most agree that his conversion was likely sincere but that Black Elk was able to accommodate both religious traditions without inner conflict. Some see him as a sophisticated ecumenicalist, negotiating both religious systems and incorporating them within his life's work.

Until the end of his life, Black Elk maintained a commitment to the Catholic Church and to traditional Lakota spirituality, seeing them as inherently compatible and describing the Six Grandfathers of the Lakota tradition as One, as Wakan Tanka, as the Great Spirit. When he died on August 19, 1950, in his log cabin at Manderson, South Dakota, there was for him no contradiction in the fact that he was holding a Christian rosary as well as a Lakota sacred pipe, which he had never given up smoking in the ceremonial manner. Whether Catholic or traditionalist, Black Elk worked for the well-being of his people, for their survival as a nation, and for the renewal of the sacred tree. The widespread popularity of his legacy, among both American Indians and non-Indians, and the subsequent revitalization of traditional ceremonies across the reservations by younger Native people, attest that Black Elk still speaks.