Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux.

• Author: Ball, Milner S.
• Position: Review

BLACK ELK SPEAKS: BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX. By Black Elk and John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1979. Pp. xix, 299. $30.

"This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true." (1)

Among the American classics in my library, Black Elk Speaks is one of the least willing to rest closed on the shelf. It is the story of a vision, the duty that accompanies the vision, and the life of those whom the vision would animate. It can be justly read as tragedy, indictment, and struggle with the past. But it can also be read as affirmation and as invocation of hope for the future, possibilities that present themselves on this revisit.

There are risks in making Black Elk Speaks the subject of a Classics Revisited, more risks than in Kenji Yoshino's choice last year of Albert Camus's The Fall, (2) which, as he noted, was riskier than Steven Lubet's decision two years ago to initiate the series with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. (3) At least in those books, law and lawyers make their way into the text. No lawyer appears in Black Elk Speaks, nor does the word "law."

And we can never say with certainty exactly whose speaking this book is. Black Elk knew no English, and John Neihardt knew no Lakota. And translation required difficult negotiation between two worlds as well as between two languages. In Black Elk's world, the word is powerful and performance is essential, for there is no writing, and hence no literature and no concept of literature. The speaking had to travel between Lakota orality and Western textuality. (4) It made the journey from Black Elk, who told the vision, through his son Ben, who repeated in English the words his father uttered, then through Neihardt's daughter Enid, who took stenographic notes and produced a re-ordered transcript, and then through Neihardt, who wrote from the transcript and made alterations suggested by his own memory of the sounds and silences, by his poet's gift for working words, and by Black Elk's singular openness to him. (5)

And puzzlement remains in what is not written. The book covers the period from Black Elk's birth in 1862 to the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890. Neihardt first met Black Elk in 1930. Nothing is said about the intervening forty years and Black Elk's life between the ages of twenty-seven and sixty-seven. In that meantime the Lakota holy man had apparently been silent about his vision and had become a catechist of the Roman Catholic Church. (6) He would compromise neither the vision nor the Christian faith that he continued to teach. If there was tension between the two, he would live in it.

And then, too, readers should approach this book with watchfulness. (7) As Vine Deloria points out, it is tempting to read too much into Native American tribal traditions, "to romanticize [them] and make it seem that they had more power and insight than they were capable of producing." (8) It is equally tempting to read too little in them and to overlook their pointedness and particularity and so eliminate what Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun call "differences the dominant culture perceives as destabilizing." (9) Readers will justly resist such temptations.

So there are pitfalls. But Black Elk took great risks, and his example invites following if only along the little path of a review. Black Elk Speaks is, after all, a great and classic read.

1. The Vision and the Life

Black Elk had already heard voices calling him before he had a vision of sorts at the age of five. The great vision that took central importance in his life came to him four years later when he was (outwardly) seriously ill and fell into a twelve-day coma. He was caught up by a cloud and carried to "where white clouds were piled like mountains on a wide blue plain" and then "suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud" and a great white plain amidst snowy mountains (p. 22) and he saw legions of horses wheeling and dancing in formation. A cloud became a teepee with an open rainbow door. In council within sat the six Grandfathers -- the powers of the four directions and of the sky and earth. In elaborate ritual turn, each bestowed upon Black Elk the gift of a great power.

The fourth Grandfather, of the south, gave him the power to make his nation live. It had the form of a red stick that sprouted and branched and then was filled with leaves and singing birds. Black Elk momentarily glimpsed beneath it in its shade "the circled villages of people and every living thing with roots or legs or wings, and all were happy" (p. 28) and then he looked down to earth "and saw it lying yonder like a hoop of people, and in the center bloomed the holy stick that was a tree, and where it stood there crossed two roads, a red one and a black," (p. 29); the former good, the latter the way of trouble and war.

He also saw the future. He saw that his nation would walk the black road, that its hoop would be broken, and that the tree would die. It was then that he would be called upon to repair the nation's hoop, to set the stick at its center, to make it bloom and make the people live and walk again the good red road.

Memories of this vision inhabited Black Elk for years without his talking about them. He could not "make words for the meaning" (p. 49). But "these things ... remembered themselves.... It was as I grew older that the meanings came clearer and clearer ... and even now I know that more was shown to me than I can tell" (p. 49).

What follows in the book is the intertwining of the vision and the life. Black Elk alone relates the vision. When he turns to the narrative of his life and that of his Oglala Band of the Lakota, he has the help of friends. Fire Thunder, Standing Bear, and Iron Hawk add their parts to the accounts of growing up, of games, hunts, wars, and ceremonies. Black Elk talks about his relative Crazy Horse, a strange but powerful man and a great chief. He, too, had visions. He would enter "the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world" (p. 85).

In the world we see here there was war with the Crow. One night a Crow enemy was shot while stealing horses. "When I got there to see, a pile of coup sticks was lying beside the Crow and the women had cut him up with axes and scattered him around. It was horrible. Then the people built a fire ... and we had a kill dance. Men, women, and children danced right there in the middle of the night ..." (p. 89).

The first sign of forthcoming trouble with another enemy was a Custer expedition into the Black Hills. The soldiers found gold. More Wasichus (white people) and hostilities followed. Black Elk took part in the first skirmish when he was thirteen. Shortly thereafter he took his first scalp in the battle against Custer at the Little Big Horn. That day he thought of his vision, and as he did so it gave him strength. (10)

The victory was short lived, and Black Elk's nation began to walk the black road. They lost the Black Hills. The Wasichus lured Crazy Horse into Soldiers' Town for talks and then killed him. The Oglala fled to Canada when Black Elk was fifteen.

The vision burdened him, but he also felt its power growing in him as the nation declined. When and how, he wondered, would he "bring the hoop together with the power that was given ... and make the holy tree to flower in the center and find the red road again" (p. 147). The burden and the power grew into a compelling fear. Birds in the day and coyotes at night told him that the time had come. "Time to do what? I did not know" (p. 160).

When at last the fear overwhelmed him, Black Elk spoke to a medicine man about his vision and received from him a cure: "You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth" (p. 161). The vision had to be danced and sung into the world. So began a series of community performances that re-enacted first one part of the vision and then another. The Horse Dance came first, and, as Black Elk and the assembled company of horses and riders performed, he saw the vision again.

These occasions provided him with greater understanding of the vision and with a power that enabled him to heal the sick. Even so, although he could cure individuals, he could not help his nation. The nation's condition grew disastrously worse. The Oglala returned from Canada and eventually descended to the...