Black Elk, Nicholas (1866-1950)Clyde HollerDavid J. WishartProject TeamKatherine WalterLaura WeaklyNicholas Swiercek2011egp.rel.005Encyclopedia of the Great PlainsUniversity of Nebraska–LincolnCenter for Digital Research in the Humanities319 Love LibraryUniversity of Nebraska–LincolnLincoln, NE 68588-4100cdrh@unlnotes.unl.edu2011
Clyde Holler. "Black Elk, Nicholas (1866-1950)." In David J. Wishart, ed. Encyclopedia of the Great Plains. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 736-737.2008-05-18Nicholas SwiercekModel Encoding
BLACK ELK, NICHOLAS (1866-1950)
Black Elk was probably the most influential
Native American leader of the twentieth century.
His influence flows from the enduring
beauty and power of his religious teachings,
his lifetime of engagement with the problems
of his people, and the galvanizing effect of the
book
Black Elk Speaks on the revival of traditional
religion and culture.
Black Elk was probably born in 1866, the
first year after the Civil War. The end of the war
brought western expansion, which led to aggressive
efforts to confine and assimilate the
Plains tribes. Black Elk's early years were spent
living the old nomadic life, and he was present
at the Custer fight on the Little Big Horn in
1876. He announced his vocation as a holy man
by performing the Horse Dance in 1881, but
after the government outlawed the Sun Dance
and Native healing practices in 1883, his profession
could only be practiced underground. Almost
all Black Elk's working life as a holy man
was spent in this repressive context, and his
religious thought is in part a response to the
dominant culture's oppression, missioniza
tion, and social engineering. In 1887 Black Elk
enlisted with Buffalo Bill Cody and traveled to
Europe with his Wild West Show. On his return
to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1889, he
became a leader of the Ghost Dance. When the
government responded with troops, Black Elk
called for armed resistance, and he was present
at the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.
After Wounded Knee, Black Elk seems to have
continued with his medicine practice. In 1904 he
accepted Catholicism and became active as a
catechist, a position that allowed him to regain a
public leadership role. He mastered reservation
Catholicism through conversations with the
Jesuits, including Eugene Buechel, who cites
Black Elk in his Lakota dictionary. In 1931 Black
Elk was interviewed by poet John G. Neihardt,
which resulted in
Black Elk Speaks (1932). The
book strained Black Elk's relationship with the
Jesuits, and he subsequently worked at the
Duhamel Sioux Pageant, demonstrating traditional
rituals. In 1944 Neihardt interviewed
Black Elk for When the Tree Flowered (1951). In
1947–48 Black Elk gave an account of Lakota
ritual to Joseph Epes Brown that became The
Sacred Pipe (1953), which provides a Lakota
parallel to the seven sacraments and asserts the
equal validity of Christianity and traditional
religion. Black Elk died at Manderson, South
Dakota, on August 17, 1950.
Scholarly work on Black Elk has tended to
focus on the authenticity and adequacy of
Neihardt's portrait of Black Elk as a traditionalist
in
Black Elk Speaks and on the related
issue of the extent of Black Elk's commitment
to Catholicism. (The authenticity of The Sacred
Pipe is a growing topic of discussion.) At
one pole of the debate, Michael F. Steltenkamp's
Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala
(1993) portrays Black Elk as a progressive
Catholic who retains little meaningful commitment
to traditional religion. At the other
pole, Julian Rice's Black Elk's Story: Distinguishing
Its Lakota Purpose (1991) portrays
Black Elk's involvement in Catholicism as
strategic, a response to oppression. Although
this debate is illuminating, it is also misleading,
because Black Elk retained a lifelong commitment
to the central intention of the Ghost
Dance, the revitalization of traditional culture
through religious ritual. In terms of culture,
Black Elk was undoubtedly a nativist, and the
symbolism and hope of the Ghost Dance is
seldom far from his teaching. On the other
hand, his engagement with Catholicism shows
that he could assimilate a very different set of
religious symbols, something that seems to
have been far easier for him than for academic
observers obsessed with the colonialist search
for authenticity.
Black Elk was not the broken old man who
mourns the death of the dream at the end of
Black Elk Speaks. Nor was he anybody's anthropological
informant, a passive source of
information on the past. For Black Elk, the
dream never died, and he always spoke to the
Lakota present. In the simplest terms, he was a
leader of his people during a time of troubles,
and those troubles should certainly not be forgotten
in evaluating his life and work. Black
Elk was one of the most gifted spokesmen for
the Lakota wisdom tradition, and his farseeing
literary collaborations have disseminated
his teachings far beyond their original cultural
horizon. Lakota holy men still teach the great
lessons of this tradition–respect for sacred
power, the relatedness of all beings, and care
for the earth–and they still draw on Black
Elk's legacy, which continues to confront and
challenge European ways of viewing humanity,
society, and the cosmos.
See alsoLITERARY TRADITIONS: Neihardt, John G. / WAR: Wounded Knee Massacre.
Clyde Holler
Morganton, GeorgiaDeMallie, Raymond J., ed. The Sixth Grandfather: Black
Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1984.Holler, Clyde. Black Elk's Religion:
The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism. Syracuse NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1995.Holler, Clyde, ed. The
Black Elk Reader. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press,
2000.