"My friend," said Nicholas Black Elk to the poet and writer John G. Neihardt on his visit to Black Elk's home near Manderson, South Dakota in the 1930's, "I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I should not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story, to be grass upon the hill." And yet, though many Lakota (and Cheyenne and Arapaho) lived alongside Black Elk during the Indian Wars of the late 19th century, few stories in their own words seem to remain. I was struck, actually, reading Neihardt's version of Black Elk's life, that I have never read about these conflicts in the words of those who suffered most in them at all.
There is some controversy, I think, surrounding the question of how much in Black Elk Speaks is Black Elk and how much is Neihardt, and certainly Black Elk's words have been filtered twice over, once through his translator and son Ben Black Elk, and then again through Neihardt's lucid and elegant poetic sensibility. But even taken with a grain of salt, the book is remarkable. Black Elk's life touches upon all the tumultuous events of the Indian Wars, from the skirmishes and assassination of Crazy Horse to the Ghost Dance craze that led ultimately to the killing of Sitting Bull and the massacre at Wounded Knee.
But I loved hearing, too, about Black Elk's journey to the east and to Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, complete with his descriptions of Riker's Island ("This made me feel very sad, because my people too were penned up in islands, and maybe that was the way the Wasichus were going to treat them") and Queen Victoria, whom the Lakota call, amazingly, Grandmother England ("She was little but fat and we liked her, because she was good to us"). And I was moved by the Black Elk's description of the starvation and humiliation the Lakota faced at the hands of the United States, who lied when they told the Lakota they would keep their lands as long as the grass grew long and the water flowed. "You can see that it is not the grass and the water that have forgotten," writes Black Elk.
But the story in Black Elk Speaks is not just the story of a Lakota everyman, but a medicine man and a man beset by visions. Black Elk describes having his first vision at nine years old, a cosmic dream of horses, the Six Grandfathers, and the sacred hoop. It isn't until Black Elk is a teenager that he tells anyone about this vision, and a fellow medicine man tells him that a vision is not real until it is danced for the tribe, which he does, ushering in his new identity as a healer and holy man. Black Elk Speaks, too, struck me as a kind of dancing of Black Elk's visions, a way of bringing them into the world.
But the saddest thing about Black Elk Speaks is that, by his own admission, Black Elk's visions had little effect. Speaking from his house near Manderson--a gray box, and not the tepee, whose circular shape signifies wholeness, he points out--Black Elk bemoans himself as "a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered," and thinks himself to weak for his visions. Like Dee Brown, Black Elk--or perhaps Neihardt--sees the massacre at Wounded Knee as the end of visions:
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.
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