Black Elk Speaks: A Native American View of Nineteenth‐Century American History

Henry David Thoreau wrote of the American Indian in his Journal a few years before Black Elk's birth that "It frequently happens that the historian, though he professes more humanity than the trapper, mountain man, or gold-digger, who shoots one (Indian) as a wild beast, really exhibits and practices a similar inhumanity to him, wielding a pen instead of a rifle" (Thoreau 438). Black Elk, holy man of the Ogallala Sioux (Lakota), experienced the inhumanity Thoreau refers to first hand on the Great Plains and eastward for his entire life span from the 1860s to the 1950s. It is fortunate that one white man, John G. Neihardt wielded the pen in the Native American's favor, to tell Black Elk's story of the Lakota people the way it was told to him at Manderson, South Dakota in 1931. Black Elk sensed Neihardt would come and, when the poet showed up, he implicitly trusted him. Though Neihardt romanticized somewhat the words of Black Elk, the essential spirit of Black Elk's story of a people remains faithful and fairly accurate according to scholars like Robert F. Sayre and Raymond DeMaille, who have examined the original transcriptions made at Manderson.Though such details as soldier weed (an antidote to the white soldier's fire power) and Black Elk's sense of fulfillment rather than despair are not found in the published version of Black Elk Speaks (1932), I will rely on this text as my source for the Native American's wielding of the pen (through Neihardt) to set the record straight. Too many American historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (including Francis Parkman) assumed a priori that the western expansion of the United States into "Indian Territory" was sanctified by an abiding manifest destiny. Even if, thought the non-Indians, the Indian people, instead of being militant, were quaint and charming, they had to make way for the progress of an advanced civilization. Black Elk questions white man's "progress" and "advanced civilization" by giving us through Neihardt the true story of his people, their plight and their near demise at the hands of the white man, though he is hopeful that the fourth ascent on the good red road will come sometime in the near future. The good red road, of course, refers to the road of health, strength and wholeness as opposed to the black road of war and despair.At the outset of Black Elk's story of his people, which he recollects at age 68 when Neihardt visits him, we are given a harmonious world view of the Plains Indians before it was almost irreparably damaged by the white man: "It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit" (Neihardt 1). But this world of sharing, where even strong and able hunters must give to the weak and sick, will be disrupted by the Wasichus (they who are many) who from Black Elk's viewpoint abandon their disadvantaged people.To begin with, Black Elk's father limps from a wound received at the Fetterman Fight on Peno Creek near Fort Phil Kearney in 1866 when Black Elk was three years old. As a boy Black Elk was told that "the Wasichus were coming and that they were going to take our country and rub us all out and that we should all have to die fighting" (Neihardt 8). What was the reason for the Wasichus wanting to take the Lakotas' country? Black Elk explains:When I was older, I learned what the fighting was about that winter (1866-67) and the next summer. Up on the Madison Fork the Wasichus had found much of the yellow metal that they worship and that makes them crazy, and they wanted to have a rod up through our country to the place where the yellow metal was (The Black Hills); but my people did not want the road. It would scare the bison and make them go away, and it would let the other Wasichus come in like a river. They told us that they wanted only to use a little land, as much as a wagon would take between the wheels; but our people knew better. …