![]() As Americans, we regularly insist on our own rights and freedoms, while simultaneously opposing others who stand up for their rights and freedoms. In Black Elk Speaks, one of US military’s first moves was to build a roadway through the land for wagons and carriages, but his people knew that would both disturb the bison and lead to more intrusions. As a person largely ignorant to the specifics of this history, I’m thankful to have read a firsthand narrative from a person who both lived it and stood up bravely against it.Īlthough Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux, his story is one of many like it in American history. ![]() The latter portions of the book also discuss his time traveling in Europe with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show and finally his settling-down into an undesirable way of life forced on him by the American government. In his story, Black Elk relays with candor the love he has for his people and for a way of life that he saw disappear in the late 1800s, while remarking with equal candor about the violence it took to hold off the white soldiers who were enforcing unjust treaties made with a few tribal leaders who lacked the authority to make deals on behalf of all indigenous people who occupied those lands. Eagle Man utilizes experienced Native American Spirituality to set humanity back on the right track of literary exploration. ![]() The reader is then carried through the turbulent period when white Americans – who he calls wasichus – are settling/conquering/usurping the West. The narrative begins when Black Elk is nine, in the early 1870s he has a religious vision that sets the trajectory for his life. As a collector of oral histories myself, I’m a fan of the genre, and that’s basically what Black Elk Speaks is: a book-length oral history told by a very elderly Native American and collected in the 1930s by a white poet. However, this book stayed on my reading list for about more than a decade before I bought a copy. I enjoyed Brewer’s novel when I read it back in 2005, and it has always been my habit to look into things that people I like also like (as in discovering Charlie Parker’s music through reading Jack Kerouac.) Stuart, who was a real person, was a devotee of Leo Tolstoy and, after hearing Black Elk speak, was influenced by the Oglala Sioux holy man as well. My introduction to Black Elk came instead through reading Sonny Brewer’s novel The Poet of Tolstoy Park, which tells the story of Henry Stuart, an Idaho college professor who retired to convalesce in Fairhope, Alabama in the 1920s. Though I’m not indifferent to it, I’m not particularly interested in Native American history, nor in the history of American West, and this book is both. The road that led me to Black Elk Speaks was a circuitous one. Black Elk Speaks is the transcription of personal conversations between Black Elk and Neihardt. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux The tone of the narrative is elegiac, a lament for a time that has gone and for what Black Elk sees as his personal failure in not enacting the vision he was granted (see Chapter 3 for more on the vision).
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