Black Elk tells about life in the last great days of the plains Indians and how that came to an end. Includes mystical dreams, etc. ( )

This book is the memoir of a Lakota Indian named Black Elk and the treatment of the Native Americans in the late 1800s and early 1900s by white settlers. This book was one of the most moving books I have ever read because of the fact that it is completely unbiased. Black Elk relayed his story to Neihardt as a very old man, a very long time after the occurrences in the book. He was not looking for fame or sympathy, but just to archive the history of his culture. He tells simply the facts and does not inflate anything, yet i find myself tearing up at certain points in the book. The book is also very spiritual, recalling all of Black Elks "visions." He describes exactly what it was he saw and does not try to explain the sense behind it, but just what he did in response. The book follows his life as he is brutally repressed and eventually relocated to a reservation. There Black Elk and his fellow Native Americans are stripped of their culture and beliefs and forced into assimilation. They are blacked in white schools, converted to Catholicism, and given work force jobs. No longer can Black Elk roam the land as he did and live off of nature. Neihardt manages to write the entire book just as Black Elk recalls it, simply and unchanged. This book is incredibly moving and a very important historical artifact in our country. ( )

One of the best books I've ever read and one of the few that I go back to and read over and over. It moves me again every time I read it. ( )

Black Elk was approximately 68 and most of his peers had died when he sat down with an epic poet and young translators and began telling his story. It includes glorifications of battles and buffalo hunts, the burdens of suffering caused and endured, and detailed revelations of a tribal visionary.

This is perhaps the most difficult review I have ever undertaken to write because I hold this book and the men who created it in the highest regard. I value its insights, its spiritual message, its historical documentation and its subject's earnest and personal sharing. It is difficult for me to write about it because I respect it and Black Elk, the man that it is about, to such a degree that I fear the loss of my objectivity. It is difficult also because I am not a Native American, I am not Lakota and I did not live in the turbulent times that the book describes. I feel presumptuous making even thoughtful comments about it. This being said, I wish to review it because I love it and also because I wish to share this book that has so touched me with others in hopes that it will touch them, too.

Three important factors must be considered if we are to fully appreciate Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Lakota Sioux. First we must realize that Black Elk wanted, rather he needed, to tell his story. He had already lived a long and rich life filled with enough joy and sorrow, darkness and light to fill dozens of lifetimes of an average person. He felt deep personal sorrow over what he saw as a failure of his life's mission, that of helping to save his people and enabling them to stay on the good red road of happiness in harmony with the Universe. Secondly, we must realize that Black Elk chose John G. Neihardt to help him record and make known his life story and the sacred message he carried in his heart for his people. He befriended and trusted this white man. This is a singular fact in view of who Black Elk was and what he had experienced and endured throughout his life and makes this a profoundly revelatory statement about the character of John G. Neihardt. Third, we should bear in mind that the story is much bigger than either of these two men separately and that nothing less than their combined characters and talents could have succeeded in its telling.

John G. Neihardt was a poet and historian from Nebraska who wrote a series of great epic poems called The Cycle of the West about the history of the western plains. In 1930 in the process of researching the final volume of this saga which concerned the Lakota he became acquainted with Black Elk, a holy man, healer and warrior of the Oglala Lakota who was living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A year later when Black Elk related his story to Neihardt, Black Elk was 68 years old and Neihardt was 50. Over the period of several weeks,with the help of his son Ben who acted as interpreter, Black Elk related not only the story of his life but revealed personal accounts of the life of his cousin the great Lakota leader Crazy Horse, the battle with Custer on the Little Big Horn and the ignominious slaughter by the United States government of the innocents at Wounded Knee. He shared his sacred medicine visions, rituals, dances and songs and healing remedies most of which were traditionally kept secret. He related a wealth of detailed information and insight into the times and the circumstances of life among the plains tribes of that era as well as offering a vivid and emotionally rich view into his personal life.

The book reads quickly, told as it is in simple prose. It has the music in its idiom that you would expect in an account related by a mystic and recorded and expressed by a poet. It begins with the story of how the pipe was first given to the people by White Buffalo Calf Woman. Neihardt smokes with Black Elk and a few of his elderly friends who are present to embellish and confirm the account. A sacred tone is set that permeates the book. We follow Black Elk's life from his birth three years prior to the Fetterman fight, through his childhood and the beginning evidence of his gift as a shaman, into his young adult life when his spiritual vision and his healing talents flower into maturity and into his adulthood, when after the tragedy at Wounded Knee, he goes along with the rest of Red Cloud's band and turns himself in at the Pine Ridge agency, starving, broken hearted and defeated.

Of the several books that I have read on the subject, this book contains the clearest description of the spiritual climate in which the Ghost Dance vision of the Paiute prophet Wovoka took root and it provides the best aid to understanding the desperate message of hope it provided to the indigenous people at this disastrous time in their lives. Particularly interesting to me is the Messianic vision that the prophet conveyed as related by Black Elk who was there. The parallels between it and the Christ's message of compassion and hope are quite stunning. Black Elk relates his own epiphany and vision of the Messiah in riveting words I will not soon forget and provided me with endlessly fascinating subject for contemplation.

Black Elk's words, so simple and direct, about Crazy Horse and other notable figures from this chaotic period on the cusp of monumental change, offer a truly unique first hand perspective that offered me more insight than a dozen books by historians writing from a safe and scholarly distance down the long halls of time.

This is not a fairy tale and it is told by a man who lived in harmony closer to Nature than any of us can truly imagine. His perceptions about life and death, competition, suffering, mercy, justice, stamina, will, sorrow, fellow beings, enemies and family, peace and war are expressed frankly and are cut from the stark reality of the beauty and the brutality that was life for a people who were one with the land and who did not set themselves above it. His accounts of battle are very graphic and they are bluntly honest. I found them sometimes painful to read, so specific and so straightforward are they as they relate killing and maiming and rage. They make no apologies. I have thought long and hard about aspects of competition and warfare, punishment and revenge, courage, mercy and conquest. In the end I must withhold my privileged 21st century judgments because I know that I am not from that world. The people who were from that world, both the indigenous people and the conquerors understood the stakes when they engaged each other. Until you have hung from a galloping horse, shooting under his neck among an ocean of massive, surging buffalo so that your people might survive and flourish, you cannot know what is at stake when you compete with others for that horse and for that buffalo. Until you have starved and frozen beyond all reasonable parameters of endurance and seen your family, also starving and freezing, cut down in cold blood upon the land of your birth you cannot know the cold steel of purpose that motivates you against your enemies. You cannot rightly judge. This book relates the truth of one man's experience. It does not make excuses so that you will be comfortable hearing it.

Many pages of the book provide the most minute of details of Black Elk's private medicine visions. His life cadence is unhurried. He relates the visions and the ceremonies verbatim. Our attention spans are not his concern. His eyes as they look upon this inner landscape of a higher reality displayed in symbol, myth and mysticism see keenly and his mind interprets for us concepts and paradigms with which we may be unfamiliar. This may come across as tedious or enthralling depending on your own mindset and experience. I found it endlessly fascinating. When Black Elk says, "Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.", I know at the profound level of my own spirit something of that well of intangible truth and I too see and understand more than I can tell.

A poignant melody flows throughout this book. Black Elk shares his story with such an unaffected frankness and he interweaves those simple joys of life, love and humor and sunny days, mystery and mastership of oneself so flawlessly with the dark threads of betrayal, sorrow and loss that I felt pulled into the embrace of his life as though I was Lakota. From his vision and his honesty I extracted the essence of my own humanity, of humanity in general.

At the conclusion of the book, Neihardt relates in an author's postscript that he accompanied Black Elk to the top of Harney Peak where he had his first sacred vision so long ago in his youth. Black Elk wanted to go and stand there one last time so that he could speak to the Six Grandfathers or deities of his medicine vision. One last time, Black Elk cries out on behalf of his people. He recalls the teachings he received in his youth, when crying for a dream he stood there in that high place. His sorrow is palpable as he says, "With tears running, O Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather--with running tears I must say now that the tree has never bloomed. A pitiful old man, you see me here, and I have fallen away and done nothing. Here at the center of the world, where you took me when I was young and taught me; here, old, I stand, and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather! Again and maybe the last time on this earth, I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself, but for my people; I am old. Hear me that they may once more go back into the sacred hoop and find the good red road, the shielding tree!" Neihardt says that with tears running down his face the old man raised his voice in a thin high wail and chanted, "In sorrow I am sending a feeble voice, O Six Powers of the World. Hear me in my sorrow, for I may never call again. O make my people live!"

The Six Grandfathers surely heard Black Elk that day upon the mountain because the tree does flower and the hoop is once again whole. The people struggle but many of them keep the old ways. Many of them are on the good red road. It is partly because of this book that many young First Nation people were able to hold on to the vision and beliefs of their people. It is because of this book that many reclaimed their spiritual center when once it seemed lost. I love this book because it has helped me in maintaining my own sense of my place within the sacred hoop and I think it has the power to do that for many people.

I love the way this book is written. Neihardt has been criticized by some for the way he edited the original transcripts of Black Elk's narrative. According to the publishers, "Neihardt suppressed unnecessary details, altered awkward expressions, and introduced a tone of reverence and solemnity, transmuting the oral narrative into literature." On the surface this may sound as though Neihardt took inappropriate liberties with Black Elk's words. I do not believe this to be true. I believe that the two men were so in sync at the level of their spirits that the grooming of the narrative illuminated it rather than altered it. I know in my heart that Black Elk knew exactly what he was doing when he chose Neihardt to tell his story and I know also that Neihardt fully understood that sacred trust. Another book entitled The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt by Raymond J. Demallie provides the exact transcripts, word for word as well as a 100 page introduction with biographical materials. One speaks more to the anthropologist while the other speaks to the mystic and the poet. Both tell the same tale and I recommend both.

This edition of Black Elk Speaks contains several excellent black and white photographs of Black Elk at various ages with his friends and relatives and also with the author and his children during the time of the narrative.

I don't know that I have done this great book justice, I doubt that I have. I found it enormously compelling, spiritually uplifting, historically fascinating, poignant beyond description, timeless and important. I recommend it without reservation. I recommend that you read it more than once over time for it is deceptively simple and you may find that it grows in depth as you do. ( )