Black Elk's Relationship to Christianity

Abstract

A LL LIVING RELIGIONS change in response to new circumstances and challenges. This has been especially true of Native American religions, which have changed rapidly and drastically in response to forced cultural change and contact with Christianity. It is not surprising that Native American religions have changed under influence of these circumstances. What is surprising is that such change has often been taken as evidence that Native American religions are in danger of extinction. The opposite seems more nearly true: a religion that ceases to change is a religion that is already dead or in danger of extinction. Perhaps because of widespread conviction that traditional religions will soon be extinct, relatively little attention has been paid to actual relationship between traditional religions and Christianity, or to actual state of traditional Native American religions today. Probably this is also due to overwhelming scholarly desire to reconstruct an aboriginal Indian past, which white man has not yet been able to influence or corrupt, that has been driving force behind most of serious work in field of American Indian religion. The perception that all this is passing motivated Franz Boas and others to go into field in order to record and preserve for posterity a native North America that, if truth be told, was already deeply influenced by contact with European thought and culture. The collection of soon-to-vanish data was held to be prior to task of interpretation, which could be accomplished later, when there was no longer any data to collect. Is it any wonder that task of recording and interpreting process of change in present hardly occurred to scholars so decisively oriented to saving past? There was, of course, a value judgment hidden in this focus on past. The Boasian focus on that which was passing away led to a certain disapproval of cultural and religious change. After all, it was precisely this change that was destroying all-important data! This scholarly preoccupation with past-mirrored in popular mind by image of the end of trail--colored not only our view of Native American religion in general, but also of key figures like Black Elk, who were sought out and interviewed essentially as informants on past, not as active creators of Native American