LAKOTA RELIGION AND TRAGEDY: THE THEOLOGY OF BLACK ELK SPEAKS

Abstract

John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (1932) is a literary work with considerable significance for the study of native American religion and culture. Black Elk (1863-1950) was a Lakota holy man (wicasa wakan) who matured in the twilight of the plains Indian culture, witnessed the events leading to the denouement of the Indian Wars at Wounded Knee in December 1890, and participated in the Ghost Dance, the great revitalization movement that swept the plains tribes in the last decade of the century. The historical and religious significance of Black Elk Speaks is thus considerable, for Black Elk provided Neihardt with a full account of his power vision and with firsthand information on Lakota religion and culture during an important period in Lakota history. Yet major difficulties attend the appropriation of Neihardt's narrative for scholarly purposes. Neihardt was a literary artist, not an ethnologist or comparative religionist, and Black Elk Speaks is not a work of scholarship. The work's artistic virtues and its scholarly shortcomings are opposite sides of the same coin; each is a necessary function of the other. On the one hand, Neihardt created a genuine literary work of art that has had much wider circulation than any work of ethnography or religious scholarship and has done much to increase understanding and appreciation of traditional Lakota religion and culture. As a literary artist, Neihardt was able to present Black Elk's story in the context of a sympathetic and gripping portrait of Black Elk himself and the traditional culture that nurtured him. This artful combination of authentic information, deep human interest, and literary quality has made the work a widely used classic in courses in literature, anthropology, and religion. On the other hand, Neihardt's literary reshaping of the Black Elk interviews raises important questions. In order to create a work of literature from the materials of the interviews, Neihardt necessarily sacrificed