The View from Rock Writing Bluff The Nick Black Elk Narratives and U.S. Cultural Imperialism

Abstract

Abstract The history of the Lakota Hehaka Sapa’s, or Nicholas Black Elk’s, reception, celebrity, and complex mythologization by Native American and Euro-American cultures represents effectively the possibilities and limitations of the colonized subject responding to U.S. Imperialism in the modern period. The different and often contradictory ways in 218 literary culture and U.S. Imperialism which the Black Elk narratives represent Lakota culture and its relation to Euro-American culture do not fit conventional theoretical models either for assimilation to the dominant, colonizing society or for an ethnic or cultural traditionalism (or “nativism”) that resists the constant pressures for assimilation and colonial subjugation. The Black Elk narratives represent the Lakota male subject struggling to adapt his social and religious views to changing colonial circumstances in ways that were neither strictly pragmatic nor idealistic, neither thoroughly co-opted by ideology nor free of neocolonial inflections.