1American Indian autobiographies, either related directly by Indians, or of the “as told to” variety—that is, accounts dictated by an Indian, put into literary prose by white collaborators—have been a popular genre in America for over two and a half centuries. Beginning with Samson Occom’s autobiographical essay in 1768, the genre reached its zenith with John Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks (1932), the most popular and best-written of the Indian memoirs, and its nadir in the latter stages of the twentieth century when it turned out that bestselling books like The Memoirs of Chief Red Fox and The Education of Little Tree were frauds.
- 1 Sally McCluskey, “Black Elk Speaks: And So Does John Neihardt”, Western American Literature 6: 231- (...)
- 2 Forrest Carter. For the full story, see <www.nativeweb.org/pages/legal/carter/html> .
- 3 See Vine Deloria, God is Red, n° 4, Golden North American Press, 1992, 44.
- 4 See Michael Steltenkamp, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1 (...)
2Starting in the 1970s with the efforts of Sally McCluskey and Michael Castro, a group of scholars have raised questions about the authenticity of Black Elk Speaks1. While not an outright fraud like Little Tree, written by a white Alabamian with ties to the Ku Klux Klan2, or Red Fox, in which someone posing as a Sioux invented a life for himself3, it turns out that Black Elk Speaks is not true to the full life of its protagonist. Neihardt’s book is a truncated and somewhat elaborated account of a man who had a career as a Sioux shaman, and later converted to Christianity. Neihardt omits forty years of Black Elk’s life because he feels that white readers would find Black Elk’s traditional religious experiences inauthentic if they knew he was relating them after he became a Catholic. While Neihardt felt great affection and respect for Black Elk, he did not really understand him, and he made the highly complex religious figure into a simplistic if sympathetic symbol of the defeat of the traditional Indian way of life. Black Elk deserves better than that, hence the efforts of scholars like Michael Steltenkamp, Clyde Holler, and Raymond DeMallie, following up on McCluskey and Castro, to identify the real Black Elk as opposed to the mythic figure depicted by Neihardt4.
3Black Elk certainly merits the attention. He was a remarkable man, one who was, in the words of Clyde Holler, “an authentically American religious genius”5. Coming along as late as it did, millennia after the establishment of the world’s major religions, America has not produced many major religious figures—it seems instead to produce spectacular but evanescent celebrities like Aimee Semple McPherson, Father Divine, Billy Sunday, Jimmy Swaggart, and Jim Bakker who strut and fret their hour upon the stage before being consumed by scandal. Black Elk, however, seems to have found a permanent place in the religious canon, ranking with the most influential American religious figures, men like theologian William James and Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormons.
4The quest for the historical Black Elk is difficult because like Jesus and Socrates, Black Elk left no written works, but was quoted extensively. John Neihardt is to Black Elk what Plato was to Socrates, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were to Jesus. Since Ernest Renan there has been an industry devoted to finding the historical Jesus; recently a similar enterprise, though on a much smaller scale, has grown up around Black Elk.
- 6 DeMallie, op. cit., 3.
- 7 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, Lincoln (...)
5Black Elk, a Lakota Sioux of the Ogalala band, was born in what is now Wyoming6 in December 1863, or as he and John Neihardt, his collaborator, more poetically put it, “in the Moon of the Popping Trees” during the “Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed”7. The Civil War had a year and a half to run. After the War ended Americans poured westward to effect what Hollywood and others have called the “Winning of the West”. Obviously for Black Elk and the Sioux, the Winning of the West for white settlers meant the loss of much of the land, freedom, and culture of the Indians.
6Black Elk describes his early years as an idyll, but by the time he was a teenager thousands of settlers were moving through Lakota territories, and skirmishes occurred with increasing frequency. Still, despite the intermittent battles with the whites, the Sioux maintained their traditional lifestyle, following the buffalo across the Great Plains, holding an annual Sun Dance, teaching their culture to their children.
- 8 DeMallie, op cit, 14.
- 9 Ibid, 14.
- 10 Ibidem, 16.
7Black Elk participated in some of the remarkable events of his time. In 1876 he was at Little Big Horn for Custer’s “Last Stand”, though he claims he did not see Custer. In 1886 he went on tour with Buffalo Bill, performing in New York at Madison Square Garden, and in England for Queen Victoria. And in 1890 he took part in the Ghost Dances that led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, the last fight between the US Army and Indians until the second Wounded Knee took place during the Red Power movement of the 1970s. These events, exciting as they were, meant less to Black Elk than his spiritual experiences. When he was nine, Black Elk had a great vision which gave him extraordinary powers as a healer and prophet. He used these powers from the time he was seventeen (1880) until he joined the Catholic Church in 19048. He had been baptized, probably as an Episcopalian, when traveled with Buffalo Bill, but he had continued to practice the traditional Sioux religion. When he became a Catholic, Black Elk stopped performing Lakota ceremonies9. He became a catechist in the Church, instructing converts in the catechism, saying the rosary and even holding services in the absence of the priest, who was able to visit the reservation to say mass only once a month10.
8During the ensuing decades Black Elk gained quite a bit of renown in the Dakotas as a missionary to the Indians, primarily among the Sioux, but among other tribes as well. In 1930 Black Elk met John Neihardt, and his religious life took another turn.
- 11 John G. Neihardt, All Is but a Beginning, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, xii.
- 12 Ibid, xii.
- 13 Ibidem, 281.
9John Gneisenau Neihardt was born in Illinois in 1881. His family moved to Nebraska while he was a teenager. As a youth he was a mystic and a poet, completing two blank verse epics before he turned thirteen.11 While still a teenager Neihardt began to study eastern religions and philosophy, writing The Divine Enchantment, a study of East Asian thought12. Neihardt became quite a prolific poet and man of letters, and was at one time or another Professor of Poetry at the University of Nebraska, Poet Laureate of Nebraska, literary editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and an official of the Office of Indian Affairs. His honors include being awarded in 1936 the gold scroll of honor by the National Poetry Center as the foremost poet in the United States13. However, his reputation as a poet has almost vanished, and Americans remember him today only as Black Elk’s collaborator.
- 14 Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, op.cit., vii-ix.
10Neihardt met Black Elk while doing research on the Ghost Dance for his epic Cycle of the West14. The two men developed an immediate rapport, and Black Elk decided to impart to Neihardt the story of his life, especially the part about his vision, and his extensive spiritual knowledge of the Sioux people. Black Elk’s bond with Neihardt was such that he arranged the adoption into the Lakota tribe of Neihardt and the two daughters who were helping him as amanuense. In telling Neihardt about his vision, and in conducting the ceremony to induct Neihardt and his daughters into the tribe, Black Elk rekindled his faith in Lakota religion.
- 15 N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper & Row, 1968, 52.
- 16 Holler, op cit., 29.
11Henotheism—the worship of one god without denying the existence of others—was common among Indians when they encountered Christianity. For example, the Ghost Dance Cult incorporated Jesus into the religions of the tribes that adopted it. The Catholic Church eventually became tolerant of syncretic Indian beliefs: Scott Momaday has a vivid account in House Made of Dawn of Father Olguin in 1945 leading visitors to see ceremonies at Walatowa that incorporate kiva dancing into the celebration of the saint’s day of Santiago, the patron saint of the pueblo15. The priests who worked with the Sioux were slower to adopt this attitude, but in the 1960s Jesuit Paul Steinmetz decorated the church at Oglala with traditional Lakota symbols, and changed its name from St. Elizabeth to Our Lady of the Sioux. According to Clyde Holler, in 1965 Steinmetz prayed with the pipe at a church service16.
12However, in the early decades of the twentieth century the priests in the Dakotas made it clear to their converts that practicing traditional religion was strengst verboten. Before he met Neihardt, Black Elk subscribed to the idea of one religion at a time. In The Sixth Grandfather anthropologistRaymond DeMallie includes a letter that Black Elk wrote to the Catholic Herald in 1911, decrying henotheism, and urging Lakotas to practice only Christianity:
- 17 DeMallie, op cit., 21.
Remember the words you have said in making declarations. You speak the words but your lives are lives of the old way. Therefore my relatives unify yourselves […]. Only one church, one God, one Son, and only one Holy Spirit—that way you have only one faith17.
13After he began talking to Neihardt and decided to adopt Neihardt into his tribe, Black Elk performed his first Lakota ceremony in years. To begin Neihardt’s initiation Black Elk lit his ceremonial pipe, and “presented it in prayer to the six directions, invoking the six grandfathers on the proceedings”18.
14Black Elk did not abandon Christianity at that point, but apparently decided to accommodate two religious traditions at once. As DeMallie puts it, Black Elk believed that:
the powers of the Lakota universe exist and have the ability to aid mankind in all endeavors, to protect people from disease and from their enemies and to bring joy and contentment. These powers were not replaced by the Christian God whom Black Elk came to accept; instead, they represented an alternative approach to the unknowable, another path to the “other world”19.
15It is not clear how much Black Elk told Neihardt about his life as a Christian. According to DeMallie, Black Elk told Neihardt very little about his missionary work and life as a catechist. However, Neihardt spent enough time on the reservation to hear a good deal about Black Elk, and Black Elk was famous for his labors for the Church. It is inconceivable that Neihardt knew nothing about Black Elk’s religious life as a Christian. It seems rather that he had little interest in it, and pretended that it did not exist.
16It is certain that Neihardt puts nothing of Black Elk as a Christian into Black Elk Speaks. Why that is and how it distorts Neihardt’s account of Black Elk’s life is the next question to address.
17Neihardt tells us that the process of collaboration on Black Elk Speaks was that Black Elk would tell his story, his son Ben Black Elk would act as interpreter, and Neihardt’s daughter Enid, a stenographer, would record the narrative20. Enid later typed up her notes in a transcript of the conversations. Neihardt reworked the narrative to an extent, added a Preface and Postscript, and published the story in 1932 ostensibly as Black Elk told it.
18Neihardt deposited Enid’s notes and transcript in the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection at the University of Missouri. In 1984, Raymond DeMallie published an edited version of the transcript under the title The Sixth Grandfather. The documents include Enid Neihardt’s original shorthand record of the conversations and her typed transcript. Because the shorthand account is choppier and less grammatical than the transcript, DeMallie published the typed version. Where Enid omitted or changed things in transcribing her notes, DeMallie provides that material in brackets in his book.
19To give a sense of what Neihardt did to Enid’s transcript of Black Elk’s account it is instructive to compare a passage. I have chosen one that is posted on the internet, so that readers can access it without having to get DeMallie’s book. The University of Nebraska has issued a “Twenty-First Century Electronic Edition” of Black Elk Speaks called Black Elk’s World. At the end of the text are several appendices, the second of which reprints a portion of Enid Neihardt’s transcript. In speaking of the sacred pipe of the Sioux, an episode at the beginning of Black Elk Speaks, the transcript says:
Then she presented the pipe to the chief. It was an ordinary pipe but there was a calf carved in one side, and there were twelve eagle feathers tied on with a grass that never breaks21.
Neihardt’s version is:
- 22 Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, op cit, 4.
Then she gave something to the chief, and it was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, and with twelve eagle feathers hanging from the stem to mean the sky and the twelve moons, and these were tied with a grass that never breaks22.
20Neihardt adds explanations for the reader, but they do not change the tone or meaning much. The stylistic changes that Neihardt makes are subtle, but they do alter the tone. Neihardt’s use of hendiadys, combining the two sentences into one and linking all the clauses with and ”gives a sort of biblical gravitas to the passage. In place of the direct “Then she presented a pipe to the chief”, we have “Then she gave something to the chief, and it was a pipe […]”. This sort of periphrasis, backing into the sentence, making it longer and more indirect, is Neihardt’s rendering of what one might call Indianspeak the dialect that Hollywood employed in portraying wooden-faced Indians in its horse operas. Indianspeak, a variant of the dialect that Hollywood used for Roman senators and other historical worthies, eschewed colloquialisms and contractions in its quest to achieve solemnity.
21In the full passage about the pipe Neihardt makes more major changes, leaving out various details about the pipe and the woman in order to streamline the narrative. In the words of the anonymous annotator of the Internet:
A comparison of the transcripts and the draft reveals that Neihardt suppressed unnecessary details, altered awkward expressions, and introduced a tone of reverence and solemnity, transmuting the oral narrative into literature.
22According to DeMallie, the process of transcription involved even more distortion of Black Elk’s words than that. The shorthand account, ostensibly Ben Black Elk’s translation of his father’s words, was actually a collaboration between Ben and Neihardt. According to DeMallie:
Neihardt would repeat Ben’s translation, rephrasing it for clarity in more standard English […]. As each sentence came forth in revised form from Neihardt’s repetition, Enid wrote it down in shorthand23.
23Obviously we are a few removes from Black Elk’s original account. But it is not principally the minor omissions or change in tone that distorts Neihardt’s account of Black Elk’s life; it is the truncation. Neihardt stops his narrative at Wounded Knee, the “dream that died in the snow”, an event that occurred forty years before the interviews. Neihardt did that for a number of reasons, religious, philosophical and literary.
- 24 Arnold Krupat, For Those Who Come After, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1985.
- 25 Hayden White, Metahistory, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1973.
24In his study of Indian autobiography For Those Who Come After24Arnold Krupat examines Indian-white collaborations (including that of Black Elk and Neihardt) from a Marxist perspective, focusing on the mode of production of the text, that is, the roles of subject and collaborator. In analyzing the attitudes of the white collaborators, Krupat makes use of the historiographical categories of Hayden White, who analyzed European history in terms of its philosophy, politics, and literary form25. Krupat’s scheme is a sound one, but his conclusions are dubious, and not very complete. For instance, Krupat decides that Black Elk Speaks is a romance, a work that ends in triumph, when it seems pretty clear that whether the book ends at Wounded Knee or with Neihardt’s postscript, it finishes with Black Elk’s failure, the form White called “irony”.
- 26 Ibid, 30.
- 27 Ibidem, 31.
25But Krupat has a valid point in applying White’s categories. Biography and autobiography are species of history, and histories are molded according to the views of the historians. White’s scheme is the most comprehensive and useful I have come across. According to White, historical narratives are verbal models—he also uses the word “icons”—of historical events26. The historian begins with an essentially poetic act in which he “both creates his object of analysis and predetermines the modality of the conceptual strategies he will use to explain it”27. White describes three “levels” or “modes” the historian uses in organizing his material: emplotment, argument, and ideological implication.
- 28 I prefer the term “melodrama”, since it describes a work in terms of its tone and ending. Romance g (...)
26White borrows his categories of emplotment—i.e., the shape of the narrative—from literary critic Northrop Frye: romance, tragedy, comedy, and satire. These categories encompass the possibilities of the fate of the hero. In a romance28 the hero wins, in a tragedy he dies, in a comedy he marries, and in a satire (Frye had used the term “irony”) the hero loses.
27Applying these terms to histories, in a melodrama the side favored by the historian ends up triumphant. A melodramatic treatment of the Civil War would end at Appomattox with the North triumphant. Tragedy ends with the death of the hero but not necessarily the failure of his cause. The story of the Alamo is tragic. Davy Crockett et al. died, but Texas won its independence. Comedy ends with marriage; for history this means the melding of hostile peoples, be they Saxons and Normans, Yankees and Rebels. Irony ends in failure. A history of the Civil War told from the standpoint of the South would be ironic.
28Neihardt has clearly fashioned Black Elk Speaks as an example of the mode of irony: Black Elk fails. Black Elk’s narrative ends with the massacre at Wounded Knee:
- 29 Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks, op cit., 276.
And so it was all over.
I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream29.
29This is undoubtedly a beautiful and moving speech; the problem is that Black Elk never delivered it. Holler states, “it can now be regarded as certain that Black Elk never spoke the “death of the dream speech that ends Black Elk Speaks”30.
- 31 DeMallie, op cit., 282.
30The speech is not in DeMallie’s transcript. Black Elk ends his discussion of Wounded Knee with the surrender of the Sioux to the Cavalry, who saluted them as the Indians marched into Pine Ridge. The final line of Black Elk’s account is, “Two years later I was married”31.
31Why did Neihardt add the speech? To shape the narrative into the form he thought it ought to take. To him the end of the traditional life of the Sioux was a terribly sad thing, a failure. Black Elk, who became an enthusiastic Catholic catechist, presumably took a somewhat different view of things. Black Elk was not writing the book, however. Neihardt’s views are typical of the mindset of Americans of his time who were sympathetic to the Indians. The prominent image of Indians in works of popular culture was that of the “vanishing Americans”, either dead or dying out. Edward Curtis, the photographer whose works were widely known to Americans, has a famous picture of Navajos in soft focus riding away from the camera down a trial. Curtis entitled it “The Vanishing Race”. As far as most Americans, especially those in the East, knew, Indians were disappearing fast if not already gone.
32Actually, in 1890, the census reported that there were only 200,000 Indians left in America, out of the eight million who in 1492 lived in what became the US, so there was a factual basis to the myth. According to the 2004 census there are now 2.4 million Indians. The tenfold leap in population can mostly be attributed to the fact that for years mixed-bloods refused to acknowledge their Indian heritage. Gradually throughout the twentieth century minority status became something not only glamorous (black is beautiful), but something that provided actual benefits from affirmative action programs and minority scholarships. This accelerated in the sixties because of the paradigm shift from the image of the melting pot (in which ethnics blended into the American soup) to the salad (in which individual ingredients keep their discrete identities). In each census more and more people who had described themselves as white reasserted their Indian identity. After the eighties, when Indian gaming put new wealth into Indian country ($12.4 billion annually is the latest figure), the process speeded up again.
33Neihardt, however, was shaping Black Elk’s narrative in the 1930s, and he thought of Black Elk in terms of the stereotype of the “Vanishing American”. One vivid symbol of that stereotype is “The End of the Trail”, a large (six meter) statue of an Indian slumped over an exhausted horse, his lance pointing at the ground. The figure represents the essence of defeat. James Earle Fraser designed it as a memorial to a valiant but defeated people. Originally the plaster statue appeared at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915. Fraser had hoped his work would be cast in bronze, but the shortage of metal during World War I prevented that. In 1920 the small California city of Visalia bought the work and placed it in a park where it slowly deteriorated until the in 1968 Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City restored it and made it the focal point and symbol of the museum.
34Although Hollywood westerns have made cowboys and Indians binary opponents, “The End of the Trail” is not in the Cowboy Hall of Fame to represent a victory of the cowboys, settlers, whites over the Indians. It is there as a symbol of the end of the Old West. The appeal of “The End of the Trail” touches something deep in Americans, who despite the large infusion of ethnics retain an Anglo-Saxon culture which makes them half in love with easeful death. Their ancient Germanic pagan heritage of the Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, the struggle in which the good gods lose, remains alive in American culture. Americans place more value in losing in a good cause than winning a cheap victory. The battles that are most prominent in American history are ones in which US forces suffered crushing losses: the Alamo, Little Big Horn, Pearl Harbor.
35Fraser’s warrior is a symbol of an American people who went down fighting, victims of numbers and technology, not of a failure of courage or will. There is a link between the dying Indian and the dying cowboy as symbolized by Billy the Kid, or the cowboy in the song who bleeds to death on the streets of Laredo. Kiowa writer Scott Momaday, who has written repeatedly about Billy the Kid, attributes the outlaw’s appeal to the pathos of the dying cowboy, and discusses how both the cowboy and the Indian are part of the tradition of a world that has disappeared, the Old West:
- 32 Charles Woodward, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, Lincoln, University of Nebr (...)
Billy the Kid is opposed to one part of my experience—to the Indian side of me […] but at the same time he’s very much a reflection of the world I love, the Wild West. He’s as much a reflection of that as is, say, Crazy Horse32.
Neihardt, writing an epic about the West, instinctively saw Black Elk as a symbol of defeat, the last great man of a doomed race. If he needed a final speech as a coda, why not invent one to emphasize his point? Undoubtedly he thought it true to the spirit of what Black Elk felt, even if the shaman never articulated the sentiments.
36Hayden White’s second mode, argument, deals with philosophy of history. The terms he uses are “formist”, “organicist”, “mechanist” and “contextualist”. Formists emphasize events in their uniqueness: to them history is largely biography, the deeds of great leaders. A formist history of America would have chapters labeled “The Age of Jackson”, “The Age of Lincoln”, “The Age of Roosevelt”. Contextualists emphasize of historical trends, and think in terms of periods like “The Gilded Age”, “The Progressive Era”. Often, especially today, they think in terms of decades: the twenties, the sixties, the eighties all have a distinctive Zeitgeist. Mechanists believe that history is the working out of laws: revolutions or depressions occur as the result of the confluence of certain conditions. Finally, organicists believe that history betrays the working of a great force. Many organicists believe that history is providential, the working out of God’s will. Sometimes this is stated openly, as by the Deuteronomic Historians of the Hebrew Bible; sometimes it is implied as in the phrase “Manifest Destiny”. Destiny in a Christian nation means God’s will.
37Neihardt is an organicist. He has a mystical belief that the settling of the West—with the havoc it caused to Indian cultures—is part of an epic pattern thousands of years old, the inexorable working of a force similar to Hegel’s World Spirit. What mechanists like Frederic Jackson Turner and his disciples explained in terms of the laws of the frontier, Neihardt mystified in terms of a primordial urge of the Aryan people to move ever westward. The story is:
- 33 John G. Neihardt, Knowledge and Opinion: Essays and Literary Criticism of John G. Neihardt, Lincoln (...)
one of the most compelling tales imaginable. Its hero is not less than a Race, and the action is concerned with the last major phase of a westward migration of peoples that began thousands of years ago beyond the Danube, beyond the Hellespont33.
The result was a final conflict with the Indian people living in the American West, a conflict Neihardt saw in Homeric terms, with sympathy for both sides. Custer may have been an Achilles or Ajax, but Crazy Horse was a Hector and Black Elk a Priam. If the victory of the settlers was inevitable, the cause of the Indians was certainly a worthy one, and the settlers could and should learn a great deal from them. As Neihardt put it in a review of a history of the Southwest:
Life has been differently and admirably lived by great numbers of men and women who preceded us on this continent, and […], in some very important respects their lives may have been saner, happier, nearer to the great realities than ours can be in the complex world that we have created with, perhaps somewhat more ingenuity than wisdom34.
38White’s final mode is “ideological implication”, a fancy term for “politics”. In looking at nineteenth century European politics he employs the terms “anarchist”, “radical”, “liberal”, and “conservative”. The twentieth century equivalents would probably be “socialist”, “liberal”, “conservative”, and “fascist”. These terms do not fit white political attitudes towards Indians in Neihardt’s times very well, however. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the range of political attitudes, moving from left to right, might best be described as “allies”, “assimilators”, “separatists” and “enemies”. Allies believed that Indians should be allowed to live pretty much as they always had, having sovereignty over their land and lives. Allies deplored the Dawes Act, which took communal Indian land and divided it into individual plots in order to teach Indians responsibility through private property.
- 35 William T. Hagan. American Indians. Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1961, 3.
39Assimilators favored integration, turning Indians peaceably (or forcibly, if necessary) into garden variety Americans. They subscribed to Richard Pratt’s dictum: “Kill the Indian and save the man”35. They favored the Dawes Act in the belief that it would help Indians become like other Americans.
40A third group thought Indians need to be herded away on remote reservations where they would not impede American progress. They favored the Dawes Act because they thought (correctly) that it would help them get their hands on Indian land.
41The final group, the enemies, thought “the only good Indian was a dead Indian”, a phrase attributed to General Philip Henry Sheridan, an old Indian fighter. Although far more Indians died of disease than bullets, small but murderous groups of settlers carried out a campaign of genocide in places like Texas and California.
42Neihardt emphatically belonged to the first group, the allies. He had a more favorable idea of traditional Indian life than he did of life in modern America, and he had the romantic idea that somehow Indians should try to keep living as they always had, worshipping in traditional ways, performing the old ceremonies, keeping their languages and cultures pretty much intact. The effort was ultimately doomed, but if it meant that the Indians died out rather than give over their traditional ways, death was better than dishonor.
43For this reason Neihardt could not bear the thought of Black practicing Catholicism. As Neihardt saw it, Black Elk had a perfectly good culture and perfectly good religion. To abandon them for the institutions of his conquerors was a betrayal. Obviously Black Elk saw things differently; he was able to accommodate Christianity and his traditional religion, to adjust to new realities and move on.
44Just how much Black Elk knew about Neihardt’s poetic recreation of his life is a question. In 1993 Michael Steltenkamp published Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala, in which he included two letters in which Black Elk complains that Neihardt 1. didn’t pay him, and 2. refused to reveal that Black Elk had become a Catholic. The first letter reads in part:
- 36 Michael Steltenkamp, op cit., 82-83.
Holy Rosary Mission
Pine Ridge, S. Dak.
January 26, 1934
Black Elk Speaks Again—A Last Word
I shake hands with my white friends. Listen, I speak some true words. A white man made a book and told what I had spoken of olden times, but the new times he left out. So I speak again, a last word.
I am now an old man […] In the last thirty years I am different from what the white man wrote about me. I am a Christian […] I say the Apostle’s Creed and I believe every word of it36.
45The second letter adds:
Three years ago in 1932 a white man named John G. Neihardt came up to my place whom I have never met before and asked me to make a story book with him […]. He promised me that if he completed and publish [sic] this book he was to pay half of the price of each book. [He told me] he hasn’t seen a cent from the book which we made. By this I know he was deceiving me about the whole business. I also asked to put an the end of the story that I was not a pagan but have converted into the Catholic Church in which I work as a catechist for more than 25 years. I’ve quit all these pagan works. But he didn’t mention this. Cash talks37.
- 38 DeMallie, op. cit., 34.
46Both Steltenkamp, who prints the letters, and DeMallie, who comments on them, speculate that Black Elk wrote them to appease the priests who were appalled at his apparent relapse. DeMallie thinks perhaps that Black Elk’s daughter Lucy was the “actual author of the [second] letter”38. It is hard to tell exactly what Black Elk thought. It is quite possible that he was disappointed that Neihardt never mentioned his conversion, but equally possible that he wrote the letters primarily to mollify the priests. It seems certain that he valued both his Lakota religion and Christianity, but was shrewd enough to know that the priests would never understand or respect how he felt, so it was just easier to accede to their wishes.
47As for Neihardt, the poet did not cheat Black Elk. The first edition of the work made nothing. The book did not make any money until the University of Nebraska Press reissued it in the sixties, when it became a classic for the New Age religion crowd, and a staple of ethnic studies syllabi. By that time Black Elk was dead. In regard to distorting Black Elk’s life, Neihardt is guilty primarily of poetic license. He told Black Elk’s story the way he imagined Black Elk would have wanted him to. Looking back today it appears that Neihardt is condescending and unfair in taking Black Elk’s life and fitting it to a pattern decreed by Neihardt’s prejudices. Black Elk is a more complex and interesting figure than Neihardt realized, but without Neihardt’s account, we wouldn’t know anything at all about a great American religious figure.
