![]() By all accounts, he was a model of what a good Christian ought to be, and more so. He baptized hundreds of Sioux and other Indians, taught the Bible, held Masses, preached sermons, and lived a humble, righteous, and useful life. Nicholas, in December of 1904, Black Elk was a practicing and proselytizing Catholic. Neihardt left out a key fact about Black Elk: after his baptism, which took place on the name day of St. In the nineteen-sixties and seventies, “Black Elk Speaks” became the kind of book one carried in a backpack while hitchhiking around the West. Non-Native American people looking for alternative kinds of spirituality sought it out, and young Native Americans used it and another Black Elk text, “The Sacred Pipe,” his descriptions of Sioux rites, compiled by the anthropologist Joseph Epes Brown, to revive religious practices from the past. Neihardt, a Nebraska poet, in 1930, and Neihardt put it in his book of the holy man’s recollections, “Black Elk Speaks.”Īlmost no one bought the book when it first appeared, but in time it picked up readers by the millions. During an illness when he was nine years old, he saw something that can be interpreted as the totality of earthly creation conjoined in glorious, sky-spanning unity. The Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, a publication of the University of Nebraska, calls him “probably the most influential Native American leader of the twentieth century.” Unlike Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull, the previous century’s famous Sioux, Black Elk won fame not for deeds of war but because of a vision. At his death, he was thought to be about eighty-four years old. Nicholas Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Sioux, came into the world in Wyoming before it was Wyoming, and died in the village of Manderson, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in South Dakota, in 1950. Good Thunder, Brave Bear, and Yellow Breast, who were taught the Ghost Dance by medicine man Wovoka.Ĭrazy Horse, Lakota war leader of the Oglala band.Īnother Vision of Black Elk, Candidate for Catholic Sainthood Wovoka, the Paiute medicine man whose vision became the Ghost Dance Movement. Now, December 26, 2017, Black Elk is being considered for Catholic sainthood. ![]() ![]() He was a second cousin of the war leader Crazy Horse and fought with Crazy Horse in the Battle of Little Bighorn. Neihardt (1881 - 1973), author of Black Elk Speaks.īlack Elk, was a wičháša wakȟáŋ ("medicine man, holy man"), heyoka of the Oglala Lakota people and educator about his culture. Agnes Catholic Cemetery in Manderson, South Dakota. Black Elk made a prediction earlier in his life that lights in the sky would accompany his death. Birth and youth Black Elk was born in December 1863 on the Little Powder River in Wyoming, west of present-day South Dakota.īlack Elk died in 1950 on a night when the Pine Ridge area experienced a meteor shower. ![]() Black Elk, also known as Hehaka Sapa and Nicholas Black Elk, was a famous holy man, traditional healer, and visionary of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) of the northern Great Plains. ![]()
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