Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

Product Information

Last year, we visited the Black Hills and there began my learning of the plight of our Native Americans. Moon of the Grass Appearing (April), to the migrations across traditional lands, to the historic battles with the Wasichus (white men), to the Ogalalas' end at Wounded Knee, the reader is immersed in a strange and vanished culture.

Black Elk Speaks - John G. Neihardt - Google Books Black Elk Speaks - John G. Neihardt - Google Books

Black Elk participates in the movement, hoping that it will allow him to finally act on vision and save his people.He survived the massacre at Wounded Knee and became sadly resigned to his broken nation consigned to living on reservations. Black Elk Speaks is the story of the Lakota visionary and healer Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) and his people during the momentous twilight years of the nineteenth century. Every little thing is sent for something, and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy.

Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the

Most importantly, he willingly opened up and shared his story with the author of this book who sought out his story. I've made it to the half-way point, and the audio book is now on its way, too, but I had some interesting revelations of my own, while I was reading this important work. He was a cousin of Crazy Horse, the renowned Native American Warrior, and he recounts Crazy Horse’s death at the hands of a Calvary officer. Black Elk, then in his mid-60s, reflects back on a life spent trying to heal his people as a whole, not just individuals with medical problems. However his vision was from a very masculine perspective and had only little reference to the feminine aspects.Neihardt may have written the words, and Ben Black Elk (Black Elk's son) may have done the translating, but Black Elk lived the life, as is corroborated by other sources. You will recognize some places and people like Little Bighorn, Crazy Horse, Red Cloud, Sitting Bull as well as, other great leaders. In the aftermath of this defeat, Black Elk laments his inability to act on the powers given to him in his initial vision and mourns the destruction of his people. How could there be any saving grace in what was done to Native Americans, with the colonialists employing massacres of women and children, biological warfare (intentionally spreading the infectious diseases they brought with them), starvation (the last survivors of the northern buffalo herds were killed off in 1881), slavery, and ethnocide (e.