Handout: Black Elk’s Significance in American Culture

Black Elk’s Significance in American Culture 

a. religious & historical significance of Nicholas Black Elk
b. “creative & courageous confrontation with Christianity and with the challenges of modernity
c. “the greatest religious thinker yet produced by native North America”
d. created an “authentic Lakota Christianity” 
e. revitalized the traditional Lakota religion 
f. identified points of commonality between Christianity and Lakota religion
g. showed how Christianity could be embraced without sacrificing Lakota identity
h. worked to reinvigorate the Sun Dance, and to reinstate it as the centerpiece of Lakota religion 
i. Black Elk was significant as a religious leader
j. helps stimulate interest in native religions 
k. concern for “greening” and environmental issues
l. offers spiritual insight and attentiveness to the natural world
m. the natural world is a vehicle for religious experience
n. Indians are regarded as noble savages who enjoy an original relationship with the spiritual powers of nature, free from the corruptions of civilization 
o. exemplifies environmental stewardship & ecospirituality 
p. helped natives become spiritual authorities and not outsiders in American culture
q. natives as romantic images-problematic
r. Native Americans have become religious experts and teachers

Editors Contribution
1. Black Elk was treated as a tragic figure 
2. BE’s way of life was treated as a description of a noble way of life that had vanished forever
3. Black Elk held true to the Lakota religion, not appreciated by the author 
4. BE’s contribution to the world-not taken seriously by the editor
5. BE’s vision treated literally, although could had been a worldview that developed over the course of his lifetime
6. BE’s conveyance to Neihardt: significant part of its development & realization 
7. Neihardt didn’t consider that the stories BE told about the vision & life of his people could be a manifestation of an ongoing vitality of Lakota culture
8. lens: believed N.A. societies were internally coherent cultural systems in which religion played a central role 
9. cultural relativism of the 1930s was an improvement over defending that Anglo Saxons were of the highest moral & intellectual authority
10. native culture wasn’t considered historically 
11. complex relationships were involved in their cultural change & ongoing vitality
12. many parts of the story are authentic 
13. Longfellow’s Hiawatha didn’t have much basis in Native American reality 
14. Niehardt wanted to learn about the Lakota people & the Ghost Dance ceremonies


Since the 1960s
1. Alice Beck Kehoe, wrote The Ghost Dance: Ethnohistory & Revitalization
a. discussed the role of the Ghost Dance in the 1890 massacre of Big Foot’s band of Lakota people beside Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota
b. the Wounded Knee Massacre site was later occupied by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in 1973, a new warrior society in a struggle for Indian rights
c. AIM activists read Black Elk Speaks to learn about the religious traditions of their ancestors
d. young people that were disaffected by the US government’s policies in Vietnam, racism, & complacency of middle class Americans were exposed to Black Elks 
e. Black Elk, first major Native-influenced text to be studied in mainstream Religion courses
f. interest in alternative religions & alternative forms of spirituality 
g. more publications focusing on mistreatment of Indians by the US government were created
h. it is critically sophisticated to gain insights from Black Elk speaks because of the author’s influence 

Main points
1. story about the mistreatment of the Lakota people by the US government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries 
2. & about the efforts of Black Elk and others to preserve their religion and culture against hostile forces 
3. indictment of stupidity and cruelty of Americans who made native lives miserable 
4. tribute to a small ethnic group that defended their religion & culture against great odds
5. about planting and development of native ideas within the religious imaginations of millions of Americans 
6. Black Elk wanted to revitalize Lakota religion and promote its relevance for modern life 

Black Elk In The Context of Long-standing Trends in American Cultural History
1. Black Elk is popular
2. signals some important shifts in American thought
3. Natives have been admired for centuries 
4. when natives became less of a military threat, they became more admired
5. when technology & industry distanced people from the land, people admired Indians more 
6. low levels of hostility against native groups
7. high levels of concern about the natural environment & its degradation 
8. positive images as simple and wholesome 
9. After French & Indian Wars, historians, playwrights, novelists, poets, visual artists portrayed natives as noble savages
10. In America: the Indian warrior was a symbol of fierce pride, a spirit of independence, a down-to-earth intelligence and a natural skillfulness 
11. Transcendentalist movement: celebrated natives for their practical knowledge about the natural world & for their immediate and childlike acquaintance with nature’s spiritual powers 
12. Transcendentalists shaped romantic stereotypes about Native Americans
13. their intellectual and emotional climate celebrated nature as a primary source of religious experience 
14. grew out of the transcendental idealism advanced by Immanuel Kant 
a. Goethe, Wordsworth, Carlyle, de Staal, Cousin-equated intuition with religious impilse
b. believed religious institutions had a stultifying effect on religious inspiration 
c. thought the sublime parts of nature were the best means of inspiration 
d. reflected Plato’s ideas that material reality reflects ideal truths
e. Augustine-nature was evil because of the fall
f. Puritans shaped Native Americans as savage beasts
g. transcendentalism- Thoreau & Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson
1. nature was a living bible of spiritual revelations & signs
2. you become a “particle of God” 
3. absence of egoism 
4. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Francis Parkman, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Annie Dillard, Wendall Berry, Peter Matthiessen, Gary Snyder, N. Scott Momaday
5. God in nature, already common in the American literary tradition 
6. the Lakota people’s resisting of American culture-countercultural
7. counterculturalism is an important element of American culture itself
8. counter-culture: experiencing God in nature
9. anti-institutional
10. Indians: countercultural protest, natural wisdom, spiritual insight
11. Thoreau tried to live like an Indian 
12. Thoreau hired Indians to be his guides to nature
13. John Brown & Walt Whitman influenced Thoreau 
14. Native religious beliefs were diverse 
15. Neihardt presented Indian culture & Western civilization as irreconcilable 

Black Elk Speaks and the Re-creation of American Culture
1. Black Elk: viewed as a religious leader
2. Native American religion is part of North American religion 
3. Native Americans participated in motion pictures & activities for financial gain
4. the majority of Native Americans have been deeply influenced by Christianity 
5. Sacred Pipe: symbolizes Lakota spiritual life 
6. belief in a true God is central to Native spirituality & Christianity
7. 7 rituals mirrored the 7 sacraments of Roman Catholicism
8. water symbolized vitality for the Lakota people
9. doesn’t believe the nature world is corrupt or that spiritual purification must renounce nature or the flesh
10. need forgiveness for inattention or lack of care for the natural world
11. stresses personal religious experience & intuition
12. Black Elk’s: less countercultural. less hostile to Christianity, more prosocial, more community oriented than transcendentalism
13. overcomes transcendentalism’s savagism
14. represents the religious achievements & religious authority of Native Americans and the emergence of their religious thought as a highly respected element of American culture