The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025


#633： The World and Vision of Lakota Medicine Man Black Elk


Episode Stats

Misogynist Sentences

3

Hate Speech Sentences

51


Summary

When he was nine years old in 1872, Black Elk had a near-death vision in which he was called to save not only his people, but all of humanity. For the rest of his life, this vision haunted and inspired him as he took part in many of the seminal confrontations between the Lakota and the U.S. Government, including those of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee. My guest today is the author of a biography of this native holy man, Joe Jackson. His book is Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:10.800 When he was nine years old in 1872, Black Elk, a member of the Lakota tribe, had a near-death
00:00:16.080 vision in which he was called to save not only his people, but all of humanity.
00:00:19.880 For the rest of his life, Black Elk's vision haunted and inspired him as he took part in
00:00:23.720 many of the seminal confrontations between the Lakota and the U.S. government, including
00:00:27.200 those of Little Bighorn and Wounded Knee.
00:00:29.100 My guest today is the author of a biography of this native holy man.
00:00:32.420 His name is Joe Jackson and his book is Black Elk, The Life of an American Visionary.
00:00:36.440 We begin our conversation with the background of the Sioux or Lakota Indians, including how
00:00:40.020 the introduction of the horse turned them into formidable hunters and warriors and how their
00:00:43.620 spirituality influenced their warfare.
00:00:45.640 Joe then introduces to Black Elk and unfolds the vision that he had as a boy, which would
00:00:49.440 lead him to follow in his family's footsteps by becoming a medicine man and guide him for
00:00:53.200 the rest of his life.
00:00:54.300 We then take detours into the seminal battles between the U.S. government and Lakota that
00:00:58.140 Black Elk witnessed firsthand, as well as the sun dance and ghost dance rituals, which
00:01:01.960 helped catalyze them.
00:01:02.920 Joe then explains why Black Elk converted to Catholicism after the Indian Wars and how
00:01:06.820 he fused Lakota's spirituality with his newfound faith.
00:01:09.420 We then discuss why Black Elk decided to tell his vision to a white poet named John Neidhart
00:01:13.480 and the cultural influence the resulting book, Black Elk Speaks, had on the West in the 20th
00:01:18.020 century.
00:01:18.560 And we end our conversation discussing whether Black Elk ever felt he fulfilled his vision.
00:01:22.480 After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash Black Elk.
00:01:33.540 All right, Joe Jackson, welcome to the show.
00:01:36.040 Thank you for having me.
00:01:37.120 So you're the author of Black Elk, The Life of an American Visionary.
00:01:40.680 And this is a biography of a famous Lakota holy man, prophet, medicine man, Black Elk.
00:01:47.660 I'm curious, what led you down the path to writing this biography?
00:01:50.680 Well, I had written a book prior to this about the air race that made Charles Lindbergh famous.
00:01:58.480 And one of the things that I discovered was that the process by which this was in the 1920s,
00:02:05.540 the process by which Americans discovered and created and then destroyed secular holy men,
00:02:11.860 you know, the momentary media saints.
00:02:13.620 And that made me start to think, what does it really mean for a society or a group of people
00:02:20.400 to call somebody holy?
00:02:21.700 What does holy really mean?
00:02:24.360 And I first thought of doing a biography of the Catholic writer Thomas Merton, but there
00:02:30.020 had just been a biography written of him, well, about five years ago or something like that.
00:02:35.040 Then I started thinking about Black Elk because I remembered that, I remember two things.
00:02:40.240 One, Black Elk Speaks was one of my favorite books when I was in either high school or college.
00:02:45.920 And secondly, at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, there was this colloquium of college
00:02:52.020 theologians.
00:02:52.960 And they were asked, who do you think was the Americans' premier holy man of the 20th century?
00:02:59.260 And the majority said Black Elk.
00:03:02.500 And I thought, well, now that's really interesting because this is from a country that tried to,
00:03:06.460 you know, wipe out his kind of religion too.
00:03:10.140 And then when I was researching the book, I didn't know this at the time, but then when
00:03:14.260 I first started researching the idea, I found out that there was a move to turn Black Elk
00:03:20.580 into a Catholic saint.
00:03:22.020 And that made it even more interesting because once again, at the time, it was the Catholics
00:03:27.000 who tried to stamp out Black Elk's type of religion.
00:03:30.180 So there were a lot of different things going on and a lot of different trails I could go
00:03:35.160 down.
00:03:35.480 It seemed like a perfect book to work on.
00:03:37.620 Well, so this is a biography of Black Elk, but it's also a history or biography of the
00:03:41.360 Lakota.
00:03:42.140 So let's start there.
00:03:43.200 For a big picture overview for the people who aren't familiar with the Lakota Plains Indians,
00:03:48.360 where were they from originally?
00:03:49.760 Because we know them for being on the Plains, like the Dakotas or whatever.
00:03:53.560 I don't think they were there originally.
00:03:54.960 How'd they end up there?
00:03:56.660 And we'll start from there.
00:03:59.020 Well, the first place they were at least recorded in white histories was in Michigan or around
00:04:06.240 Michigan, around the Great Lakes.
00:04:07.820 And they were forced out by, you know, white settler pressure.
00:04:13.000 And they started moving across the Plains.
00:04:16.200 Some state of Michigan, others moved across the Northern Plains, what's now like Minnesota,
00:04:23.140 North Dakota, South Dakota.
00:04:24.520 But at that time, when that happened, they were still afoot.
00:04:27.420 They weren't really horse soldiers like they became famous for being.
00:04:31.020 And so it was a slow process of moving west.
00:04:36.220 And there were three or four clans.
00:04:38.540 The most famous of the clans were Black Elks, which were the Oglala Lakota.
00:04:45.200 And that was also the clan of Crazy Horse.
00:04:48.900 And the other clan, which became quite famous, was Sitting Bulls Clan, which was the Hunk Papa.
00:04:56.000 And so they moved west until they came to the Dakotas.
00:05:00.280 Then they kind of started separating out into, you know, each clan had its kind of territory.
00:05:05.600 The Sitting Bulls Clan was in the northernmost of the United States, in what is now North Dakota.
00:05:12.080 And at least among the Lakota, the southernmost clan were Black Elks,
00:05:16.740 who are down right around where the Black Hills are of South Dakota today.
00:05:22.140 And for people, I mean, I think it's important to note, the Lakota are also known as the Sioux.
00:05:25.880 So that can be confusing.
00:05:27.260 People are like, the Sioux, Lakota, those are different tribes.
00:05:29.240 No, it's the same tribe.
00:05:30.520 Right. Yeah, the Sioux is pretty much, it was a bastard, the name Sioux is a bastardization of a French word for them.
00:05:39.140 And so, but their name for themselves was always the Lakota.
00:05:42.760 Lakota. So you mentioned they weren't, they're famous for being Plains horse warriors, cavalry, Plains warriors.
00:05:48.580 But they always didn't have the horse.
00:05:49.980 When did they, when were they introduced to the horse?
00:05:51.880 When did they start incorporating that into their culture?
00:05:53.520 Nobody's really sure about that.
00:05:56.140 But, you know, the horse culture spread up from the South.
00:06:01.020 There were Spanish horses that escaped and bred.
00:06:05.100 And then the Comanches were among the first American tribes to become really proficient horsemen.
00:06:11.340 Over time, it spread North.
00:06:13.680 They think that the Lakota discovered the horse and started riding sometime between 1750 and 1820.
00:06:22.060 There were Lakota historians.
00:06:24.020 They would kind of like draw pictographs on these deerskins.
00:06:27.560 And the first time that the Lakota were recorded to have caught a horse was, to caught or have stolen a horse was 1801.
00:06:38.520 Somewhere between 1801 and 1820, they became quite proficient.
00:06:44.040 And how did it change their culture?
00:06:46.620 Oh, completely.
00:06:47.260 I mean, they were afoot before then.
00:06:51.280 So, you know, they were pretty much at the mercy of the elements.
00:06:56.000 And then all of a sudden, they started riding horses.
00:06:58.480 They could run down the buffalo.
00:07:01.280 They had a kind of natural recklessness and bravery to them.
00:07:05.140 As they became more proficient hunters, then they became warriors.
00:07:09.240 And because they were so good, so daring, and so reckless, they became some of the, you know, most feared or at least the most successful warriors on the Northern Plains.
00:07:20.880 As they moved west towards the Black Hills and then even farther west towards the Rockies,
00:07:26.940 they would come up against other tribes like the Crow, who had been in, you know, this early kind of paradise of hunting grounds over in Wyoming for a long time.
00:07:37.780 And they would fight for years over the hunting ground.
00:07:40.060 And the reason they were such a feared martial society was because they were so good on their horses.
00:07:44.840 And there was also a very highly spiritual component to their warrior culture as well, correct?
00:07:49.600 Very much so.
00:07:50.540 When you were a young man and you were going to become an adult, you would go through a vision quest.
00:07:56.420 You would fast.
00:07:57.220 You would go out into the hills.
00:07:59.120 You would starve yourself.
00:08:00.580 You would go into a sweat lodge.
00:08:02.340 And you would seek a vision.
00:08:04.160 And since, you know, the highest attainable position or the highest attainable life for a young man was to be a warrior,
00:08:12.840 then you were seeking a vision that had something to do with your prowess as a warrior.
00:08:17.880 And many times, the visions that you were given from the gods would tell you what you would have to do before battle
00:08:25.620 or what kind of life you would have to lead in order to be a pure warrior.
00:08:30.160 And they basically were a code of conduct, either for your life or for your conduct right before the battle.
00:08:38.200 So, it was a very important thing.
00:08:40.380 Religion and spirituality among the Oglala were very tied up in battle and hunting.
00:08:45.980 And hunting was a kind of battle in itself.
00:08:48.300 And we'll talk about how that connection between spirituality and warfare,
00:08:51.960 I mean, that's eventually what led up to Wounded Knee and some of the conflicts between the government and the Lakota.
00:08:57.620 So, we kind of lead up, we talked about what the Lakota, where are they from, their culture,
00:09:03.200 the development of the warrior culture they had.
00:09:06.180 Let's talk about what was the state of U.S. government and Lakota relations at the time of Black Elk's birth and childhood.
00:09:14.220 So, Black Elk was born around, I don't remember exactly, but around 18, I think it was 1863.
00:09:19.120 The Lakota considered the area from the Black Hill, well, the Northern Plains, what we call the Northern Plains today,
00:09:28.700 but then especially west past the Black Hills up to the Rockies.
00:09:37.740 They considered that a great hunting ground.
00:09:40.660 I mean, there was a lot of game up there, and it was great camping, and it was just an easier life for them.
00:09:49.100 And around this time, gold was discovered in Montana.
00:09:54.360 There were all of these trails west that went through the center of the United States,
00:10:00.520 but then mine started going north, and they started invading there, the Lakota's hunting ground,
00:10:06.460 and that led to a war, that led to a war that was called Red Clouds War,
00:10:10.580 where there were a number of American U.S. Army forts along this Northern Trail,
00:10:16.840 and the Indians attacked these forts incessantly.
00:10:22.080 They basically shut down this trail that the miners were using,
00:10:26.840 and the Indians eventually, after massacring a bunch of soldiers in a place outside of Sheridan, Wyoming,
00:10:34.360 called the Fetterman Massacre, and besieging these forts for a long time,
00:10:39.960 the Sioux won the only, they won what was called Red Clouds War.
00:10:43.940 It was the only war that the Native Americans were acknowledged as winning in U.S. history.
00:10:50.100 So he was born during this.
00:10:51.600 His father fought at that massacre that I was talking about.
00:10:54.280 He was badly wounded.
00:10:55.280 He would always be kind of lame.
00:10:56.820 Red Clouds War ended around, I don't know, 1865, 1866, 1867, something like that.
00:11:02.520 And from then until around the time of the Custer Massacre, there was relative peace.
00:11:13.440 There were skirmishes, but there was relative peace.
00:11:17.200 And there were negotiations for land, you know, large tracts of land belonging to the Indians and the Indians alone,
00:11:25.420 which was over time being invaded by white miners again.
00:11:29.520 Black Elk was born in a time of war, but his first 10 years, 10, 11, 12 years, most of that was a time of peace.
00:11:41.340 It was also during this time you saw the rise of these great chiefs that we know today, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.
00:11:48.100 And, I mean, Crazy Horse would fight other tribes, but he would also, I mean, during Red Clouds War, we don't really see Sitting Bull during Red Clouds War.
00:12:01.060 That's kind of too far south for Sitting Bull.
00:12:04.000 But we do start to see Crazy Horse come into ascendance during Red Clouds War.
00:12:11.680 I mean, he was, because of his success as a warrior and also as a tactician, he was always very good at tactics.
00:12:23.240 He rose in prominence as one of Red Clouds' major lieutenants during that war.
00:12:30.360 And speaking of that connection between spirituality and war, like Crazy Horse had visions.
00:12:35.600 Like, I guess they had thunder visions.
00:12:37.100 Like, he had, like, the God speak to him that he was going to lead his people against the whites.
00:12:42.680 As long as he adhered to certain standards as delineated in his visions, then he would never be touched by a bullet and he would lead his people in war.
00:12:55.020 And he was this holy man of war, this kind of, like, holy madman.
00:13:00.200 I mean, he'd just charge straight into the line of bullets or he'd charge at opposing tribe and he would wreak havoc and come out the other end unscathed.
00:13:10.200 He had many, many followers.
00:13:11.740 There were lots of young men, young warriors who really respected Crazy Horse.
00:13:16.600 Black Elk was the younger cousin of Crazy Horse.
00:13:21.500 Crazy Horse was actually the second cousin to Black Elk.
00:13:25.440 So, as Black Elk was growing up, Crazy Horse was right there.
00:13:30.120 He was, like, you know, his mentor in a way.
00:13:33.160 And Crazy Horse started to pay a little bit more attention to Black Elk after Black Elk seemed to be touched by the gods in some way that not everybody really understood at first.
00:13:42.880 Well, let's talk about that, and particularly Black Elk's immediate family, because it seems like because of his family lineage, he was destined to become a great medicine man.
00:13:52.960 Yeah, I mean, the family business was being a medicine man, being a holy man.
00:13:57.220 And there were two types of holy men.
00:13:59.080 There were the ones who had visions and were in touch with the gods, and there were the ones who healed.
00:14:05.240 It was almost like, in a way, it was like medical school.
00:14:07.640 I mean, you could go on, and you could try to have—you could try to be both.
00:14:12.500 And in time, that's what our Black Elk was.
00:14:14.780 He was both a spiritual leader, a holy man who was in touch with the gods, but he also was a healer.
00:14:21.820 At a very early age, he started hearing voices, which—and that eventually turned into a near-death vision that he had when he was just nine years old.
00:14:29.260 And this is the moment, this is like the seminal thing for Black Elk that would guide him for the rest of his life and would influence his decisions he made.
00:14:37.680 So walk us through that vision.
00:14:40.760 Like, how did it start, and then like, what did he see in it?
00:14:44.880 Okay, so he, like you said, he would be, you know, just a little kid, and he'd be out on the planes playing, and all of a sudden, someone would speak to him, and he'd look around, and nobody was there.
00:14:54.880 Even though, culturally, the Lakota supported visitation from the gods a lot more than white culture does, I mean, if you heard voices, you weren't necessarily, you know, immediately sent off to the psychiatrist.
00:15:08.180 At the same time, it would appear that the Lakota were fairly cautious about it.
00:15:13.380 I mean, a lot of people could fake that.
00:15:15.120 They didn't want to have fake holy men around.
00:15:17.340 So Black Elk, when he was younger, he kind of hid this from his family.
00:15:21.180 He didn't want his family to think he was crazy.
00:15:23.400 And then when he was nine, they were, his family was traveling west to go to an annual confluence of all the tribes over in the Black Hills.
00:15:36.020 And he fell into a coma.
00:15:38.360 He got really sick, and he fell into a coma.
00:15:40.500 First, his legs gave out, and then he had an extremely high fever.
00:15:45.080 And, you know, you can't really tell what people, historically, what people fall ill of, but it did kind of seem like he had childhood meningitis or something like that.
00:15:58.200 I mean, he came really close to death.
00:16:00.120 And for nine days, he was in a coma.
00:16:03.280 And during those nine days, when he was in a coma, he had this vision in which he was lifted up into the clouds where the spirits were, the grandfathers.
00:16:13.120 They're basically just like, you know, the Catholic Church has a trinity.
00:16:17.180 There were six grandfathers.
00:16:18.520 And he was given a vision that if he went on this quest and overcame the dangers, then he would be given powers and tools that would save his people from the coming white encroachment.
00:16:34.180 And by this time, we're talking like the early 1870s.
00:16:38.000 By this time, it was pretty evident to all of the Lakota that they were going to be overrun by white culture, that they were going to lose their land, and it was a coming apocalypse.
00:16:48.940 And so everybody was pretty much worried.
00:16:50.600 So he went off on this quest as very much a kind of Joseph Campbell type of hero quest.
00:16:56.060 And he comes back with these powers, and the grandfathers bring him to the, you know, the kind of the cloud lodges.
00:17:04.160 He has this giant vision of millions of horses dancing in front of him.
00:17:10.160 He has these visions of what he must do to save his people from the whites.
00:17:15.740 But a complicating matter is also that his powers are not just for the Lakota.
00:17:22.760 It's for all people.
00:17:23.960 And in time, he would come to think, well, that means everybody, even the enemy.
00:17:28.720 But he didn't really understand that when he was nine.
00:17:31.820 And he comes out of his coma, and from the time that he is nine years old until he is in his 20s, 1890, when Wounded Knee takes place, he feels that it is his responsibility to save his people.
00:17:52.420 After he had his vision, did he tell anybody about it, or did he keep it to himself?
00:17:55.340 He kept it to himself until after the Custer Massacre in 1876.
00:18:02.980 Around 1877, 1878, 1879, he began to have these dreams again.
00:18:09.880 He began to hear these voices again, and they were more threatening now.
00:18:13.760 It's like, now is the time.
00:18:15.440 You have to do what you have to do.
00:18:17.540 And he always felt that if he did not do what the gods told him to do, that he'd be wiped out, that he would be annihilated.
00:18:23.880 But he didn't know what to do.
00:18:26.220 And he just grew more and more panicked until finally he had a huge panic attack, and his parents took him to some medicine men, some holy men within the tribe.
00:18:37.360 It was like a psychiatric session.
00:18:39.820 I mean, he was a group psychiatric session.
00:18:41.940 I mean, he told them about his dreams.
00:18:44.060 He told them about his vision, and they listened, and they were quite impressed because, in a way, his vision had, in a very sophisticated way, for when so young, his vision encompassed a lot of Lakota cosmology.
00:18:58.440 And they basically said that you've got to somehow perform your vision to the tribe.
00:19:07.000 You've got to prove yourself as a holy man.
00:19:09.840 That was when he publicly outed himself as somebody who had these visions.
00:19:14.580 And that's when he basically replicated the horse dance that he saw in his vision.
00:19:18.440 He replicated the horse dance, and it was a huge success.
00:19:22.760 And because it was so successful, he was honored.
00:19:25.800 And because it was so successful, he had a lot more confidence in his own abilities.
00:19:31.040 That was when he started performing other visions that he might have had, minor visions that he might have had.
00:19:37.360 It was also when he started to teach himself how to be a healer as well.
00:19:41.980 In this replication, when he did his horse dance, this was after Bighorn, correct? Little Bighorn?
00:19:48.120 This was after Bighorn.
00:19:49.400 I think it was around 1878 or 1879 when he replicated the horse vision.
00:19:54.700 We're going to take a quick break for your word from our sponsors.
00:19:58.480 And now back to the show.
00:20:00.140 Well, let's backtrack a little bit and go back to the battle of Little Bighorn because Black Elk was there.
00:20:05.200 And as I said earlier, as we talked about earlier, there's this connection between spirituality and warrior culture in Lakota.
00:20:13.520 And I think a lot of – most Americans know about the Battle of Little Bighorn or Custer's Last Stand.
00:20:18.680 But what role – what they don't know is like what led up to that.
00:20:22.340 And what led up to – like part of the contributing factor to that was Lakota's spirituality, particularly around the Sundance ritual.
00:20:29.000 Can you walk us through the lead-up to the Battle of Little Bighorn, particularly in regards to the Sundance?
00:20:33.680 Well, what happened was that after Red Cloud won his war, the American government said,
00:20:40.220 there's this huge swath of the Northern Plains that belongs to you all, the Lakota.
00:20:45.560 We're not going to invade this.
00:20:47.780 But in 1875, George Custer led a scientific and military expedition into the Black Hills, which was a very holy place for the Lakota.
00:20:59.220 I mean, they considered that – that's where they got their lodge bowls, where they hunted.
00:21:02.860 That's where they – that's where the spirits were thought to reside.
00:21:06.500 And so Custer came with a huge, huge force of men and a huge force of like a wagon train and scientists and everything.
00:21:15.400 And they discovered gold.
00:21:17.220 Not a lot of gold, but they discovered gold.
00:21:19.200 Immediately, white gold miners flooded into the area.
00:21:23.180 And then Deadwood is now kind of like, you know, what was the main gold town you can still see today.
00:21:30.640 The U.S. government had reneged on its treaty, which the Indians considered sacred.
00:21:36.200 And they were really upset about this.
00:21:38.120 And that proved to them the very thing that they had been worrying about all these years, which was that the whites were going to overrun their culture and they were going to wipe them out.
00:21:49.160 And so in 1876, there was a huge conclave in Sundance that was – it was called to the west towards where the Little Bighorn was.
00:21:59.560 This was the moment when Sitting Bull becomes really important in American history because Sitting Bull's clan was the Hunk Papa.
00:22:09.820 And the Hunk Papa had this huge Sundance.
00:22:13.240 And a Sundance was basically a way of torturing yourself into having visions.
00:22:18.740 And Sitting Bull had a vision in which he saw two giant waves of approaching forces, like two big clouds meeting head on.
00:22:27.380 And there was a battle, and then American soldiers in uniforms started falling to the ground head first, which meant that they were killed.
00:22:36.820 And so Sitting Bull basically prophesied a huge battle between the U.S. Army and the Indians.
00:22:45.780 And there were thousands of Indians who had come together for this conclave.
00:22:50.360 And they kept moving west towards the Rockies, and they eventually camped over at the Little Bighorn.
00:22:57.320 At the same time, the United States government had said, all of you have to live on reservations, and if you're not on a reservation, we're going to hunt you down.
00:23:05.540 And so there was a three-pronged hunt to find this huge number of Indians.
00:23:12.160 George Custer and a small band of men found them first, and they were wiped out.
00:23:15.660 And that was like, I don't know, June 26, 1876, or something like that.
00:23:20.160 I mean, can you walk us through the Sundance?
00:23:21.980 Because it's a really intense ritual.
00:23:24.100 I mean, it starts off, they stare at the sun.
00:23:27.340 I mean, they literally look at the sun with their blind eyes, basically.
00:23:31.220 And then what goes on after that?
00:23:33.340 Basically, four stages of the Sundance, which is basically four days of the Sundance,
00:23:38.900 at least as it was practiced in this best-known Sundance of sitting bulls before the Little Bighorn.
00:23:48.420 You fasted, you were in a sweat lodge, there was sage that was burning around you.
00:23:55.600 And then on each of the successive days, you went through these ordeals, which finally culminated
00:24:04.140 on the fourth day with the most famous ordeal, which was the one where a medicine man would
00:24:11.820 slice the muscles in your pectorals, and one on each side, and he would insert a rod through
00:24:20.040 the slice, the rod would be attached by leather thongs to the top of this tree.
00:24:26.460 For that day, and you were also given this long rod or stick that you held onto, and for
00:24:33.100 that day, you tried to pull yourself loose from the pole.
00:24:37.860 Many times, you would see Sundancers who had multiple scars over their lives where they had
00:24:43.500 pulled themselves loose.
00:24:44.680 And while you were doing this, while you were dancing, while you were trying to pull yourself
00:24:50.040 loose, you would supposedly stare into the sun.
00:24:54.780 Now, later, some informants would say that you didn't necessarily stare straight into the
00:25:00.780 sun because you would have gone blind, but you would stare into a spot below the sun.
00:25:05.520 But it was close enough to the rays of the sun that you were pretty much blinded for the day.
00:25:11.040 And between the pain and the fasting and staring at the sun, getting loose from the pole or not,
00:25:17.980 there was a lot of pain and suffering there, and pretty dramatic visions would come out of that.
00:25:23.840 And the other thing it also did is there were a lot of people who were invited to these Sundances
00:25:29.880 who weren't part of the Lakota.
00:25:32.300 They were amazed by the extent of suffering that these guys went through.
00:25:36.300 And so, in a way, it was also kind of a public demonstration of how tough the Lakota were,
00:25:43.840 what badasses they were.
00:25:46.040 And, I mean, it was supposedly a pretty amazing spectacle.
00:25:50.940 And while you were doing that, I mean, there were a lot of people that, I mean,
00:25:53.960 the tribes would sit around and watch.
00:25:56.400 So, it was a very public ritual of suffering.
00:26:00.300 And I think one of the aftermaths of the Battle of Little Bighorn,
00:26:05.620 you know, the government, this is like when the government started, you know,
00:26:08.400 making this idea of, like, we got to start killing the Indian inside of the Indian.
00:26:12.020 And one of the ways they did that is, you know,
00:26:14.160 since they saw the connection between the Sundance and the Battle of Little Bighorn,
00:26:18.880 the U.S. government started basically trying to prevent Sundances from happening after that point.
00:26:23.300 Right.
00:26:23.740 Yeah, they outlawed a lot of dances like that.
00:26:26.820 I mean, later on, we'll see another dance called the Ghost Dance,
00:26:30.360 which was nowhere near as violently as inclined as the Sundance was.
00:26:35.620 But it was a dance.
00:26:36.560 It was an Indian dance.
00:26:37.800 And the American government and the American settlers feared it,
00:26:41.040 especially since the Lakota were the ones who were doing it.
00:26:44.880 Basically, what happened was that the U.S. Army hunted them down
00:26:49.300 and forced all the Indians pretty much slowly into the reservations.
00:26:54.080 And so from 1876 until the early 1880s, you've got the remainders of the Indian tribes going into reservations.
00:27:04.880 And once the tribes were in the reservations and they could easily control and outlaw these rituals.
00:27:11.540 And the other thing that happened was that each of the, at least in the early days,
00:27:15.360 each of these reservations were, even though the government controlled it,
00:27:19.380 they were really kind of run by different religious sects.
00:27:22.660 And so, you know, one reservation somewhere might be run by the Episcopalians.
00:27:28.040 Somewhere else, it might be by the Presbyterians.
00:27:30.620 Where Black Elk lived, it was the largest, it still is the largest reservation in the United States.
00:27:36.460 And that was run by the Catholics.
00:27:38.120 And the Catholics kind of impressed the Indians because, the Lakota,
00:27:42.760 because they seem to have a certain magic to themselves, you know,
00:27:46.060 the robes and the big crosses and all that kind of stuff.
00:27:48.800 But at the same time, at that time, they really tried to stamp out the Indian beliefs.
00:27:55.060 And so we're talking, we're talking the 1880s is when they were really trying to stamp out the Indian beliefs.
00:28:02.800 So, a little big born happens.
00:28:04.500 Black Elk's family, they end up on the reservation.
00:28:06.820 They went to Canada for a little bit, but they ended up back on the reservation.
00:28:09.880 During this time, Black Elk was recognized, basically, publicly by his people as a holy man.
00:28:16.660 But then he goes on, we kind of, I mean, this is kind of an interesting detour in his life.
00:28:20.240 He connects with Wild Bill Cody and joins him on his Wild West circus show that went to go see the Queen of England.
00:28:27.820 Yeah, yeah, I know.
00:28:28.960 And that was kind of a road trip for all these young guys.
00:28:31.780 I mean, by now, Black Elk would have been in his early 20s.
00:28:36.220 Around 1886 or so, Cody had already been in theater.
00:28:41.180 He had a Wild West plays on the Chicago stage.
00:28:45.420 And he kind of dreamed up the idea of these traveling Wild West shows.
00:28:50.220 I mean, they were like circuses on horseback.
00:28:52.900 And the first couple of years, they didn't really do that well.
00:28:55.000 But then he began to understand that what people were really interested in were the Indians.
00:29:01.760 And the first Indians that he hired when he went down to Louisiana were the Pawnee.
00:29:07.500 But over time, he put out this casting call to the different reservations saying,
00:29:13.320 if you ride with me on these Buffalo Bill Wild West shows, I'll take you.
00:29:18.340 You know, you go around the United States, you'll get paid.
00:29:20.880 If you're married, your wife will get paid about half of what you get paid or maybe a quarter.
00:29:27.120 And, you know, it's a road trip.
00:29:30.100 And you're making money at the time when there weren't a whole lot of jobs to be held on the reservations.
00:29:35.660 So around 1886 or 1887, Buffalo Bill pretty much comes to Pine Ridge where the Oglala War and says,
00:29:44.580 you know, we're hiring actors, Indian actors for the Wild West show.
00:29:48.940 And Black Elk wasn't sure he wanted to join up because, you know, he was a healer in the reservation.
00:29:55.300 During what was called the reservation period, children are dying and it was a tough time.
00:30:00.820 But Black Elk was starting to think, well, the Indian ways aren't saving my people.
00:30:06.480 Maybe I should see why the whites are so powerful.
00:30:09.800 He went east with his friends on the Buffalo Bill tour.
00:30:13.440 And he went to Madison Square Gardens and he really enjoyed it.
00:30:19.080 And while he was in Madison Square Gardens, Buffalo Bill swung a deal with Great Britain.
00:30:24.420 I mean, Queen Victoria was having her 50th anniversary.
00:30:27.640 And so it was the Golden Jubilee, I think I remember it being.
00:30:31.260 And so they went from Madison Square Gardens over to England.
00:30:35.060 And he rode as one of the Indians in London.
00:30:39.240 And then he was a very good dancer because, you know, as a holy man, as a Madison man, you have to be able to dance.
00:30:46.520 And so he was one of several Lakota performers who danced before the Queen.
00:30:50.820 And that was kind of a charming moment in Black Elk Speaks because he says something like,
00:30:57.380 you know, she was short and pudgy, but she was very nice.
00:31:00.640 And she grabbed my hand and she said, you know, you said nice things to him.
00:31:04.620 And so it was, it's kind of a, it's, it's kind of a really nice section in Black Elk Speaks.
00:31:09.840 When he makes it back to America, things are starting to change again on the reservation amongst the Lakota.
00:31:16.900 And there was this movement you referred to earlier, this ghost dance movement.
00:31:22.200 What was the impetus behind the ghost dance movement?
00:31:24.560 What was its purpose, et cetera?
00:31:26.140 Well, the ghost dance movement was, there had, there had actually been,
00:31:30.100 there were actually two waves of the ghost dance movement in the, in the Rockies down around Nevada,
00:31:35.640 around, I don't know, about 1888 or something like that.
00:31:38.860 There was a first wave and it was basically that if you religiously dance this, this dance,
00:31:46.540 the dancers will be chosen and they will be delivered away from, from this veil of tears,
00:31:53.340 it was kind of like the rapture in, in Protestant theology.
00:31:57.300 And then it kind of died for a little while.
00:31:59.780 And then around 1890, the ghost dance began to spread east along the Northern Plains.
00:32:08.220 And a lot of tribes started dancing.
00:32:10.340 And basically it was a long dance and it was an endurance dance.
00:32:14.320 And as you danced, you know, you didn't, you didn't have anything to drink or eat.
00:32:20.200 You were, you were fasting.
00:32:21.740 And as you were dancing, if you fainted from exhaustion, then you were dragged out of the line
00:32:26.580 and you would have a vision.
00:32:28.380 And it became, you know, kind of a public spectacle, a public religious spiritual spectacle.
00:32:35.200 There was, there was this kind of group cohesiveness.
00:32:37.700 There was this idea that sometime in spring 1891, if the ghost dancers adhered religiously
00:32:47.340 to the strictures of the ghost dance, that all the enemies would be killed and only the
00:32:54.200 Indians would survive.
00:32:56.240 And those family members, those Indians who had been killed by the whites in the past
00:33:00.400 would come back.
00:33:02.200 And so it's very much like white millennial movements.
00:33:05.260 I mean, you know, such and such a day, the end of the world is going to come.
00:33:08.700 And the only ones who are going to survive are the chosen.
00:33:12.000 It's almost exactly the same.
00:33:13.780 And in many ways, it was a millennial movement.
00:33:17.240 And in many ways, it had a lot of hallmarks of the kind of Christianity that, that Indians
00:33:22.420 all over the plains had been learning during the reservation period, which once again, like
00:33:27.260 I said, was the 1880s.
00:33:28.780 In most places, nothing really happened.
00:33:30.940 I mean, the agents in charge of the, of the reservations, they said, let them dance.
00:33:36.120 I mean, it's, it's not a, it's not a violent movement, but people were scared of the Sioux
00:33:41.640 because of what happened at the Little Bighorn.
00:33:45.760 And so when the ghost dance reached the Sioux, the U.S.
00:33:50.180 Army moved in.
00:33:51.340 And then part of the ghost dance was this idea of a ghost shirt, right?
00:33:54.160 That you could wear this shirt that would protect you from bullet and blade.
00:33:57.280 Yeah.
00:33:58.440 And it's really interesting because, I mean, it was supposed to be an impervious shirt.
00:34:02.520 It was a holy shirt.
00:34:03.440 And if you wore this shirt, then you were protected.
00:34:05.880 And according to Black Elk, I mean, a lot of, he spent a lot of time making these shirts.
00:34:11.100 You would kind of like, you know, say a prayer over them and paint symbols on them and that
00:34:15.540 kind of stuff.
00:34:16.360 It's interesting, the reservation right to the east of Pine Ridge called the Rosebud
00:34:22.160 Reservation.
00:34:23.060 And there is a, there is a Lakota museum in the, the Catholic church there.
00:34:27.920 And there is a ghost dance shirt that's still been preserved.
00:34:32.020 And it's a, it's a long kind of loose shirt with many times it'll have a, like a painting
00:34:38.560 of an eagle, eagle or a thunderbird or something like that on it.
00:34:42.160 I mean, they're always, they're, I mean, they're faded by now, but they're kind of elaborate
00:34:46.000 and always have a lot of ribbons and they're kind of beautiful.
00:34:49.260 And you said, even though Black Elk took part in the ghost dance movement, making the ghost
00:34:53.240 shirts and doing some of the dances, like the way he describes it in Black Elk Speak, he
00:34:58.080 was kind of ambivalent about the ghost dance.
00:35:00.660 Yeah.
00:35:00.960 He wasn't really sure about it because, I mean, there had been different movements.
00:35:04.140 And remember, even by then, I mean, he's still in his early twenties, even by then, he still
00:35:10.340 believes that somehow he's going to, you know, find the key to his vision.
00:35:15.700 He's going to, he's going to understand.
00:35:18.040 He never really completely understood his vision.
00:35:20.980 And so he kept going over it and going over it and trying to figure out how can I make this
00:35:25.960 right?
00:35:26.280 How, what is the secret?
00:35:27.720 What do I have to do to make my vision come true and to save my people?
00:35:33.140 And he wasn't really sure that, that the ghost dance was in line with his vision, but then
00:35:39.560 he had the invitation of one of his friends or one of his family members.
00:35:43.500 He went down to the, to a ghost dance, probably about 10 or 12 miles south of where he lived.
00:35:50.460 And it was in this area called Wounded Knee.
00:35:52.960 And he watched this ghost dance and there were a lot of similarities between his, between his
00:35:59.280 vision and the ghost dance as it was being danced.
00:36:02.060 And so he thought, well, maybe it's the same thing.
00:36:05.840 And that's when he joined.
00:36:07.560 And you mentioned that, and when they first started doing the ghost dance, the agents were
00:36:12.460 like, yeah, just let them do it.
00:36:13.420 But then this, like the Sundance, this led up to another conflict between the Lakota and
00:36:18.480 the U.S. Army.
00:36:19.760 Yeah.
00:36:19.940 It was really more of a massacre on, unlike the little bighorn.
00:36:23.080 There were a number of ghost dancers, including up on Sitting Bull's Northern Reservation.
00:36:28.560 And the U.S. Army and the government were very afraid of them.
00:36:34.520 And they started moving the, they started moving the army in.
00:36:38.660 And Sitting Bull had a number of ghost dancers up where he was.
00:36:42.500 And there was a confrontation and he was killed.
00:36:44.720 His people started moving south.
00:36:46.360 And they collected some other Sioux as they started moving south.
00:36:52.000 And the U.S. Army knew about this and they were, they didn't, you know, it's hard to find
00:36:56.860 people on the planes.
00:36:58.000 And so the army was mobilized around Pine Ridge to try to catch these refugee ghost dancers
00:37:05.620 and to stop the ghost dancing.
00:37:07.820 By the time that this band came into Pine Ridge, they were led by this old chief by the name of
00:37:15.540 Bigfoot.
00:37:16.560 They were, it was during the winter.
00:37:18.200 It was in December 1890.
00:37:20.380 They were starving.
00:37:21.620 They were frostbitten.
00:37:23.320 They were in really bad shape.
00:37:24.780 And they turned themselves into this column of U.S. troops.
00:37:27.900 And they were brought to this camp down at Wounded Knee, the same place where Black Elk had
00:37:34.620 encountered his first ghost dance.
00:37:36.540 And they were given food and they were given shelter.
00:37:40.460 And then the next day, the soldiers lined up around them and demanded their rifles.
00:37:48.300 And the young men didn't want to give away their rifles and shooting started.
00:37:53.940 In the very beginning of the battle, the Indians and the soldiers pretty much gave as well as
00:38:01.320 they took.
00:38:01.940 I mean, the casualties were just about even.
00:38:04.180 But the army also had what was called a Hotchkiss gun, which was a kind of small mountain cannon.
00:38:11.200 It had two or three of those that it had brought along.
00:38:13.740 It was up on this hill to the north of where the fight was taking place.
00:38:19.000 And they started shooting down into the, the Indians started running after the first wave
00:38:23.680 of battle.
00:38:24.140 And they, the Indians started running south and the Hotchkiss guns started firing.
00:38:28.920 And that's where, when it became a massacre.
00:38:31.160 And that's when children, women and children began to be killed.
00:38:34.600 And in the latter stages of that, I mean, that's not very far from where Black Elk, by now he
00:38:40.580 was back from, from London and they heard the shooting.
00:38:44.240 And that's where Black Elk grabs a horse and he starts to ride towards the sound of the
00:38:49.000 shooting.
00:38:49.880 And he collects a lot of young men behind him and they try to save some of the refugees,
00:38:56.120 some of the women and some of the children.
00:38:57.600 And that's, that's, that's the part of Wounded Knee, the battle of Wounded Knee that you
00:39:02.400 see in Black Elk Speaks.
00:39:04.560 He arrives at the end with other Lakota men to try to save the people being killed.
00:39:11.700 And I'm sure his vision was going on in his mind.
00:39:14.320 Oh yeah.
00:39:15.040 Oh yeah.
00:39:15.740 You know, how do I, you know, why can't I, how has this happened?
00:39:19.680 Why have I failed?
00:39:20.720 Why did I allow this to happen?
00:39:23.300 It must be because I never understood my vision well enough.
00:39:26.480 You know, and you have this famous passage where, you know, he sees these, he sees, you
00:39:32.120 know, all these women and children, you know, dead or dying and heaps over to the side.
00:39:36.540 And it was like, it was the end of a dream.
00:39:38.480 It was a beautiful dream, but it was all, you know, all lying in blood and the snow and
00:39:42.820 the dust.
00:39:43.580 And that's pretty much where Black Elk Speaks, the book ends.
00:39:49.180 That's not where Black Elk's story ends.
00:39:51.620 Wounded Knee is pretty much thought of as the very last battle between the U.S. Army
00:39:57.240 and the Native Americans in U.S. history.
00:40:00.040 There was actually one or two little skirmishes after that, but that was the last big campaign.
00:40:06.260 Well, and after this, what happens to Black Elk?
00:40:09.240 What does he do?
00:40:10.220 Well, he goes in this kind of existential limbo.
00:40:12.420 I mean, we don't hear anything of him in 1891.
00:40:17.120 1892, you start to hear of him again.
00:40:20.900 He's, I mean, lots of people, especially kids are dying from white diseases.
00:40:26.840 I mean, there's a epidemic of whooping cough, which is just killing, and measles, but especially
00:40:31.800 whooping cough, which is killing off young Lakota.
00:40:35.000 And so for the 1890s, he is trying to save his people with his healing, and he also gets
00:40:41.160 married around to his first wife and has three children around 1893.
00:40:47.800 From 1893 until about 1903 or 1904, he tries to save his people as a healer, but his wife
00:40:58.320 dies until two of his children die, and his mother dies, and his dad dies.
00:41:02.860 And all these people that he knows are dying, and they're dying from diseases, and he's getting
00:41:07.860 more and more depressed.
00:41:10.480 He's thinking more and more, I failed my people.
00:41:13.780 Our old beliefs, they don't have the power of the white beliefs.
00:41:17.920 What can I do?
00:41:19.560 And then in 1904, he has a confrontation with a Catholic priest.
00:41:26.740 And many times what would happen during this period, this was a period of religious transition
00:41:32.640 for the Lakota.
00:41:33.960 I mean, individual Lakota would think, do I want to be Catholic?
00:41:37.800 Do I want to stay the same as I, you know, keep the old ways?
00:41:41.320 And a family member would die.
00:41:43.380 And the family would call in both the Catholic priests and the native priests as, I guess,
00:41:49.520 a way of hedging their bets.
00:41:51.140 And Black Elk kind of came face-to-face with one of these priests.
00:41:55.720 It wasn't the first time he came face-to-face with one of these priests.
00:41:58.760 And he was known by these priests.
00:42:01.200 He was known as a powerful and respected medicine man.
00:42:04.840 And if they could convert him to Catholicism, that would be a coup for them.
00:42:10.060 And Black Elk was depressed because his children had died, and his wife had died, and he had
00:42:14.780 a really bad ulcer, and he was really sick.
00:42:17.380 And sometime in 1904, he just gives up.
00:42:20.380 And he waits outside after the priest has finished giving last rites.
00:42:26.600 And the priest comes up to him and says, you look pretty bad.
00:42:29.360 Let me take you to the monastery.
00:42:32.520 And I'm fixed up.
00:42:33.780 He has an operation for an ulcer, and he becomes a converted Catholic.
00:42:38.700 He's a strong, strong, strong Catholic.
00:42:41.300 From 1904 to 1916, he goes around the United States converting other Indians in other tribes
00:42:49.080 and up into Canada.
00:42:51.400 And supposedly, he converted 400 Native Americans in both Canada and the United States to Catholicism,
00:42:58.740 more than any other Native American.
00:43:02.140 And that's why the Catholic Church is looking into turning him into a saint right now.
00:43:06.920 But that all ended in 1916.
00:43:10.080 He stopped traveling in 1916.
00:43:12.540 Somewhere between 1916 and 1930, he didn't stop being a Catholic, but he started practicing
00:43:19.540 the old ways again.
00:43:21.000 So, it was kind of like a combination of both.
00:43:23.520 He was a combination Catholic and an old holy man.
00:43:28.000 And I mean, it seems like what he was trying to do was trying to figure out his vision.
00:43:32.520 Like, that was the thing that was, like, he converted to Catholicism because it thought
00:43:37.820 maybe there's something there that I can take that helped me, like, unlock the key to understanding
00:43:41.220 my vision I had.
00:43:43.020 It was always about the vision.
00:43:45.500 He always believed that the vision was held the key to saving his people.
00:43:50.860 And actually, just, you know, as he got older to saving humanity, you're exactly right.
00:43:56.700 I mean, he became more ecumenical because he always began to think that other religions
00:44:02.680 might hold secrets that I don't see just from a Lakota point of view.
00:44:07.740 And then this is where, this is how we know about Black Elk's vision because this guy, he's
00:44:12.660 a poet, American poet named John Neidhart, shows up at his Black Elk's house and says, you
00:44:20.660 know, hey, I want to talk to you about the old ways.
00:44:22.400 And then Black Elk, for some reason, because he hasn't really talked about his vision all
00:44:25.980 that much, particularly to white people, says, you're the guy I'm going to tell my vision
00:44:29.640 to.
00:44:30.600 Yeah, I know.
00:44:31.240 And that's one of the big mysteries.
00:44:32.820 Well, Neidhart was already kind of known.
00:44:34.640 I mean, this, okay, so Neidhart meets Black Elk in 1930, and he was already kind of famous
00:44:39.240 as a Plains poet.
00:44:41.380 He wrote these long, long, long epics about the ending of the West and starting with the
00:44:48.360 fur trappers and going all the way to the ghost dancers.
00:44:51.380 And he had just written an epic about the Little Bighorn and about Crazy Horse.
00:44:58.700 And like I said, I mean, because Black Elk was a holy man, he wasn't as well known as
00:45:02.500 the Chiefs.
00:45:03.680 But rumors had started to get out about this second cousin of Crazy Horse and who, you know,
00:45:11.340 had been around during the Little Bighorn and been around during Wounded Knee.
00:45:15.440 And Neidhart was coming with his own son away from a poetry reading at some college.
00:45:21.960 He goes, makes a detour to Pine Ridge and goes to the agent, the government agent and
00:45:28.000 says, is there anybody here who, you know, was one of the old holy men who'd been around
00:45:31.740 during the ghost dance?
00:45:32.860 And the agent talks with some of the old Indian men there.
00:45:36.100 And they said, well, there's this guy by the name of Black Elk who was something of
00:45:40.720 a holy man and kind of directed him where to go.
00:45:43.780 And so Neidhart, you know, went out and just out of the blue, shows up in the middle of
00:45:48.620 nowhere at Black Elk's home.
00:45:51.140 Usually Black Elk kind of, like you said, kind of politely turned people away.
00:45:55.360 But there was something about Neidhart that Black Elk liked.
00:46:00.380 And Neidhart had been, when he was younger, he'd been raised close to the Omaha Reservation
00:46:06.360 and around Nebraska.
00:46:08.940 And he traveled throughout the West and he kind of knew the Native Americans and he didn't
00:46:15.700 rush the Native Americans in conversation.
00:46:18.940 He wasn't impatient like Indians kind of knew whites to be.
00:46:23.840 And he was also not dismissive of the idea of Indian religion or, you know, having visions
00:46:32.700 or, you know, being in touch with the spirits.
00:46:35.720 And some of that must have come off because Black Elk, they sat together for an afternoon
00:46:40.740 for about five hours.
00:46:42.680 And Black Elk, you know, finally said the equivalent of, I've got this vision.
00:46:46.920 All my friends around me are dying.
00:46:48.640 He, Black Elk was about 60 by them, you know.
00:46:51.700 And I'm afraid that if I die, I'm going to lose the vision.
00:46:55.700 And I want to put my vision out to the world.
00:46:59.560 And he felt comfortable with Neidhart.
00:47:02.680 And so he basically, Black Elk basically said to Neidhart, come back in a year and I'll have
00:47:07.660 a teaching space ready, which is kind of like a sacred hoop and a teepee and everything.
00:47:12.900 And I'll tell you my vision.
00:47:16.080 And so Black Elk and Neidhart first met in 1930.
00:47:21.340 And then Neidhart comes back with his two daughters, one of whom knows shorthand in 1931.
00:47:32.340 And you've got, you know, they're still in archives, like a month's worth of storytelling
00:47:38.060 by Black Elk.
00:47:39.260 And then Black Elk Speaks appeared as a.
00:47:42.900 book by William Morrow in 1932.
00:47:47.380 And how was it received initially in the United States?
00:47:50.640 Well, it was a little bit too strange for the public.
00:47:53.800 I mean, the critics kind of liked it.
00:47:57.160 They thought that it was an authentic peek into the mind of a Native American holy man.
00:48:03.200 But it didn't do well.
00:48:04.720 I mean, it went into remainders within about six months or so.
00:48:07.860 I mean, even less than that.
00:48:08.960 And it just kind of like disappeared from view.
00:48:12.220 But there were people who liked it and who thought it was really something special.
00:48:15.680 And then near the end of the 30s, Carl Jung, the psychiatrist, you know, the one who was very interested in, like, the universal unconscious and the power of dreams.
00:48:26.800 He came to give a lecture on religion and psychology at Yale University.
00:48:32.480 And somebody came and gave him a copy of Black Elk Speaks.
00:48:35.900 And he got all excited.
00:48:37.100 And he went back to Germany.
00:48:38.280 He went back to Switzerland thinking, I'm going to get this published in German for the Europeans.
00:48:42.840 Because Europeans, ever since Buffalo Bill had been there, they'd been absolutely in love with Native American culture.
00:48:50.340 But then World War II came about.
00:48:53.060 And so, you know, that kind of ended that.
00:48:55.760 But then after the war, Jung tried again.
00:48:58.740 And he got Black Elk Speaks published in German in 1955.
00:49:04.580 And then, as often happens, a European intellectual says something American is good, then Americans kind of sit up and take notice of what's in their backyard.
00:49:16.280 It was republished in English in 1961, the first edition.
00:49:23.360 And then that's, like, the hippie movement picked up on it.
00:49:26.720 And that's sort of where that came from.
00:49:28.180 Yeah, that was the hippie movement.
00:49:29.220 I mean, it was around for a while.
00:49:31.160 And it was gaining momentum.
00:49:32.340 But then, you know, I think it was, like, 1968 that Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee comes out.
00:49:40.460 And then all of a sudden, between Black Elk Speaks and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, you know, all of a sudden, like, Black Elk enters New Age religion.
00:49:49.820 I mean, he becomes a cultural commodity.
00:49:55.380 He enters white American popular culture.
00:49:58.180 I don't know if you ever saw the Dustin Hoffman movie, Little Big Man.
00:50:02.340 But the old chief, who is Dustin Hoffman's mentor, was modeled after Black Elk.
00:50:10.020 And so, and Black Elk Speaks since then has been, it's, it's been translated into, I'd have to look it up, it's been translated into lots of languages.
00:50:19.480 And so, after Black Elk Speaks got put out there, I mean, what did, what did Black Elk think about his vision as he came to the end of his life?
00:50:27.520 Did he, did he feel, did he still feel like a failed prophet?
00:50:29.720 Because it seemed like all throughout his life, he felt like he never had it quite figured out.
00:50:32.820 He didn't do what he was supposed to do.
00:50:35.260 Or did he feel like he saved his people somehow in the end?
00:50:38.680 Well, I think he was of two minds.
00:50:41.880 I mean, I think he always felt that he never saved his people.
00:50:45.100 But near, after, after Black Elk Speaks came out, I remember he was 60 and he thought he was going to die.
00:50:51.680 But he held on until he was like, night until 1950.
00:50:54.720 So, like, you know, he was, he was much older by then.
00:50:57.560 By that point, he had also become a preservationist.
00:51:02.580 I mean, he wanted to preserve the old ways, the old religion and the old dances and the old iconography.
00:51:11.280 And a lot of that was dying out.
00:51:13.300 And at least among the Lakota, I mean, he was one of the main ones to preserve all that.
00:51:18.840 And there was also, even back in the 1920s and 1930s, 1940s, I mean, there were still, even though they couldn't do so publicly,
00:51:27.600 there were young men that, that wanted to learn the old ways, that wanted to be holy men.
00:51:33.180 Black Elk started to train them.
00:51:35.480 In fact, one of the medicine men who was present at Wounded Knee 2, you know, in 1973,
00:51:41.480 when the government shot it out with the American Indian Movement, he had been trained under Black Elk.
00:51:46.800 Black Elk was very important for the continuity of the, and the preservation of these old ways.
00:51:53.480 And I think he understood that, and I think that when he died, he felt a certain peace about that.
00:51:59.440 I mean, he seemed at peace when he died.
00:52:01.900 So, I mean, what was your big takeaway after writing this book?
00:52:05.900 My big takeaway, like, you know, what does it mean to be a holy man?
00:52:09.440 Yeah, I don't know.
00:52:10.140 Maybe, like, what?
00:52:10.860 I mean, I'm sure it changed you.
00:52:12.140 I mean, it changed the way you look at things.
00:52:13.420 Yeah, well, I mean, it certainly did.
00:52:15.980 But, I mean, you know, you certainly have an appreciation of other religious expressions,
00:52:22.280 and you certainly have an appreciation of what people go through on their own sort of spiritual
00:52:31.200 quests.
00:52:31.880 And I think that I was able to understand that a lot more.
00:52:35.760 In fact, I have a friend who I've had a friend.
00:52:38.800 He's been a friend since junior high, and he has had, like, approaching blindness and stuff
00:52:45.060 like that, and he's become increasingly mystical.
00:52:47.720 And I never really understood what he was trying to do as he was faced with all these
00:52:53.580 challenges.
00:52:54.340 And after I read the book, I think I understood a lot more what he was doing and going through.
00:53:01.000 There's a lot more understanding for me there.
00:53:04.760 As far as what it takes to be holy, there's a couple of things that seem to be holy and famous,
00:53:11.280 like Black Elk or Jesus or Buddha or Muhammad.
00:53:14.360 You've got to have a society which is changing in a really threatening way for people.
00:53:23.360 They want something new.
00:53:25.900 And the main personal trait just seems to be endurance.
00:53:31.100 I mean, endurance that as you go through so many bad things, it becomes a kind of wisdom.
00:53:37.780 But I guess it's a kind of wisdom that based on patience and your own suffering or your
00:53:42.860 own contact with other people's suffering and trying to help them.
00:53:46.780 I mean, that's the main takeaway, I guess, I've got from that.
00:53:53.040 I guess that's the main pattern that I saw.
00:53:56.720 Joe, this has been a fantastic conversation.
00:53:59.160 Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:54:02.020 Well, there are two books to learn more about Black Elk.
00:54:06.720 I mean, okay, so they can read my book.
00:54:08.960 I mean, that's the biography.
00:54:10.580 But they really should read the Neihart Black Elk Collaboration, Black Elk Speaks.
00:54:17.700 They really should do that.
00:54:20.020 And then, I mean, it's a beautiful book.
00:54:22.000 It's really sad.
00:54:22.700 And then, if they really want to get into it, there is a transcription of Black Elk's
00:54:28.700 interview with Neihart that took place over a month.
00:54:33.280 And it's called The Sixth Grandfather.
00:54:36.660 And it's kind of difficult because it's an oral history.
00:54:39.580 And it's got all the catches.
00:54:41.360 It's got all the, you know, all of the backtracks.
00:54:44.160 It can, at times, can be confusing.
00:54:46.520 And so, it's difficult reading.
00:54:48.340 I wouldn't read it until after I read Black Elk Speaks and then maybe my book.
00:54:52.480 But one thing that's really nice about that is that you see, since it's an oral history
00:54:57.880 from Black Elk's words, you kind of get a picture straight into Black Elk's mind.
00:55:03.420 So, I would do that if you're really interested in it.
00:55:06.260 And then, you know, if you want to read my other books, I mean, I've got a website,
00:55:10.560 www.joejacksonbooks.com.
00:55:13.900 But this is the only book that I've done on Black Elk.
00:55:17.160 Well, Joe Jackson, thanks for trying.
00:55:18.440 It's been an absolute pleasure.
00:55:20.200 It was a lot of fun.
00:55:21.080 Thanks for having me.
00:55:21.880 My guest here is Joe Jackson.
00:55:23.340 He's the author of the book, Black Elk and American Visionary.
00:55:25.900 It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:55:28.080 You can find out more information about his work at his website, joejacksonbooks.com.
00:55:31.580 Also, check out our show notes at aom.is slash black elk.
00:55:34.440 You can find links to resources where you can delve deeper into this topic.
00:55:36.780 Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
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00:56:16.160 Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you not only to listen to the AOM podcast,
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