Black Elk

Black Elk with wife and daughter

Nicholas Black Elk ("Black Deer" or "Black Wapiti "; Hehaka Sapa ; * December 1863 ; † 19 August 1950 ) was a Wichasha Wakan ( medicine man , holy man) of the Oglala - Lakota - Indians and Catholic catechist in the Pine Ridge Reservation , South Dakota .

Life

Black Elk was born in December 1863 on the Little Powder River, probably in what is now the US state of Wyoming . His father and father were respected healers ("medicine men") among the Oglala-Lakotas. For Black Elk, too, this vocation became apparent at an early age: at the age of nine, a vision happened to him that shaped his life and laid the foundations for his later importance as a spiritual guide. Put very briefly - the original transcript of the report, which he wrote sixty years later, comprises thirty printed pages - gave him the "thunder beings", mythical forces of the Lakota religion, an insight into an "other world" and gave him powers to help people heal them and bring them joy and contentment, but also destructive powers to protect them from their enemies. This knowledge and his special abilities showed up spontaneously from time to time and put a lot of strain on the boy. His special role and the burden of being commissioned by the “thunder beings” increased to a state of anxiety, from which he was only able to free himself at the age of eighteen by portraying his vision and his spiritual calling in a public dance. From then on he became a recognized and sought-after healer among the Oglala.

Black Elk grew into his spiritual role at a time when the life of the Plains Indians was in a period of epochal change. The unstoppable advance of the white soldiers and settlers shook their traditional way of life, but also aroused the desire for more knowledge about the world of whites in some responsible and courageous people. The show business that emerged during these years offered an opportunity to get to know this strange and threatening world. In the spring of 1886 Black Elk was also hired by William Frederick Cody in Pine Ridge as a member of a show Indian troupe. With Buffalo Bill's Wild West , Black Elk then moved through the United States to Madison Square Garden in New York. The program included raids by Indians on stagecoaches and settlers, so-called war dances and other action-packed scenes of the Wild West repertoire, of which "Buffalo Bill" Cody is considered to be the main inventor. The terms of the contract were favorable for the miserable circumstances of reservation Indians. In the spring of 1887, the "Wild West" set off across the Atlantic on its first European tour, initially to make a guest appearance in London on the occasion of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee . In his later report, Black Elk remembered his appearance in front of “Grandmother England” with pride and loving detail.

With three other Lakotas, Black Elk missed the departure of the ship that brought the Wild West back to New York in Manchester in the spring of 1888 . The four, none of whom spoke English, made their way to London, where they joined a small show, and spent a year trundling across the continent, via Germany and France to Italy. In Naples, Black Elk wanted to embark on a boat trip to Palestine, because he suspected the origin of European superiority there, where the Christian religion had originated; But lack of money prevented this. In the summer of 1889 he met Buffalo Bill and his Wild West again in Paris , but turned down an invitation to participate because he was concerned about the situation at home due to a dream face. Cody paid him the return ticket. So he returned to Pine Ridge in the fall of 1889 and took a job there in a shop.

In the reservations of the Sioux at that time the ghost dance spread , a religious revival movement originally proclaimed by the Paiute Wovoka: He promised a restoration of the old Indian way of life, the return of the exterminated buffalo and the disappearance of the whites if one persevered in this dance carried out. Black Elk also participated with great approval, as he saw the message of the spirit dance as in line with his vision. All the more terrible was the disappointment from the experience of the massacre at Wounded Knee at the end of December 1890, in which around 300 men, women and children of the Miniconjou- Lacotas from the Cheyenne River reservation with Chief Big Foot , who had actually wanted to surrender, were massacred by US soldiers, including ghost dancers who - according to the ghost dance belief - had considered themselves invulnerable. Black Elk participated in the Oglala shootings of Pine Ridge soldiers following the massacre and was wounded in the process.

After that, Black Elk worked as a respected healer. He married Katie War Bonnet in 1892, who probably became Catholic in the following years. German Jesuit Fathers founded the Holy Rosary Mission in Pine Ridge in 1888, two years after the St. Francis Mission was established in the neighboring Rosebud Reservation. Black Elk's two sons, born in 1893 and 1895, were baptized in 1895, as was their third son, Benjamin, born in 1899. The firstborn son died in 1897, his wife Katie in 1903. Around this time Black Elk also turned to the Catholic Church: On December 6, 1904, Father Joseph Lindebner , a Jesuit from Mainz, baptized him under the name of Nicholas after two weeks of instruction.

At this time almost all Lakotas belonged at least nominally to a Christian church. In 1906 Black Elk married a widow, Anna Brings White, an active member of St. Mary's Catholic Society. Their daughter Lucy was born in the same year. Black Elk became a member of St. Joseph's Society in Manderson Ward and, because of his zeal, became a catechist , the lay helper of the missionaries. The ten or so catechists represented the priests mainly in the Sunday liturgy through readings, singing and catechism lessons in the Lakota language. Black Elk's work was particularly valued by them: from 1907 to 1912 he wrote reports for the Lakota-speaking Catholic Herald , participated in the annual large meetings of the Catholic Sioux, which were held alternately in the individual reservations, and traveled with the fathers to other reservations, proselytized among the Arapahoes in Wyoming and built a church with another catechist in the Yankton reservation. He distributed the money he earned as a catechist according to the Lakotas' understanding of a "holy man". He worked closely with Father Eugene Buechel , who is now considered the most important keeper of the Lakota language and culture among Catholic missionaries, before he was transferred to St. Francis in Rosebud and another white man entered his life who would make him a posthumous celebrity: John G. Neihardt .

Black Elk received a first visit from him, an award-winning poet from Nebraska, in August 1930. Neihardt researched the last volume of his epic poem A Cycle of the West , in which he wanted to treat the ghost dance and the massacre at the Wounded Knee. In May of the following year, Neihardt began his interviews: Black Elk's son Ben translated his father's words from Lakota into English, Neihardt's daughter Enid wrote shorthand. In essence, Black Elk gave an autobiographical report and went into great detail on important historical events, occasionally supported by reports from other Lakotas. On May 15th, as part of a large festival with over two hundred participants, Black Elk declared Neihardt to be his son, to whom he would pass the vision on, and gave him the name Flaming Rainbow . Over the next three days he described in detail to the Neihardts, and in this form for the first time ever, the vision he had received as a boy, in the presence of several older Lakota men. According to further stories, also by other men, the Neihardts drove with Black Elk on May 30th to conclude the interviews in the Black Hills on Harney Peak, the place of Black Elk's vision.

The following year, 1932, the book was published under the title Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as told to John G. Neihardt (later as told through ). It received positive reviews but not widespread use. At the urging of the missionaries, surprised by their model catechist's roots in the traditional Lakota religion, he signed a document in Lakota and English in January 1934 affirming his Catholic faith. At the same time, contact with the Neihardts remained, who were visiting in the summer of the same year. From 1935 he appeared in the Black Hills at demonstrations of Indian culture for tourists as a “medicine man” - and the Jesuit mission advertised with his picture as a catechist. His wife died in 1941, and he himself became more and more sickly and had to go to hospital at times.

Deeply impressed by Black Elk Speaks , Joseph Epes Brown , then a college student, went to Black Elk in 1947 and was allowed to live with him in Manderson for eight months. After further visits in 1948 and 1949, Brown wrote The Sacred Pipe . Brown's original intention had not been to write a book, but Black Elk wanted to teach him more doctrines, this time about the sacred rituals of the traditional Lakota religion, some of which he had demonstrated to tourists in the Black Hills; this time too, his son Ben interpreted.

Nicholas Black Elk died on August 19, 1950, after receiving the last unction and St. Communion. He is buried in the cemetery of the Catholic parish of St. Agnes in Manderson.

meaning

It was not until a new edition in 1961 that Black Elk Speaks became one of the most successful books about the natives of North America. The genesis of the book has then been carefully edited by Raymond J. DeMallie, including a biography of Black Elk. He published the original recordings of the interviews that Neihardt conducted with Black Elk, which in some points reveal Neihardt's interventions and his point of view. So ended z. B. Neihardt describes the wounded knee massacre at the end of the book with the much-quoted sentence (in the German version): “[…] the ring of the people has broken and disintegrated. There is no longer a center and the sacred tree is dead ”; Meanwhile, according to the minutes of the interview, Black Elk's report ended with how the Lakotas held their advice after the massacre and decided to make peace with the US Army in the face of the harsh winter weather - and Black Elk added as the very last sentence “Two years later I was married. "

Black Elk's stance on Catholicism and its role in the missionary community is hidden in Black Elk Speaks . However, this point is the most heatedly debated today, because Black Elk embodies not only the spiritual tradition of the Oglala Lakotas, but also the missionary Catholicism of his time, from the point of view of the missionaries. Whether he lived through these two forms of religiosity, biographically speaking, one after the other in his long life, whether he perceived them as insoluble opposites or whether and to what extent he succeeded in bringing them into connection and mutual exchange - there is now pointed positions both in literature and in the communities, among and between representatives of the traditional Lakota religion and Christian theology.

The two books are also enjoying great popularity in the German-speaking world: The first German translation of Black Elk Speaks was published in Switzerland in 1955 (under the title Ich rufe mein Volk , with the incorrect translation of his name as Schwarzer Hirsch - Elk ist der North American wapiti), probably at the suggestion of Carl Gustav Jung , whom the book had made a big impression on during a lecture tour in America. In 1978 the book by Joseph Epes Brown appeared under the title The Holy Pipe . The differentiated and committed discussions about the relationship between traditional and Christian religion, which in North America ignite from the person of the catechist medicine man Nicholas Black Elk, have so far hardly been noticed by the German-speaking public. The Black Elk Speech was u. a. set to music in the albums Ben Black Elk Speaks by Warfield Moose Jr. and At the Cross Roads by Red Hawk , which received the Native American Music Award for Best Historical Recording .

Works (with and about Nicholas Black Elk)

• John G. Neihardt: Black Deer - I call my people. Life, visions and legacy of the last great seer of the Ogalalla Sioux. Authentic recording by the Indian researcher John Neihardt . Göttingen, 13th edition 2007.
• John G. Neihardt: Black Deer - The Holy Pipe. The Indian wisdom book of the seven secret rites. Written down by Joseph Epes Brown . Göttingen, 11th edition 2007
• John G. Neihardt: Black Elk Speaks. Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as told through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow) by Nicholas Black Elk . Foreword by Vine Deloria Jr. with illustrations by Standing Bear. Lincoln, NE, and London 2004.
• John G. Neihardt: Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux . Ed. Raymond J. DeMallie. Albany, NY 2008.
• Joseph Epes Brown: The Sacred Pipe. Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. Recorded and edited by Joseph Epes Brown. Norman, OK, and London 1989.
• Raymond J. DeMallie, ed .: The Sixth Grandfather. Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt . Lincoln, NE, and London 1984.
• Julian Rice: Black Elk's Story. Distinguishing Its Lakota Purpose . Albuquerque, NM 1991.
• Michael F. Steltenkamp: Black Elk. Holy Man of the Oglala . Norman, OK, and London 1993.
• Clyde Holler: Black Elk's Religion. The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism . Syracuse, NY 1995.
• Hilda Neihardt: Black Elk and Flaming Rainbow. Personal Memories of the Lakota Holy Man and John Neihardt . Lincoln, NE, and London 1995.
• Karl Markus Kreis: Indian spirituality and Christian belief: The seer and catechist Black Elk. In: Orientation No. 18, 62nd year 1998, pp. 196–200.
• Clyde Holler, ed .: The Black Elk Reader . Syracuse, NY 2000.
• Esther Black Elk DeSersa et al .: Black Elk Lives. Conversations with the Black Elk Family . Ed. by Hilda Neihardt and Lori Utecht. Lincoln, NE, and London 2000.
• Joseph Epes Brown: The Spiritual Legacy of the American Indian. Commemorative Edition with Letters While Living with Black Elk. Ed. by Marina Brown Weatherly et al. Bloomington, IN 2007.
• Michael F. Steltenkamp: Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic . Norman, OK 2009.
• Joe Jackson: Black Elk. The Life of an American Visionary . New York, 2016.

Web links

• Literature by and about Black Elk in the catalog of the German National Library