""Happy Birthday Rodha!""
Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 1863-1950 Part 3
Black Elk, Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux 1863-1950 Part 3
From Chapter 13: The Compelling Fear
I was sixteen years old and more, and I had not yet done anything the Grandfathers wanted me to do, but they had been helping me. I did not know how to do what they wanted me to do.
A terrible time began for me then, and I could not tell anybody, not even my father and mother. I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling to me: "Behold your Grandfathers! Make haste!" I could understand the birds when they sang, and they were always saying: "It is time! It is time!" The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: "It is time! It is time! It is time!"
Time to do what? I did not know. Whenever I awoke before daybreak and went out of the tepee because I was afraid of the stillness when everyone was sleeping, there were many low voices talking together in the east, and the daybreak star would sing this song in the silence:
In a sacred manner you shall walk!
Your nation shall behold you!
I could not get along with people now, and I would take my horse and go far out from camp alone and compare everything on the earth and in the sky with my vision. Crows would see me and shout to each other as though they were making fun of me: "Behold him! Behold him!"
When the frosts began I was glad, because there would not be any more thunder storms for a long while, and I was more and more afraid of them all the time, for always there would be the voices crying!: "Oo oohey! It is time! It is time!"
The fear was not so great all the while in the winter, but sometimes it was bad. Sometimes the crying of coyotes out in the cold made me so afraid that I would run out of one tepee into another, and I would do this until I was worn out and fell asleep. I wondered if maybe I was only crazy; and my father and mother worried a great deal about me. They said: "It is the strange sickness he had that time when we gave the horse to Whirlwind Chaser for curing him; and he is not cured." I could not tell them what was the matter, for then they would only think I was queerer than ever.
I was seventeen years old that winter.
When the grasses were beginning to show their tender faces again, my father and mother asked an old medicine man by the name of Black Road to come over and see what he could do for me. Black Road was in a tepee all alone with me, and he asked me to tell him if I had seen something that troubled me. By now I was so afraid of being afraid of everything that I told him about my vision, and when I was through he looked long at me and said: "Ah-h-h-h!," meaning that he was much surprised. Then he said to me: "Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do what the bay horse in your vision wanted you to do. You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you."
So we began to get ready for the horse dance.
Chapter 14: The Horse Dance
There was a man by the name of Bear Sings, and he was very old and wise. So Black Road asked him to help, and he did.
First they sent a crier around in the morning who told the people to camp in a circle at a certain place a little way up the Tongue from where the soldiers were. They did this, and in the middle of the circle Bear Sings and Black Road set up a sacred tepee of bison hide, and on it they painted pictures from my vision. On the west side they painted a bow and a cup of water; on the north. white geese and the herb; on the east. the daybreak star and the pipe; on the south, the flowering stick and the nation's hoop. Also, they painted horses, elk and bison. Then over the door of the sacred tepee, they painted the flaming rainbow. It took them all day to do this, and it was beautiful.
They told me I must not eat anything until the horse dance was over, and I had to purify myself in a sweat lodge with sage spread on the floor of it, and afterwards I had to wipe myself dry with sage.
That evening Black Road and Bear Sings told me to come to the painted tepee. We were in there alone, and nobody dared come near us to listen. They asked me if I had heard any songs in my vision, and if I had I must teach the songs to them. So I sang to them all the songs that I had heard in my vision, and it took most of the night to teach these songs to them. While we were in there singing, we could hear low thunder rumbling all over the village outside, and we knew the thunder beings were glad and had come to help us.
My father and mother had been helping too by hunting up all that we should need in the dance. The next morning they had everything ready. There were four black horses to represent the west; four white horses for the north; four sorrels for the east; four buckskins for the south. For all of these, young riders had been chosen. Also there was a bay horse for me to ride, as in my vision. Four of the most beautiful maidens in the village were ready to take their part, and there were six very old men for the Grandfathers.
Now it was time to paint and dress for the dance. The four maidens and the sixteen horses all faced the sacred tepee. Black Road and Bear Sings then sang a song, and all the others sang along with them, like this:
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
A nation I will make over.
A two-legged nation I will make holy.
Father. paint the earth on me.
After that the painting was done.
The four black-horse riders were painted all black with blue lightning stripes down their legs and arms and white hail spots on their hips, and there were blue streaks of lightning on the horses' legs.
The white-horse riders were painted all white with red streaks of lightning on their arms and legs, and on the legs of the horses there were streaks of red lightning, and all the white riders wore plumes of white horse hair on their heads to look like geese.
The riders of the sorrels of the east were painted all red with straight black lines of lightning on their limbs and across their breasts, and there was straight black lightning on the limbs and breasts of the horses too.
The riders of the buckskins of the south were painted all yellow and streaked with black lightning. The horses were black from the knees down, and black lightning streaks were on their upper legs and breasts.
My bay horse had bright red streaks of lightning on his limbs, and on his back a spotted eagle, outstretching was painted where I sat. I was painted red all over with black lightning on my limbs. I wore a black mask, and across my forehead a single eagle feather hung.
When the horses and the men were painted they looked beautiful; but they looked fearful too.
The men were naked, except for a breech-clout; but the four maidens wore buckskin dresses dyed scarlet, and their faces were scarlet too. Their hair was braided, and they had wreaths of the sweet and cleansing sage, the sacred sage, around their heads, and from the wreath of each in front a single eagle feather hung. They were very beautiful to see.
All this time I was in the sacred tepee with the Six Grandfathers, and the four sacred virgins were in there too. No one outside was to see me until the dance began.
Right in the middle of the tepee the Grandfathers made a circle in the ground with a little trench, and across this they painted two roads--the red one running north and south, the black one, east and west. On the west side of this they placed a cup of water with a little bow and arrow laid across it; and on the east they painted the daybreak star. Then to the maiden who would represent the north they gave the healing herb to carry and a white goose wing, the cleansing wind. To her of the east they gave the holy pipe. To her of the south they gave the flowering stick; and to her who would represent the west they gave the nation's hoop. Thus the four maidens, good and beautiful, held in their hands the life of the nation.
All I carried was a red stick to represent the sacred arrow, the power of the thunder beings of the west.
We were now ready to begin the dance. The Six Grandfathers began to sing, announcing the riders of the different quarters. First they sang of the black horse riders, like this:
They will appear--may you behold them!
They will appear--may you behold them!
A horse nation will appear.
A thunder-being nation will appear.
They will appear, behold!
They will appear, behold!
Then the black riders mounted their horses and stood four abreast facing the place where the sun goes down.
Next the Six Grandfathers sang:
They will appear, may you behold them!
A horse nation will appear, behold!
A geese nation will appear, may you
behold!"
Then the four white horsemen mounted and stood four abreast, facing the place where the White Giant lives.
Next the Six Grandfathers sang:
Where the sun shines continually,
they will appear!
A buffalo nation, they will appear, behold!
A horse nation, they will appear, may you behold!
Then the red horsemen mounted and stood four abreast facing the east.
Next the Grandfathers sang:
Where you are always facing, an elk nation will appear!
May you behold!
A horse nation will appear,
Behold!
The four yellow riders mounted their buckskins and stood four abreast facing the south.
Now it was time for me to go forth from the sacred tepee, but before I went forth I sang this song to the drums of the Grandfathers:
He will appear, may you behold him!
An eagle for the eagle nation will appear.
May you behold!
While I was singing thus in the sacred tepee I could hear my horse snorting and prancing outside. The virgins went forth four abreast and I followed them, mounting my horse and standing behind them facing the west.
Next the Six Grandfathers came forth and stood abreast behind my bay, and they began to sing a rapid, lively song to the drums, like this:
They are dancing.
They are coming to behold you.
The horse nation of the west is dancing.
They are coming to behold!
Then they sang the same of the horses of the north and of the east and of the south. And as they sang of each troop in turn, it wheeled and came and took its place behind the Grandfathers--the blacks, the whites, the sorrels and the buckskins, standing four abreast and facing the west. They came prancing to the lively air of the Grandfathers' song, and they pranced as they stood in line. And all the while my bay was rearing too and prancing to the music of the sacred song.
Now when we were all in line, facing the west, I looked up into a dark cloud that was coming there and the people all became quiet and the horses quit prancing. And when there was silence but for low thunder yonder, I sent a voice to the spirits of the cloud, holding forth my right hand, thus, palm outward, as I cried four times:
Hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey!
Then the Grandfathers behind me sang another sacred song from my vision, the one that goes like this:
At the center of the earth,
behold a four-legged.
They have said this to me!
And as they sang a strange thing happened. My bay pricked up his ears and raised his tail and pawed the earth, neighing long and loud to where the sun goes down. And the four black horses raised their voices, neighing long and loud, and the whites and the sorrels and the buckskins did the same; and all the other horses in the village neighed, and even those out grazing in the valley and on the hill slopes raised their heads and neighed together. Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again--the tepee built of cloud and sewed with lightning the flaming rainbow door and, underneath, the Six Grandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay before the tepee. I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here.
And as I looked, the Six Grandfathers yonder in the cloud and all the riders of the horses, and even I myself upon the bay up there, all held their hands palms outward toward me, and when they did this, I had to pray, and so I cried:
Grandfathers, you behold me!
Spirits of the World, you behold!
What you have said to me,
I am now performing!
Hear me and help me!
Then the vision went out, and the thunder cloud was coming on with lightning on its front and many voices in it, and the split-tail swallows swooped above us in a swarm.
The people of the village ran to fasten down their tepees, while the black horse riders sang to the drums that rolled like thunder, and this is what they sang:
I myself made them fear.
Myself, I wore an eagle relic.
I myself made them fear.
Myself, a lightning power I wore.
I myself made them fear,
Made them fear.
The power of the hail I wore,
I myself made them fear,
Made them fear!
Behold me!
And as they sang, the hail and rain were falling yonder just a little way from us, and we could see it, but the cloud stood there and flashed and thundered, and only a little sprinkle fell on us. The thunder beings were glad and had come in a great crowd to see the dance.
Now the four virgins held high the sacred relics that they carried, the herb and the white wing, the sacred pipe, the flowering stick, the nation's hoop, offering these to the spirits of the west. Then people who were sick or sad came to the virgins, making scarlet offerings to them, and after they had done this, they all felt better and some were cured of sickness and began to dance for joy.
Now the Grandfathers beat their drums again and the dance began. The four black horsemen, who had stood behind the Grandfathers, went ahead of the virgins, riding toward the west side of the circled village, and all the others followed in their order while the horses pranced and reared.
When the black horse troop had reached the western side, it wheeled around and fell to the rear behind the buckskins, and the white horse band came up and led until it reached the north side of the village. Then these fell back and took the rear behind the blacks, and the sorrels led until they reached the east. Then these fell back behind the whites, and the buckskins led until they reached the south. Then they fell back and took the rear, so that the blacks were leading as before toward the western quarter that was theirs. Each time the leading horse troop reached its quarter, the Six Grandfathers sang of the powers of that quarter, and there my bay faced, pricking up his ears and neighing loud, till all the other horses raised their voices neighing. When I thus faced the north, I sent a voice again and said: "Grandfather, behold me! What you gave me I have given to the people--the power of the healing herb and the cleansing wind. Thus my nation is made over. Hear and help me!"
And when we reached the east, and after the Grandfathers had sung, I sent a voice: "Grandfather, behold me! My people, with difficulty they walk. Give them wisdom and guide them. Hear and help me!"
Between each quarter, as we marched and danced, we all sang together:
A horse nation all over the universe,
Neighing, they come!
Prancing, they come!
May you behold them.
When we had reached the south and the Grandfathers had sung of the power of growing, my horse faced yonder and neighed again, and all the horses raised their voices as before. And then I prayed with hand upraised: "Grandfather, the flowering stick you gave me and the nation's sacred hoop I have given to the people. Hear me, you who have the power to make grow! Guide the people that they may be as blossoms on your holy tree, and make it flourish deep in Mother Earth and make it full of leaves and singing birds."
Then once more the blacks were leading, and as we marched and sang and danced toward the quarter of the west, the black hail cloud, still standing yonder watching, filled with voices crying: "Hey-hey! hey-hey!" They were cheering and rejoicing that my work was being done. And all the people now were happy and rejoicing, sending voices back, "hey-hey, hey-hey"; and all the horses neighed, rejoicing with the spirits and the people. Four times we marched and danced around the circle of the village, singing as we went, the leaders changing at the quarters, the Six Grandfathers singing to the power of each quarter, and to each I sent a voice. And at each quarter, as we stood, somebody who was sick or sad would come with offerings to the virgins--little scarlet bags of the chacun sha sha, the red willow bark. And when the offering was made, the giver would feel better and begin to dance with joy.
And on the second time around, many of the people who had horses joined the dance with them, milling round and round the Six Grandfathers and the virgins as we danced ahead. And more and more got on their horses, milling round us as we went, until there was a whirl of prancing horses all about us at the end, and all the others danced afoot behind us, and everybody sang what we were singing.
When we reached the quarter of the west the fourth time, we stopped in new formation, facing inward toward the sacred tepee in the center of the village. First stood the virgins, next I stood upon the bay; then came the Six Grandfathers with eight riders on either side of them--the sorrels and the buckskins on their right hand; the blacks and whites upon their left. And when we stood so, the oldest of the Grandfathers, he who was the Spirit of the Sky, cried out: "Let all the people be ready. He shall send a voice four times, and at the last voice you shall go forth and coup [hit] the sacred tepee, and who shall coup it first shall have new power!"
All the riders were eager for the charge, and even the horses seemed to understand and were rearing and trying to get away. Then I raised my hand and cried hey-hey four times, and at the fourth the riders all yelled "hoka hey," and charged upon the tepee. My horse plunged inward along with all the others, but many were ahead of me and many couped the tepee before I did.
Then the horses were all rubbed down with sacred sage and led away, and we began going into the tepee to see what might have happened there while we were dancing. The Grandfathers had sprinkled fresh soil on the nation's hoop that they had made in there with the red and black roads across it, and all around this little circle of the nation's hoop we saw the prints of tiny pony hoofs as though the spirit horses had been dancing while we danced.
Now Black Road, who had helped me to perform the dance, took the sacred pipe from the virgin of the east. After filling it with chacun sha sha, the bark of the red willow, he lit and offered it to the Powers of the World, sending a voice thus:
"Grandfathers, you where the sun goes down, you of the sacred wind where the white giant lives, you where the day comes forth and the morning star, you where lives the power to grow, you of the sky and you of the earth, wings of the air and four-leggeds of the world, behold! I, myself, with my horse nation have done what I was to do on earth. To all of you I offer this pipe that my people may live!"
Then he smoked and passed the pipe. It went all over the village until every one had smoked at least a puff.
After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked. I felt very happy, for I could see that my people were all happier. Many crowded around me and said that they or their relatives who had been feeling sick were well again, and these gave me many gifts. Even the horses seemed to be healthier and happier after the dance.
The fear that was on me so long was gone, and when thunder clouds appeared I was always glad to see them, for they came as relatives now to visit me. Everything seemed good and beautiful now, and kind.
Before this, the medicine men would not talk to me, but now they would come to me to talk about my vision.
From that time on, I always got up very early to see the rising of the daybreak star. People knew that I did this, and many would get up to see it with me, and when it came we said: "Behold the star of understanding!"
From Chapter 18:
The Powers of the Bison and the Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see. You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer. And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me. But the fear came and if I had not obeyed it, I am sure it would have killed me in a little while.
It was even then only after the heyoka ceremony in which I performed my dog vision, that I had the power to practice as a medicine man, curing sick people; and many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish. There were other parts of my great vision that I still had to perform before I could use the power that was in those parts. If you think about my great vision again, you will remember how the red man turned into a bison and rolled, and that the people found the good red road after that. If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.
To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see. It was during the summer of my first cure that this was done. I carried the pipe to Fox Belly, a wise and good old medicine man, and asked him to help me do this duty. He was glad to help me, but first I had to tell him how it was in that part of my vision. I did not tell him all my vision, only that part. I had never told any one all of it, and even until now nobody ever heard it all. Even my old friend, Standing Bear, and my son here have heard it now for the first time when I have told it to you. Of course there was very much in the vision that even I cannot tell when I try hard, because very much of it was not for words. But I have told what can be told.
It has made me very sad to do this at last, and I have lain awake at night worrying and wondering if I was doing right; for I know I have given away my power when I have given away my vision, and maybe I cannot live very long now. But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way, even though I may die sooner because I did it; for I know the meaning of the vision is wise and beautiful and good; and you can see that I am only a pitiful old man after all.
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
The Great Spirit
Black Elk's near-death experience
The near-death experiences of the Native American medicine man, Black Elk, of the Lakota Sioux nation, echo with the enchanting poetic language of an ancient society. His story reveals a traditional natural world culture, yet also many of the familiar phenomena of near-death experiences that leap across eras. Living between 1863 and 1950, Black Elk survived the collision of two eras, when the ancient primal world of his people was shattered by the violent invasion of the new industrial culture. This remarkable medicine man did not even speak English when he told his visionary experience to the author, John Neihardt, who told it in his book, Black Elk Speaks, in 1932. In this classic of Native American literature, Black Elk's near-death experience glows through his perceptions of a sacred natural world.
The world of the Lakota Sioux is filled not with soulless material objects out there but with the manifestations of the presence of being that lies behind all creation: Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. This spiritual power is not personified as a remote God, but is both transcendent and present in all the world: in thunder, water, blood, birds, buffalo. Since the worldview of industrial society demands the expulsion of these perceptions, they seem like dim archaic memories. But Black Elk's near-death experience was a living, vital way of seeing in a sacred manner.
When Black Elk was a boy of nine, he collapsed with a severe, painful swelling of his legs, arms and face.
He lost consciousness and lay in his tipi dying. He was called by two men coming from the clouds, saying, "Hurry up, your grandfather is calling you."
He was raised up out of his tipi into the clouds, feeling sorry to leave his parents. He was shown an elaborate vision oriented around a classic Native American mandala:
the circular hoop, the four directions, and the center of the world on an axis stretching from sky to Earth, numerous neighing, dancing horses, surrounded by lightning and thunder, filled the sky at each direction.
He was told to behold this, then to follow a bay horse, which led him to a rainbow door. Inside, sitting on clouds, were six grandfathers, "older than men can ever be - old like hills, old like stars."
The oldest grandfather welcomed the boy and said: "Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you."
His voice was very kind, but the boy shook all over with fear now, for he knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World.
Each Grandfather gave Black Elk a power.
The first Grandfather gave him the power to heal.
The second Grandfather then gave the boy the power of cleansing.
The third Grandfather gave the boy the power of awakening and its peace.
From the fourth Grandfather the boy was given the power of growth.
The fifth Grandfather, the Spirit of the Sky, gave the power of transcendent vision.
The sixth Grandfather, a very old man, incredibly grew backwards into youth until he became the boy, Black Elk.
Growing older again he said, "My boy, have courage, for my power shall be yours, and you shall need it, for your nation on the Earth will have great troubles."
Then the boy hears a great Voice say: "Behold the circle of the nation's hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end."
Then Black Elk, standing on the highest mountain, surveying the grand vista of the hoop of the world, said: "I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being."
After returning to the six Grandfathers once again to receive his powers, the boy was sent back to his dying body. When he awoke, his overjoyed parents told him that he had been sick twelve days, lying as if dead the whole time.
Black Elk was afraid to tell his experience, and moped around as a shy, withdrawn boy for eight years. Finally he told a medicine man who helped him reenact the vision as a ritual. At that moment he became a powerful medicine man or shaman, healing, he said, many people of illnesses from tuberculosis to despair.
He kept his vision alive with daily practices, such as meditation on the daybreak star. But the great sadness of his life was his inability to stop the destructive onslaught of industrial culture, in search of gold and land that almost destroyed his people.
"You live on Earth only for a few short years which you call an incarnation, and then you leave your body as an outworn dress and go for refreshment to your true home in the spirit." - White Eagle
------------------
Sioux Religion
Doctrines:
The Sioux regard the universe as ultimately incomprehensible; life, growth, and death are mysterious and suggestive of powers difficult to understand. Since time itself is regarded as non-causal, and does not embody notions of change and progress, nothing in the universe can be considered to be inevitable. This incomprehensibility and unpredictability of the universe, anything difficult to understand, is called 'wakan', which also connotes the animating force of the universe, the totality of which is 'Wakan Tanka'. Wakan Tanka is the sum total of the personified powers that brought all things into being; sometimes it is embodied as the Six Grandfathers.
Humankind itself formed in and emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, as did the buffalo. Everything has its own spirit but all share the same spiritual essence that is Wakan Tanka; so it is that the most important aspects of personality are shared by everything in the universe. Other beings often shared their knowledge with humans or provided aid in time of crisis (See Mary Crow Dog:1991 pp.178-180), and so came to be thought of as 'people'. The observance of the human-like characteristics of these peoples led to the development of kinship with them. At birth one receives from Takuskanskan a guardian spirit and the life-breath or ghost which comes from the stars; at death these return to the spirit world.
Ritual seeks to placate the wakan beings or powers - which may be predisposed to good or evil - but also involves a process of continuing revelation. On returning from his vision quest, the vision seeker commonly integrates his vision into the life of the community by performing it ritually in public. In this way he adds to the fund of collective knowledge necessary to sustain a balanced relationship between the human community and other forms of life, both animate and inanimate. This sense of unity and of the cohesive force of ritual, is conveyed by the recurring song text: "I do this ( take part in the ritual, songs and prayers) so that I may live with my relations" (Powers:1982 p.154).
Finally, a few words on the Black Hills, why they are sacred to the Sioux. According to Charlotte Black Elk, Sioux legend says that with the creation of the universe a song was given to it, each part of the universe being imbued with a part of the song; but only in the Black Hills was the song found in its entirety, here at the "heart of everything that is" (Timewatch "Savagery and the American Indian" Part 2, BBC2 30th January 1991). Legend also says that the hills are "...a reclining female figure from whose breasts flowed life-giving forces, and to them the Lakota [Sioux] went as a child to its mother's arms" (Luther Standing Bear quoted in Matthiessen :1992 p.4). It was in the Black Hills that the Sioux people originated, and at Bear Butte on the eastern edge of the Hills, that the Creator first imparted his sacred instructions to them; thus it is that Bear Butte is the most sacred of all places, and both Sioux and Cheyenne come here each year for vision quests. Although explanations of what happens to one at death vary, it has been said that the spirits of the Sioux dead rest in the Black Hills.
History
The word 'Sioux' is a collective term for seven tribal groups which are organized into three main political units, the Teton, Yankton, and Santee. This conventional model of Sioux social organization seems not, however, to be applicable prior to about 1700. The people that came to be known as 'Sioux', had, by the sixteenth century settled on the headwaters of the Mississippi, Minnesota; at this time this people called themselves the 'Seven Fire Places'.
The Sioux were first positively identified by Jean Nicolet who recorded the term 'Sioux' in the Jesuit Relation in 1640. In 1660 two French explorers, Pierre Esprit Radisson, and Medard Chouart, encountered the Sioux in what is now eastern Minnesota at an annual feast of the Dead. Wars with the Chippewas and the Crees contributed to the dispersion of the eastern Sioux - collectively called the Santee - from their homes around Mille Lacs, the Chippewas being armed by French Traders. Missionaries, however, considered that the presence of traders at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, had also attracted the Santee from their original homeland. Of the seven sub-divisions of the Teton Sioux, the Oglala and Sicangu (Brule) were the first to arrive on the Plains, whilst horses, which transformed Plains life, were obtained by the Oglala about 1750, possibly from the Arikara people (Powers:1982 pp.5, 16-17, 26, 28).
In the history of the Sioux peoples the Buffalo holds a crucial place. From it the Sioux derived most of life's necessities; for example, from its hide they made clothing and tepees, ropes and snowshoes; the horns provided spoons, weapons, and ceremonial articles, whilst the sinew was used for bow strings, arrow points, and sewing materials (Salomon:1928 p.31). The Buffalo was also the comrade of the Sun, and even controlled all affairs of love; its spirit cares for the family, for the young of all beings, and for growing things or vegetation. This centrality of the Buffalo in the life and thought of the Sioux, suggests how devastating was the Buffalo's extermination for the latter's traditional culture.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were possibly sixty million buffalo on the Plains (Matthiessen:1992 p16); by 1884 the slaughter by hide hunters, encouraged in Government and by the army for the purpose of breaking tribal power and autonomy, was virtually complete, and, according to one contemporary estimate only eighty-five Buffalo were left in 1889 (W.T.Hornaday quoted in Dippie:1982 p.225). The Sioux, along with other Plains tribes, were now consigned to a state of dependence on Government handouts on various reservations - the Government's strategy had been a success.
Even more devastating for tribal culture and religion than the extermination of the Buffalo, was the Government's determination to forcibly civilize and assimilate Indian peoples. In view of rapid Euro-American expansion, the Federal Indian Bureau had opted for assimilation partly as the most effective means of neutralizing Indian-White conflicts. Nevertheless, Hiram Price, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1881), stated in his annual report of October 24th, that the Indian could not be allowed to remain in his "old superstitions, laziness, and filth, when we have the power to elevate them in the scale of humanity"; the choice was clear: Indian 'civilization', or Indian 'extermination'.
When Price stated that history proves "Savage and civilized life cannot prosper on the same ground", he was echoing a long held conviction among Euro-Americans, and one, which, by the mid-nineteenth century was allied to a theory of social development that had become central to Federal Indian policy. This theory of social development both defined what the Indian was and what he ought to become, namely, a Euro-American imitation. Since it was obvious that in evolutionary terms the Euro-American was immeasurably the Indians' superior, it followed that the former knew what was best for the Indian whose humanity was yet barely developed1; in determining the Indians' future, it was therefore considered, by the Government and other interested groups, unnecessary to consult native peoples themselves, to ask them what they wanted. In practice this meant the elimination of native culture, language, and religion.
In schools Indian children were prohibited from speaking their own language and from expressing themselves through their own cultural forms - punishment followed if this rule was broken. Children were also separated from their families whose influence was viewed as deleterious to their children's 'progress'; one of the main jobs of the Indian police was to return truants to school. In his annual report for october 1st, 1889, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, T.J.Morgan, outlined his vision for Indian education. The Indian school was to be the "means of awakening loyalty to the Government, gratitude to the nation, and hopefulness for themselves [the Indian]". Reference to the Indians' own "unhappy history" should be kept to a minimum, and made only to contrast it with the "better future that is within their grasp". Furthermore, they "should hear little or nothing of the 'wrongs of the Indians', and of the injustice of the white race". As for removing children from their parents - the earlier the better - Morgan went so far as to prescribe the witholding of rations from the latter if they resisted the removal of their children to school. Mary Crow Dog (Sicangu Sioux), formerly a pupil at St.Francis Boarding school (est.1886), Rosebud Reservation, S.Dakota, gives a moving account of the prevalence of the aforementioned attitudes to Indian education as recently as the 1960's! (Mary Crow Dog:1991 Ch.3).
Indian schools nurtured in many students a sense of shame and contempt for their own people and culture2, and further eroded their tribal identity by throwing together into one class Indians of different tribes. In his Commissioner's report for 1934, John Collier expresses his desire to end this denigration of native culture in the classroom. Quoting his Commissioner's circular, issued in the January of the same year, he states: "There are Government schools into which no trace of Indian symbolism or craft expression has been permitted to enter...No interference with Indian religious life or expression will hereafter be tolerated. The cultural history of Indians is in all respects to be considered equal to that of any non-Indian group...The Indian arts are to be prized, nourished, and honoured".
In the Congressional debates over the Wheeler-Howard Act3 in June, 1934, Collier's radical support of native culture attracted severe opposition from Churches and from Indians who had enthusiastically adopted the White man's culture. In 1948 Representative Wesley D'Ewart asserted the need to "break the ties" of Indian children with their roots in order to "get them assimilated with the White race" (Dippie:1985 p.341). Despite this enduring opposition to native culture, the passing of the Wheeler-Howard Act in 1934 promoted the official reinstatement of the Sun Dance prohibited in 1881, although it appears that the Dance was operative, covertly, in the 1920's and may never have ceased. Also prohibited in the 1880's and revived in 1973 by Leonard Crow Dog, was the Ghost Dance.
The 1890 Ghost Dance was inspired by the vision of the Paiute prophet, Wovoka (Jack Wilson), the 'Messiah'. Wovoka's vision reached the Sioux late in 1889 bringing, for many, a ray of hope into a sad and desperate existence. This vision, as told by the sioux, spoke of the resurrection of the Indian dead, the restoration of one's youth, the return of the Buffalo, Elk, and other game, and the removal of the White Man from Indian country forever4. Black Elk, a well known Holy Man who attended Ghost Dances in 1890, later recalled that "The people were crying for the old ways of living and that their religion would be with them again" (DeMallie:1985 p.260). Notably, by this time all the traditional public rituals of Sioux religion including the Sun Dance, Soul-keeping, and Giveaways, had been prohibited by the Government (Ibid.)5.
Following reports from Indian Agents that the Sioux were arming themselves and showing a defiant stance toward the Government and its representatives, troops arrived at Pine Ridge on November 20th, whilst others were deployed to Rosebud and other Sioux agencies. Sitting Bull, viewed by one Agent as "...the high priest and leading apostle..." of the Ghost Dance, was arrested on December 15th and killed in the process. Followers of Sitting Bull fled to the Cheyenne River agency; alarmed at Sitting Bull's death and uneasy at the troops' presence on their Reservation, the Big Foot band, numbering about 350, headed for Pine Ridge under a flag of truce on December 23rd. Intercepted by troops they surrendered unconditionally and stayed at Wounded Knee overnight. On the following day (Dec.29th) as troops sought to confiscate the Indians' weapons, a shot went off and "carnage ensued".
Morgan records in his Commissioner's Report for October 1st, 1891, that of the troops' casualties 25 were killed [though mostly by their own fire] and 35 wounded; for the Indians those killed included 84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children, whilst at least 33 were wounded, many fatally6. It has been said that besides these Indian deaths "A people's dream died there.. for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered" (Black Elk Speaks:1971 p.276); the ghost shirts worn by the Big Foot band had failed to protect them as it was believed they would... the dream was discredited. The Messiah's vision had promised a return to the old ways, that the White Man would be gone from the Indian's land forever...the massacre of the Big Foot band promised and affirmed the contrary; by the end of January the Indians were back at the Indian agencies.
Thus, when Leonard Crow Dog revived the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee in 1973, he revived more than just a dance. At Wounded Knee at this time traditional Indians and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protested to the Government at the appalling living conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation. Wounded Knee was chosen for the protest because it symbolized a continuity with the suffering and injustice experienced by those who were massacred there in 1890, and where a 'dream' also died.
The Ghost Dancers had restored and affirmed the Sacred Hoop, the life-way and the solidarity of the Sioux people, whilst also denying the alleged superiority and sovereignty of Euro-American culture. The Sacred Hoop had, however, now taken on an international character, for at Wounded Knee in 1973 Indians of different nations stood side by side against a common foe, namely, Euro-American culture and the U.S. Government itself; the attendance at the Sun Dance also illustrated this international character, whilst the Dance itself, like the Ghost Dance here, became for many Indians a focus for rediscovering and reaffirming their Indianness'. It should, however, be noted that for some Sioux the participation of other tribes in the Sun Dance is a cause for concern (see Beatrice Medicine in DeMallie;Parks:1987 pp.163-164).
The Sun Dance, Yuwipi, Purification ritual (Sweat lodge ), and Vision Quest are still regularly held. In all of these rituals one's kinship with the Earth, with Wakan Tanka, continues to be affirmed. In the modern Yuwipi prayer is still offered to the spirit of the stones, and a spirit stone is still offered to patients or clientele for protection against danger or illness, thus signifying the continued belief in a spiritual force in all forms of Creation. The Sacred Pipe, given by the White Buffalo Woman and handed down through the generations is still a symbol of unity for the Sioux people. The present Pipe Keeper, Arval Looking Horse, says of it, "The Sacred Pipe is the center, all the other pipes are the roots. When people pray with the Pipe, then the spirits come. Sometimes it takes time, but they do come. It is our way. The Sioux people believe in the Sacred Pipe" (DeMallie;Parks:1987 p.73) The Sacred Pipe thus remains the mediator between Wakan Tanka and humankind reinforcing the kinship ties of the Sioux people with all aspects of Creation. This sense of unity and kinship is further reinforced in the Sun Dance as Arthur Amiotte (Oglala Sioux) explains: "... for the one who understands it, there is a profound realization in the dance, a sacred ecstasy, a transformation whereby he realizes the wholeness and unity of all things... Through this the individual transcends all that we know of this life and finally arrives at the real world, the real place" (DeMallie;Parks:1987 p.89).
Ritual teaches the people how to live; it defines one's responsibilities to both the human and non-human communities, and affirms one's kinship with the land itself. These relationships have, however, been seriously damaged by assimilation, Government educational policies, relocation, high unemployment (up to 90% on reservations), the indignity of poverty, domestic violence on reservations, and alcohol and drug abuse; children who were separated from their families often never returned. The re-establishment, then, of the traditional life-way requires no less than the rebuilding of the community from the family upwards, and there is much being done toward this end7.
Symbols DeMallie has referred to the concept of 'Wakan' as the dominant "intangible symbol" of Sioux religion, the core of its belief, and the reader should turn to the section on Belief for a discussion of this important concept. The present section discuses the circle symbolism, the Sacred Calf Pipe, and sacred numbers, so important for understanding the structure of Sioux belief.
The circle was indicative of life itself and was thus held to be sacred (wakan). "Everything", said Black Elk, "tries to be round - the world is round" (DeMallie:1985 p.291). The human body, the tree-trunk, the seasons. time (day, night, moon), a bird's nest - all of these were circles. The Sioux imitated this natural order by configuring the camp in circles, by sitting in circles for ceremonial occasions, and also by constructing circular tepees. Metaphorically, the camp circle was the 'sacred hoop', within which all was "safe, knowable, auspicious" (Powers:1982 p.41). So, the circle symbolizes wholeness and "helps us to remember Wakan Tanka, who, like the circle, has no end" (Black Elk quoted in Brown:1953 p.92).
The Sacred Calf Pipe, brought to the people by the White Buffalo Calf Woman, one of the Wakan Tanka, is the embodiment of all creation, all forms of which are understood to be one's relatives and to which one is bound by smoking the Sacred Pipe; by this act one accepts one's responsibility toward all one's relatives.
Black Elk tells us that the pipe-bowl is made of red stone and symbolizes the Earth, whilst a buffalo carved in the stone represents all the four-legged. The pipe stem, made of wood, symbolizes all growing things, whilst twelve feathers attached to it represents the eagle and all winged creatures. All of these "peoples" "send their voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this Pipe, you pray for and with everything" (Black Elk quoted in Brown:1953 pp.6-7). Thus, the Sacred Pipe symbolizes the identity of the Sioux peoples - "this is the Sioux religion" (Arval Looking Horse 'The Sacred Pipe' in DeMallie:1988 p.69). (See also the end of the History section).
Sacred numbers, four and seven. The structure of the Universe and of all those things within it reflect a four-fold division. There are, for example, four divisions of time: day, night, the moon, and the year; four parts to all growing things: the roots, stem, leaves, and fruit; and four stages of human life: babyhood, childhood, adulthood, and old age. "Since the Great Spirit caused everything to be in fours, mankind should do everything possible in fours" (George Sword quoted in Powers:1982 p.48). Hence, ceremonies preferably spanned four days or a period divided into four day sections. Also, the Purification Lodge was constructed, ideally, from sixteen willow branches so arranged as to mark out the four directions. The Sun Dance Lodge was built from twenty-eight poles (4x7) with a central pole symbolizing Wakan Tanka; both of the said structures represented the Universe. The White Buffalo Woman brought to the people seven sacred rites and she stayed with them for four days. The Sioux were also formerly known as the 'Seven Fire Places' (See History section). The numbers four and seven are viewed as sacred by most North American Indians.
Adherents
Tribal population estimates from the 1990 Census for American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native villages, gives the total Sioux population at 103,255. This figure, however, gives no indication of the number of Sioux who adhere to what may be understood as traditional culture. It has been noted that for native Americans generally, following much assimilation, "...large numbers of persons do not strongly identify with their American Indian heritage and do not resemble the socioeconomic profile of most American Indians... There are nearly 6 million such individuals, compared with the 1.4 million persons who better resemble conventional ideas about who is an American Indian", namely, a core group with strong ties to their tribal heritage, who are most likely to speak a native language, and probably live on a reservation (Snipp:1991 p.310). Nevertheless, it is much less clear to what extent this relationship applies to the population of any given tribe, or for our present purposes, the Sioux. This problem is complicated by the question of to what extent can Indian participation in Euro-American society be considered as acculturation. Powers suggests that acculturation studies have, by definition, been biased in favour of showing change and adaptation but not contEskimo-Aleuty (Powers:1982 p.xii).
Speaking of the Oglala Sioux, Powers makes the important observation that using the White man's technology, wearing White man's clothes etc., is no indication of the acceptance of the White man's values. Use of the White man's technology may be necessary for survival, but when the Oglala seeks his identity he does so in a "...religious system whose structure has remained in many respects constant since European contact" (Ibid. p.204). Whilst it is difficult to give a figure for the number adherents of traditional culture, there are certainly many Sioux organizations dedicated to its continuing survival. Many Sioux continue the struggle to hold on to the Black Hills, refusing a $100 million award for the Hills from the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1980. The refusal of this award is a measure of the continuing vitality of and committment to traditional culture (See Beliefs section for a discussion on the sacredness of the Black Hills).
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) was an Oglala Sioux medicine man in the transition period from nomadic to reservation life for his people and then, as an interviewee, a source for Native American tribal traditions and Plains Indian spirituality.
Born in December 1863 within a paternal lineage of shamans, or medicine men, Black Elk was nearly 70 years old when John Neihardt, Nebraska's poet laureate, interviewed him and several other Sioux elders in May 1931. This contact, the result of Neihardt's search to find survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, produced the literary classic in American western and Native American writing, Black Elk Speaks, published in 1932. Black Elk became known to the world beyond Pine Ridge Reservation through Neihardt's literary interpretation, which covered the first 27 years of his life.
The actual interviews highlighted prominent features of Plains Indian nomadic life, including accounts of military conflict with the United States government, concluding with the 1890 tragic encounter at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. As a teenager, Black Elk had also been at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Montana, the last stand of General George Custer in 1876. Ten years later he joined William (Buffalo Bill) Cody's Wild West Show on tour in the United States, Great Britain, and the European continent between 1886 and 1889.
The central event in Black Elk's life, however, occurred when he was nine years old while suffering from a lifethreatening illness. He had then "the great vision" that took him to the spiritual center of the Lakota world where he was presented to the Six Grandfathers that symbolized Wakan Tanka or The Great Mysteriousness expressed in the powers of the four directions and of the earth and sky. In this transforming experience, Black Elk received instructions typical of shamanic initiation. For the rest of his life, the vision possessed determinative power. Especially in his young adult years, he sought to act out parts of it for the sake of preserving the unity and survival of his people. Aided by a wise elder and medicine man named Black Road, Black Elk launched his career as a shamanic healer at Fort Keogh, Montana, in the spring of 1881. Present as witnesses were his relatives, who had returned from Canada where they had been since 1877 following the death of the warrior Crazy Horse, a cousin of Black Elk's father.
The great vision, as told to Neihardt in 1931, became the center of the text of Black Elk Speaks. In remembering it so vividly, Black Elk resurrected its spiritual power, which had not waned despite his sincere conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1904. His depiction stands as a major source in visionary religious literature, attracting the interest in the last half century of symbologists, depth psychologists, and scholars in comparative mythology and prompting pan-Indian revitalization movements of traditional rituals.
Twice married, Black Elk's wife of 1892, Katie War Bonnett, died in 1903. Nicholas, added as a Christian name, lived with his second wife, Anna Brings White, from 1905 until her death in 1941. The father of four sons and a daughter, Black Elk was particularly dependent upon the third and last child by Katie, Benjamin, who provided him a home in his failing years and who also proved enormously helpful to Neihardt's projects. A victim of tuberculosis, Black Elk was treated first in 1912 and as late as the last years of his life. From the fifth decade of his life, he suffered from poor eyesight.
Traveling as a catechist for Roman Catholicism, Black Elk visited the Wind River, Winnebago, and Sisseton reservations between 1908 and 1910. But he kept some traditional practices alive in performing dances for pageants for summer tourists to the Black Hills, first probably in the late 1920s and certainly after 1935. When first hosting Neihardt, he ritualized the occasion of the telling of the great vision and of his deep involvement in the corporate life of his people. The event was so potent that Christian missionaries required Black Elk to disavow any intent to renew the traditional practices of the Sioux. Thirteen years later, he gave Neihardt another interview which became a novel entitled When the Tree Flowered when it was published the year after Black Elk died. After the interview of 1944, no disavowal was required of the octogenarian.
In 1947 Joseph Epes Brown, later a scholar of Native American religion and culture, met Black Elk in Nebraska. Brown spent the next winter with the elderly spiritual teacher in Manderson, South Dakota. Through that contact and their conversations Black Elk provided the details of seven traditional rituals of the Oglala people which Brown published as The Sacred Pipe. They included a purification ceremony (the sweat lodge), crying for a vision, female puberty, marriage, soul-keeping, throwing the ball, and the great medicine of all traditional Plains people, the Sun Dance.
Even though there is no public evidence that Black Elk practiced the healing rituals of a shaman after he converted to Catholicism, all of his adult life, beginning with his first major exposure to the world of "white" America and Europe, was spent creatively blending native and Christian perspectives. As catechist, he retained the role of spiritual leader, focused as always on the welfare and future of his people. Black Elk's bicultural religious orientation went far beyond the impression mediated by Neihardt's first book, which has no mention of his later Catholic roles and which presents an elegy to the last generation of Plains Indian survivors before the dominance of the reservation. With a spirituality infused by hopefulness and imaged as the sacred hoop and the flowering tree - symbols of the corporate reality of his people - Black Elk was continually devoted to trying to find a way for the tribe to live. His own long life, despite bad health and the economic difficulties of existence on the reservation, testified to a strong determination to endure while facing threatening cultural changes. Within a decade of his death the Sun Dance was renewed under his nephew, Frank Fools Crow. Such an action reflected the impact of Black Elk on the reservation where, coming full circle, what he described but no longer performed became a living practice again. Through the books with Neihardt and Brown, Black Elk made the world at large heirs of his spiritual wisdom, ensuring in them that the rituals of empowerment of the Sioux people would not depend on oral tradition. He died on August 19, 1950, at Manderson and was buried from St. Agnes Mission Chapel in a barren cemetery.
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men."
"Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss."
Black Elk
Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950 (In Italiano)
"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking."
"I cured with the power that came through me. Of course, it was not I who cured, it was the power from the Outer World, the visions and the ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-legged."
"If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish."
Earth Prayer
"Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you -- the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings of the air,
and all green things that live.
"You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things."
Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.
At the center of the sacred hoop
You have said that I should make the tree to bloom.
With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
With running eyes I must say
The tree has never bloomed
Here I stand, and the tree is withered.
Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.
Nourish it then
That it may leaf
And bloom
And fill with singing birds!
Hear me, that the people may once again
Find the good road
And the shielding tree.
The Sunset
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy...
But anywhere is the center of the world.
A long time ago my father told me what his father had told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called "Drinks Water", who dreamed what was to be... He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back to the Earth, and that a strange race would weave a web all around the Lakota’s. He said, "You shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land..." Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking. (1932)
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
Quotes from Black Elk
A good nation I will make live.
-Black Elk
After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.
-Black Elk
Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.
-Black Elk
And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.
-Black Elk
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
-Black Elk
And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.
-Black Elk
And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.
-Black Elk
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
-Black Elk
But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way, even though I may die sooner because I did it; for I know the meaning of the vision is wise and beautiful and good; and you can see that I am only a pitiful old man after all.
-Black Elk
Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.
-Black Elk
Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
-Black Elk
I cured with the power that came through me.
-Black Elk
I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it.
-Black Elk
I know now what this meant, that the bison were the gift of a good spirit and were our strength, but we should lose them, and from the same good spirit we must find another strength.
-Black Elk
I looked about me once again, and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are, and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from whence the horses came, and vanished.
-Black Elk
I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.
-Black Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.
-Black Elk
I was four years old then, and I think it must have been the next summer that I first heard the voices.
-Black Elk
If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.
-Black Elk
My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?
-Black Elk
Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.
-Black Elk
So I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation's hoop I thrust it in the earth.
-Black Elk
Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
-Black Elk
The boys of my people began very young to learn the ways of men, and no one taught us; we just learned by doing what we saw, and we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls.
-Black Elk
The soldiers did go away and their towns were torn down; and in the Moon of Falling Leaves (November), they made a treaty with Red Cloud that said our country would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow.
-Black Elk
There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk
They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.
-Black Elk
To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see.
-Black Elk
When I got back to my father and mother and was sitting up there in our tepee, my face was still all puffed and my legs and arms were badly swollen; but I felt good all over and wanted to get right up and run around.
-Black Elk
You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer.
-Black Elk
You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.
-Black Elk
The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice.
-Black Elk
"...all the wings of the air shall come to you, and they and the winds and the stars shall be like relatives.
-Black Elk
There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk
And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.
-Black Elk
(Black Elk speaks of the deceased Crazy Horse.) It does not matter where his body lies; there the grass is growing... but where his Spirit lies, that would be a good place to be.
-Black Elk
It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka who is everything; then he knows that world which is real.
-Black Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.
-Black Elk
I was ten years old that winter, and that was the first time I ever saw a Wasichu (white man). At first I thought they all looked sick, and I was afraid they might just begin to fight us any time, but I got used to them.
-Black Elk
The Sun, the Light of the world. I hear him coming. I see his face as he comes. He makes the beings on earth happy and they rejoice. O, Wakan Tanka, I offer to You this world of Light."
-Black Elk
From Chapter 13: The Compelling Fear
I was sixteen years old and more, and I had not yet done anything the Grandfathers wanted me to do, but they had been helping me. I did not know how to do what they wanted me to do.
A terrible time began for me then, and I could not tell anybody, not even my father and mother. I was afraid to see a cloud coming up; and whenever one did, I could hear the thunder beings calling to me: "Behold your Grandfathers! Make haste!" I could understand the birds when they sang, and they were always saying: "It is time! It is time!" The crows in the day and the coyotes at night all called and called to me: "It is time! It is time! It is time!"
Time to do what? I did not know. Whenever I awoke before daybreak and went out of the tepee because I was afraid of the stillness when everyone was sleeping, there were many low voices talking together in the east, and the daybreak star would sing this song in the silence:
In a sacred manner you shall walk!
Your nation shall behold you!
I could not get along with people now, and I would take my horse and go far out from camp alone and compare everything on the earth and in the sky with my vision. Crows would see me and shout to each other as though they were making fun of me: "Behold him! Behold him!"
When the frosts began I was glad, because there would not be any more thunder storms for a long while, and I was more and more afraid of them all the time, for always there would be the voices crying!: "Oo oohey! It is time! It is time!"
The fear was not so great all the while in the winter, but sometimes it was bad. Sometimes the crying of coyotes out in the cold made me so afraid that I would run out of one tepee into another, and I would do this until I was worn out and fell asleep. I wondered if maybe I was only crazy; and my father and mother worried a great deal about me. They said: "It is the strange sickness he had that time when we gave the horse to Whirlwind Chaser for curing him; and he is not cured." I could not tell them what was the matter, for then they would only think I was queerer than ever.
I was seventeen years old that winter.
When the grasses were beginning to show their tender faces again, my father and mother asked an old medicine man by the name of Black Road to come over and see what he could do for me. Black Road was in a tepee all alone with me, and he asked me to tell him if I had seen something that troubled me. By now I was so afraid of being afraid of everything that I told him about my vision, and when I was through he looked long at me and said: "Ah-h-h-h!," meaning that he was much surprised. Then he said to me: "Nephew, I know now what the trouble is! You must do what the bay horse in your vision wanted you to do. You must do your duty and perform this vision for your people upon earth. You must have the horse dance first for the people to see. Then the fear will leave you; but if you do not do this, something very bad will happen to you."
So we began to get ready for the horse dance.
Chapter 14: The Horse Dance
There was a man by the name of Bear Sings, and he was very old and wise. So Black Road asked him to help, and he did.
First they sent a crier around in the morning who told the people to camp in a circle at a certain place a little way up the Tongue from where the soldiers were. They did this, and in the middle of the circle Bear Sings and Black Road set up a sacred tepee of bison hide, and on it they painted pictures from my vision. On the west side they painted a bow and a cup of water; on the north. white geese and the herb; on the east. the daybreak star and the pipe; on the south, the flowering stick and the nation's hoop. Also, they painted horses, elk and bison. Then over the door of the sacred tepee, they painted the flaming rainbow. It took them all day to do this, and it was beautiful.
They told me I must not eat anything until the horse dance was over, and I had to purify myself in a sweat lodge with sage spread on the floor of it, and afterwards I had to wipe myself dry with sage.
That evening Black Road and Bear Sings told me to come to the painted tepee. We were in there alone, and nobody dared come near us to listen. They asked me if I had heard any songs in my vision, and if I had I must teach the songs to them. So I sang to them all the songs that I had heard in my vision, and it took most of the night to teach these songs to them. While we were in there singing, we could hear low thunder rumbling all over the village outside, and we knew the thunder beings were glad and had come to help us.
My father and mother had been helping too by hunting up all that we should need in the dance. The next morning they had everything ready. There were four black horses to represent the west; four white horses for the north; four sorrels for the east; four buckskins for the south. For all of these, young riders had been chosen. Also there was a bay horse for me to ride, as in my vision. Four of the most beautiful maidens in the village were ready to take their part, and there were six very old men for the Grandfathers.
Now it was time to paint and dress for the dance. The four maidens and the sixteen horses all faced the sacred tepee. Black Road and Bear Sings then sang a song, and all the others sang along with them, like this:
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
Father, paint the earth on me.
A nation I will make over.
A two-legged nation I will make holy.
Father. paint the earth on me.
After that the painting was done.
The four black-horse riders were painted all black with blue lightning stripes down their legs and arms and white hail spots on their hips, and there were blue streaks of lightning on the horses' legs.
The white-horse riders were painted all white with red streaks of lightning on their arms and legs, and on the legs of the horses there were streaks of red lightning, and all the white riders wore plumes of white horse hair on their heads to look like geese.
The riders of the sorrels of the east were painted all red with straight black lines of lightning on their limbs and across their breasts, and there was straight black lightning on the limbs and breasts of the horses too.
The riders of the buckskins of the south were painted all yellow and streaked with black lightning. The horses were black from the knees down, and black lightning streaks were on their upper legs and breasts.
My bay horse had bright red streaks of lightning on his limbs, and on his back a spotted eagle, outstretching was painted where I sat. I was painted red all over with black lightning on my limbs. I wore a black mask, and across my forehead a single eagle feather hung.
When the horses and the men were painted they looked beautiful; but they looked fearful too.
The men were naked, except for a breech-clout; but the four maidens wore buckskin dresses dyed scarlet, and their faces were scarlet too. Their hair was braided, and they had wreaths of the sweet and cleansing sage, the sacred sage, around their heads, and from the wreath of each in front a single eagle feather hung. They were very beautiful to see.
All this time I was in the sacred tepee with the Six Grandfathers, and the four sacred virgins were in there too. No one outside was to see me until the dance began.
Right in the middle of the tepee the Grandfathers made a circle in the ground with a little trench, and across this they painted two roads--the red one running north and south, the black one, east and west. On the west side of this they placed a cup of water with a little bow and arrow laid across it; and on the east they painted the daybreak star. Then to the maiden who would represent the north they gave the healing herb to carry and a white goose wing, the cleansing wind. To her of the east they gave the holy pipe. To her of the south they gave the flowering stick; and to her who would represent the west they gave the nation's hoop. Thus the four maidens, good and beautiful, held in their hands the life of the nation.
All I carried was a red stick to represent the sacred arrow, the power of the thunder beings of the west.
We were now ready to begin the dance. The Six Grandfathers began to sing, announcing the riders of the different quarters. First they sang of the black horse riders, like this:
They will appear--may you behold them!
They will appear--may you behold them!
A horse nation will appear.
A thunder-being nation will appear.
They will appear, behold!
They will appear, behold!
Then the black riders mounted their horses and stood four abreast facing the place where the sun goes down.
Next the Six Grandfathers sang:
They will appear, may you behold them!
A horse nation will appear, behold!
A geese nation will appear, may you
behold!"
Then the four white horsemen mounted and stood four abreast, facing the place where the White Giant lives.
Next the Six Grandfathers sang:
Where the sun shines continually,
they will appear!
A buffalo nation, they will appear, behold!
A horse nation, they will appear, may you behold!
Then the red horsemen mounted and stood four abreast facing the east.
Next the Grandfathers sang:
Where you are always facing, an elk nation will appear!
May you behold!
A horse nation will appear,
Behold!
The four yellow riders mounted their buckskins and stood four abreast facing the south.
Now it was time for me to go forth from the sacred tepee, but before I went forth I sang this song to the drums of the Grandfathers:
He will appear, may you behold him!
An eagle for the eagle nation will appear.
May you behold!
While I was singing thus in the sacred tepee I could hear my horse snorting and prancing outside. The virgins went forth four abreast and I followed them, mounting my horse and standing behind them facing the west.
Next the Six Grandfathers came forth and stood abreast behind my bay, and they began to sing a rapid, lively song to the drums, like this:
They are dancing.
They are coming to behold you.
The horse nation of the west is dancing.
They are coming to behold!
Then they sang the same of the horses of the north and of the east and of the south. And as they sang of each troop in turn, it wheeled and came and took its place behind the Grandfathers--the blacks, the whites, the sorrels and the buckskins, standing four abreast and facing the west. They came prancing to the lively air of the Grandfathers' song, and they pranced as they stood in line. And all the while my bay was rearing too and prancing to the music of the sacred song.
Now when we were all in line, facing the west, I looked up into a dark cloud that was coming there and the people all became quiet and the horses quit prancing. And when there was silence but for low thunder yonder, I sent a voice to the spirits of the cloud, holding forth my right hand, thus, palm outward, as I cried four times:
Hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey! hey-a-a-hey!
Then the Grandfathers behind me sang another sacred song from my vision, the one that goes like this:
At the center of the earth,
behold a four-legged.
They have said this to me!
And as they sang a strange thing happened. My bay pricked up his ears and raised his tail and pawed the earth, neighing long and loud to where the sun goes down. And the four black horses raised their voices, neighing long and loud, and the whites and the sorrels and the buckskins did the same; and all the other horses in the village neighed, and even those out grazing in the valley and on the hill slopes raised their heads and neighed together. Then suddenly, as I sat there looking at the cloud, I saw my vision yonder once again--the tepee built of cloud and sewed with lightning the flaming rainbow door and, underneath, the Six Grandfathers sitting, and all the horses thronging in their quarters; and also there was I myself upon my bay before the tepee. I looked about me and could see that what we then were doing was like a shadow cast upon the earth from yonder vision in the heavens, so bright it was and clear. I knew the real was yonder and the darkened dream of it was here.
And as I looked, the Six Grandfathers yonder in the cloud and all the riders of the horses, and even I myself upon the bay up there, all held their hands palms outward toward me, and when they did this, I had to pray, and so I cried:
Grandfathers, you behold me!
Spirits of the World, you behold!
What you have said to me,
I am now performing!
Hear me and help me!
Then the vision went out, and the thunder cloud was coming on with lightning on its front and many voices in it, and the split-tail swallows swooped above us in a swarm.
The people of the village ran to fasten down their tepees, while the black horse riders sang to the drums that rolled like thunder, and this is what they sang:
I myself made them fear.
Myself, I wore an eagle relic.
I myself made them fear.
Myself, a lightning power I wore.
I myself made them fear,
Made them fear.
The power of the hail I wore,
I myself made them fear,
Made them fear!
Behold me!
And as they sang, the hail and rain were falling yonder just a little way from us, and we could see it, but the cloud stood there and flashed and thundered, and only a little sprinkle fell on us. The thunder beings were glad and had come in a great crowd to see the dance.
Now the four virgins held high the sacred relics that they carried, the herb and the white wing, the sacred pipe, the flowering stick, the nation's hoop, offering these to the spirits of the west. Then people who were sick or sad came to the virgins, making scarlet offerings to them, and after they had done this, they all felt better and some were cured of sickness and began to dance for joy.
Now the Grandfathers beat their drums again and the dance began. The four black horsemen, who had stood behind the Grandfathers, went ahead of the virgins, riding toward the west side of the circled village, and all the others followed in their order while the horses pranced and reared.
When the black horse troop had reached the western side, it wheeled around and fell to the rear behind the buckskins, and the white horse band came up and led until it reached the north side of the village. Then these fell back and took the rear behind the blacks, and the sorrels led until they reached the east. Then these fell back behind the whites, and the buckskins led until they reached the south. Then they fell back and took the rear, so that the blacks were leading as before toward the western quarter that was theirs. Each time the leading horse troop reached its quarter, the Six Grandfathers sang of the powers of that quarter, and there my bay faced, pricking up his ears and neighing loud, till all the other horses raised their voices neighing. When I thus faced the north, I sent a voice again and said: "Grandfather, behold me! What you gave me I have given to the people--the power of the healing herb and the cleansing wind. Thus my nation is made over. Hear and help me!"
And when we reached the east, and after the Grandfathers had sung, I sent a voice: "Grandfather, behold me! My people, with difficulty they walk. Give them wisdom and guide them. Hear and help me!"
Between each quarter, as we marched and danced, we all sang together:
A horse nation all over the universe,
Neighing, they come!
Prancing, they come!
May you behold them.
When we had reached the south and the Grandfathers had sung of the power of growing, my horse faced yonder and neighed again, and all the horses raised their voices as before. And then I prayed with hand upraised: "Grandfather, the flowering stick you gave me and the nation's sacred hoop I have given to the people. Hear me, you who have the power to make grow! Guide the people that they may be as blossoms on your holy tree, and make it flourish deep in Mother Earth and make it full of leaves and singing birds."
Then once more the blacks were leading, and as we marched and sang and danced toward the quarter of the west, the black hail cloud, still standing yonder watching, filled with voices crying: "Hey-hey! hey-hey!" They were cheering and rejoicing that my work was being done. And all the people now were happy and rejoicing, sending voices back, "hey-hey, hey-hey"; and all the horses neighed, rejoicing with the spirits and the people. Four times we marched and danced around the circle of the village, singing as we went, the leaders changing at the quarters, the Six Grandfathers singing to the power of each quarter, and to each I sent a voice. And at each quarter, as we stood, somebody who was sick or sad would come with offerings to the virgins--little scarlet bags of the chacun sha sha, the red willow bark. And when the offering was made, the giver would feel better and begin to dance with joy.
And on the second time around, many of the people who had horses joined the dance with them, milling round and round the Six Grandfathers and the virgins as we danced ahead. And more and more got on their horses, milling round us as we went, until there was a whirl of prancing horses all about us at the end, and all the others danced afoot behind us, and everybody sang what we were singing.
When we reached the quarter of the west the fourth time, we stopped in new formation, facing inward toward the sacred tepee in the center of the village. First stood the virgins, next I stood upon the bay; then came the Six Grandfathers with eight riders on either side of them--the sorrels and the buckskins on their right hand; the blacks and whites upon their left. And when we stood so, the oldest of the Grandfathers, he who was the Spirit of the Sky, cried out: "Let all the people be ready. He shall send a voice four times, and at the last voice you shall go forth and coup [hit] the sacred tepee, and who shall coup it first shall have new power!"
All the riders were eager for the charge, and even the horses seemed to understand and were rearing and trying to get away. Then I raised my hand and cried hey-hey four times, and at the fourth the riders all yelled "hoka hey," and charged upon the tepee. My horse plunged inward along with all the others, but many were ahead of me and many couped the tepee before I did.
Then the horses were all rubbed down with sacred sage and led away, and we began going into the tepee to see what might have happened there while we were dancing. The Grandfathers had sprinkled fresh soil on the nation's hoop that they had made in there with the red and black roads across it, and all around this little circle of the nation's hoop we saw the prints of tiny pony hoofs as though the spirit horses had been dancing while we danced.
Now Black Road, who had helped me to perform the dance, took the sacred pipe from the virgin of the east. After filling it with chacun sha sha, the bark of the red willow, he lit and offered it to the Powers of the World, sending a voice thus:
"Grandfathers, you where the sun goes down, you of the sacred wind where the white giant lives, you where the day comes forth and the morning star, you where lives the power to grow, you of the sky and you of the earth, wings of the air and four-leggeds of the world, behold! I, myself, with my horse nation have done what I was to do on earth. To all of you I offer this pipe that my people may live!"
Then he smoked and passed the pipe. It went all over the village until every one had smoked at least a puff.
After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked. I felt very happy, for I could see that my people were all happier. Many crowded around me and said that they or their relatives who had been feeling sick were well again, and these gave me many gifts. Even the horses seemed to be healthier and happier after the dance.
The fear that was on me so long was gone, and when thunder clouds appeared I was always glad to see them, for they came as relatives now to visit me. Everything seemed good and beautiful now, and kind.
Before this, the medicine men would not talk to me, but now they would come to me to talk about my vision.
From that time on, I always got up very early to see the rising of the daybreak star. People knew that I did this, and many would get up to see it with me, and when it came we said: "Behold the star of understanding!"
From Chapter 18:
The Powers of the Bison and the Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see. You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer. And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me. But the fear came and if I had not obeyed it, I am sure it would have killed me in a little while.
It was even then only after the heyoka ceremony in which I performed my dog vision, that I had the power to practice as a medicine man, curing sick people; and many I cured with the power that came through me. Of course it was not I who cured. It was the power from the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds. If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish. There were other parts of my great vision that I still had to perform before I could use the power that was in those parts. If you think about my great vision again, you will remember how the red man turned into a bison and rolled, and that the people found the good red road after that. If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.
To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see. It was during the summer of my first cure that this was done. I carried the pipe to Fox Belly, a wise and good old medicine man, and asked him to help me do this duty. He was glad to help me, but first I had to tell him how it was in that part of my vision. I did not tell him all my vision, only that part. I had never told any one all of it, and even until now nobody ever heard it all. Even my old friend, Standing Bear, and my son here have heard it now for the first time when I have told it to you. Of course there was very much in the vision that even I cannot tell when I try hard, because very much of it was not for words. But I have told what can be told.
It has made me very sad to do this at last, and I have lain awake at night worrying and wondering if I was doing right; for I know I have given away my power when I have given away my vision, and maybe I cannot live very long now. But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way, even though I may die sooner because I did it; for I know the meaning of the vision is wise and beautiful and good; and you can see that I am only a pitiful old man after all.
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
The Great Spirit
Black Elk's near-death experience
The near-death experiences of the Native American medicine man, Black Elk, of the Lakota Sioux nation, echo with the enchanting poetic language of an ancient society. His story reveals a traditional natural world culture, yet also many of the familiar phenomena of near-death experiences that leap across eras. Living between 1863 and 1950, Black Elk survived the collision of two eras, when the ancient primal world of his people was shattered by the violent invasion of the new industrial culture. This remarkable medicine man did not even speak English when he told his visionary experience to the author, John Neihardt, who told it in his book, Black Elk Speaks, in 1932. In this classic of Native American literature, Black Elk's near-death experience glows through his perceptions of a sacred natural world.
The world of the Lakota Sioux is filled not with soulless material objects out there but with the manifestations of the presence of being that lies behind all creation: Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery. This spiritual power is not personified as a remote God, but is both transcendent and present in all the world: in thunder, water, blood, birds, buffalo. Since the worldview of industrial society demands the expulsion of these perceptions, they seem like dim archaic memories. But Black Elk's near-death experience was a living, vital way of seeing in a sacred manner.
When Black Elk was a boy of nine, he collapsed with a severe, painful swelling of his legs, arms and face.
He lost consciousness and lay in his tipi dying. He was called by two men coming from the clouds, saying, "Hurry up, your grandfather is calling you."
He was raised up out of his tipi into the clouds, feeling sorry to leave his parents. He was shown an elaborate vision oriented around a classic Native American mandala:
the circular hoop, the four directions, and the center of the world on an axis stretching from sky to Earth, numerous neighing, dancing horses, surrounded by lightning and thunder, filled the sky at each direction.
He was told to behold this, then to follow a bay horse, which led him to a rainbow door. Inside, sitting on clouds, were six grandfathers, "older than men can ever be - old like hills, old like stars."
The oldest grandfather welcomed the boy and said: "Your Grandfathers all over the world are having a council, and they have called you here to teach you."
His voice was very kind, but the boy shook all over with fear now, for he knew that these were not old men, but the Powers of the World.
Each Grandfather gave Black Elk a power.
The first Grandfather gave him the power to heal.
The second Grandfather then gave the boy the power of cleansing.
The third Grandfather gave the boy the power of awakening and its peace.
From the fourth Grandfather the boy was given the power of growth.
The fifth Grandfather, the Spirit of the Sky, gave the power of transcendent vision.
The sixth Grandfather, a very old man, incredibly grew backwards into youth until he became the boy, Black Elk.
Growing older again he said, "My boy, have courage, for my power shall be yours, and you shall need it, for your nation on the Earth will have great troubles."
Then the boy hears a great Voice say: "Behold the circle of the nation's hoop, for it is holy, being endless, and thus all powers shall be one power in the people without end."
Then Black Elk, standing on the highest mountain, surveying the grand vista of the hoop of the world, said: "I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being."
After returning to the six Grandfathers once again to receive his powers, the boy was sent back to his dying body. When he awoke, his overjoyed parents told him that he had been sick twelve days, lying as if dead the whole time.
Black Elk was afraid to tell his experience, and moped around as a shy, withdrawn boy for eight years. Finally he told a medicine man who helped him reenact the vision as a ritual. At that moment he became a powerful medicine man or shaman, healing, he said, many people of illnesses from tuberculosis to despair.
He kept his vision alive with daily practices, such as meditation on the daybreak star. But the great sadness of his life was his inability to stop the destructive onslaught of industrial culture, in search of gold and land that almost destroyed his people.
"You live on Earth only for a few short years which you call an incarnation, and then you leave your body as an outworn dress and go for refreshment to your true home in the spirit." - White Eagle
------------------
Sioux Religion
Doctrines:
The Sioux regard the universe as ultimately incomprehensible; life, growth, and death are mysterious and suggestive of powers difficult to understand. Since time itself is regarded as non-causal, and does not embody notions of change and progress, nothing in the universe can be considered to be inevitable. This incomprehensibility and unpredictability of the universe, anything difficult to understand, is called 'wakan', which also connotes the animating force of the universe, the totality of which is 'Wakan Tanka'. Wakan Tanka is the sum total of the personified powers that brought all things into being; sometimes it is embodied as the Six Grandfathers.
Humankind itself formed in and emerged from the womb of Mother Earth, as did the buffalo. Everything has its own spirit but all share the same spiritual essence that is Wakan Tanka; so it is that the most important aspects of personality are shared by everything in the universe. Other beings often shared their knowledge with humans or provided aid in time of crisis (See Mary Crow Dog:1991 pp.178-180), and so came to be thought of as 'people'. The observance of the human-like characteristics of these peoples led to the development of kinship with them. At birth one receives from Takuskanskan a guardian spirit and the life-breath or ghost which comes from the stars; at death these return to the spirit world.
Ritual seeks to placate the wakan beings or powers - which may be predisposed to good or evil - but also involves a process of continuing revelation. On returning from his vision quest, the vision seeker commonly integrates his vision into the life of the community by performing it ritually in public. In this way he adds to the fund of collective knowledge necessary to sustain a balanced relationship between the human community and other forms of life, both animate and inanimate. This sense of unity and of the cohesive force of ritual, is conveyed by the recurring song text: "I do this ( take part in the ritual, songs and prayers) so that I may live with my relations" (Powers:1982 p.154).
Finally, a few words on the Black Hills, why they are sacred to the Sioux. According to Charlotte Black Elk, Sioux legend says that with the creation of the universe a song was given to it, each part of the universe being imbued with a part of the song; but only in the Black Hills was the song found in its entirety, here at the "heart of everything that is" (Timewatch "Savagery and the American Indian" Part 2, BBC2 30th January 1991). Legend also says that the hills are "...a reclining female figure from whose breasts flowed life-giving forces, and to them the Lakota [Sioux] went as a child to its mother's arms" (Luther Standing Bear quoted in Matthiessen :1992 p.4). It was in the Black Hills that the Sioux people originated, and at Bear Butte on the eastern edge of the Hills, that the Creator first imparted his sacred instructions to them; thus it is that Bear Butte is the most sacred of all places, and both Sioux and Cheyenne come here each year for vision quests. Although explanations of what happens to one at death vary, it has been said that the spirits of the Sioux dead rest in the Black Hills.
History
The word 'Sioux' is a collective term for seven tribal groups which are organized into three main political units, the Teton, Yankton, and Santee. This conventional model of Sioux social organization seems not, however, to be applicable prior to about 1700. The people that came to be known as 'Sioux', had, by the sixteenth century settled on the headwaters of the Mississippi, Minnesota; at this time this people called themselves the 'Seven Fire Places'.
The Sioux were first positively identified by Jean Nicolet who recorded the term 'Sioux' in the Jesuit Relation in 1640. In 1660 two French explorers, Pierre Esprit Radisson, and Medard Chouart, encountered the Sioux in what is now eastern Minnesota at an annual feast of the Dead. Wars with the Chippewas and the Crees contributed to the dispersion of the eastern Sioux - collectively called the Santee - from their homes around Mille Lacs, the Chippewas being armed by French Traders. Missionaries, however, considered that the presence of traders at the junction of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, had also attracted the Santee from their original homeland. Of the seven sub-divisions of the Teton Sioux, the Oglala and Sicangu (Brule) were the first to arrive on the Plains, whilst horses, which transformed Plains life, were obtained by the Oglala about 1750, possibly from the Arikara people (Powers:1982 pp.5, 16-17, 26, 28).
In the history of the Sioux peoples the Buffalo holds a crucial place. From it the Sioux derived most of life's necessities; for example, from its hide they made clothing and tepees, ropes and snowshoes; the horns provided spoons, weapons, and ceremonial articles, whilst the sinew was used for bow strings, arrow points, and sewing materials (Salomon:1928 p.31). The Buffalo was also the comrade of the Sun, and even controlled all affairs of love; its spirit cares for the family, for the young of all beings, and for growing things or vegetation. This centrality of the Buffalo in the life and thought of the Sioux, suggests how devastating was the Buffalo's extermination for the latter's traditional culture.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century there were possibly sixty million buffalo on the Plains (Matthiessen:1992 p16); by 1884 the slaughter by hide hunters, encouraged in Government and by the army for the purpose of breaking tribal power and autonomy, was virtually complete, and, according to one contemporary estimate only eighty-five Buffalo were left in 1889 (W.T.Hornaday quoted in Dippie:1982 p.225). The Sioux, along with other Plains tribes, were now consigned to a state of dependence on Government handouts on various reservations - the Government's strategy had been a success.
Even more devastating for tribal culture and religion than the extermination of the Buffalo, was the Government's determination to forcibly civilize and assimilate Indian peoples. In view of rapid Euro-American expansion, the Federal Indian Bureau had opted for assimilation partly as the most effective means of neutralizing Indian-White conflicts. Nevertheless, Hiram Price, Commissioner of Indian Affairs (1881), stated in his annual report of October 24th, that the Indian could not be allowed to remain in his "old superstitions, laziness, and filth, when we have the power to elevate them in the scale of humanity"; the choice was clear: Indian 'civilization', or Indian 'extermination'.
When Price stated that history proves "Savage and civilized life cannot prosper on the same ground", he was echoing a long held conviction among Euro-Americans, and one, which, by the mid-nineteenth century was allied to a theory of social development that had become central to Federal Indian policy. This theory of social development both defined what the Indian was and what he ought to become, namely, a Euro-American imitation. Since it was obvious that in evolutionary terms the Euro-American was immeasurably the Indians' superior, it followed that the former knew what was best for the Indian whose humanity was yet barely developed1; in determining the Indians' future, it was therefore considered, by the Government and other interested groups, unnecessary to consult native peoples themselves, to ask them what they wanted. In practice this meant the elimination of native culture, language, and religion.
In schools Indian children were prohibited from speaking their own language and from expressing themselves through their own cultural forms - punishment followed if this rule was broken. Children were also separated from their families whose influence was viewed as deleterious to their children's 'progress'; one of the main jobs of the Indian police was to return truants to school. In his annual report for october 1st, 1889, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, T.J.Morgan, outlined his vision for Indian education. The Indian school was to be the "means of awakening loyalty to the Government, gratitude to the nation, and hopefulness for themselves [the Indian]". Reference to the Indians' own "unhappy history" should be kept to a minimum, and made only to contrast it with the "better future that is within their grasp". Furthermore, they "should hear little or nothing of the 'wrongs of the Indians', and of the injustice of the white race". As for removing children from their parents - the earlier the better - Morgan went so far as to prescribe the witholding of rations from the latter if they resisted the removal of their children to school. Mary Crow Dog (Sicangu Sioux), formerly a pupil at St.Francis Boarding school (est.1886), Rosebud Reservation, S.Dakota, gives a moving account of the prevalence of the aforementioned attitudes to Indian education as recently as the 1960's! (Mary Crow Dog:1991 Ch.3).
Indian schools nurtured in many students a sense of shame and contempt for their own people and culture2, and further eroded their tribal identity by throwing together into one class Indians of different tribes. In his Commissioner's report for 1934, John Collier expresses his desire to end this denigration of native culture in the classroom. Quoting his Commissioner's circular, issued in the January of the same year, he states: "There are Government schools into which no trace of Indian symbolism or craft expression has been permitted to enter...No interference with Indian religious life or expression will hereafter be tolerated. The cultural history of Indians is in all respects to be considered equal to that of any non-Indian group...The Indian arts are to be prized, nourished, and honoured".
In the Congressional debates over the Wheeler-Howard Act3 in June, 1934, Collier's radical support of native culture attracted severe opposition from Churches and from Indians who had enthusiastically adopted the White man's culture. In 1948 Representative Wesley D'Ewart asserted the need to "break the ties" of Indian children with their roots in order to "get them assimilated with the White race" (Dippie:1985 p.341). Despite this enduring opposition to native culture, the passing of the Wheeler-Howard Act in 1934 promoted the official reinstatement of the Sun Dance prohibited in 1881, although it appears that the Dance was operative, covertly, in the 1920's and may never have ceased. Also prohibited in the 1880's and revived in 1973 by Leonard Crow Dog, was the Ghost Dance.
The 1890 Ghost Dance was inspired by the vision of the Paiute prophet, Wovoka (Jack Wilson), the 'Messiah'. Wovoka's vision reached the Sioux late in 1889 bringing, for many, a ray of hope into a sad and desperate existence. This vision, as told by the sioux, spoke of the resurrection of the Indian dead, the restoration of one's youth, the return of the Buffalo, Elk, and other game, and the removal of the White Man from Indian country forever4. Black Elk, a well known Holy Man who attended Ghost Dances in 1890, later recalled that "The people were crying for the old ways of living and that their religion would be with them again" (DeMallie:1985 p.260). Notably, by this time all the traditional public rituals of Sioux religion including the Sun Dance, Soul-keeping, and Giveaways, had been prohibited by the Government (Ibid.)5.
Following reports from Indian Agents that the Sioux were arming themselves and showing a defiant stance toward the Government and its representatives, troops arrived at Pine Ridge on November 20th, whilst others were deployed to Rosebud and other Sioux agencies. Sitting Bull, viewed by one Agent as "...the high priest and leading apostle..." of the Ghost Dance, was arrested on December 15th and killed in the process. Followers of Sitting Bull fled to the Cheyenne River agency; alarmed at Sitting Bull's death and uneasy at the troops' presence on their Reservation, the Big Foot band, numbering about 350, headed for Pine Ridge under a flag of truce on December 23rd. Intercepted by troops they surrendered unconditionally and stayed at Wounded Knee overnight. On the following day (Dec.29th) as troops sought to confiscate the Indians' weapons, a shot went off and "carnage ensued".
Morgan records in his Commissioner's Report for October 1st, 1891, that of the troops' casualties 25 were killed [though mostly by their own fire] and 35 wounded; for the Indians those killed included 84 men and boys, 44 women, and 18 children, whilst at least 33 were wounded, many fatally6. It has been said that besides these Indian deaths "A people's dream died there.. for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered" (Black Elk Speaks:1971 p.276); the ghost shirts worn by the Big Foot band had failed to protect them as it was believed they would... the dream was discredited. The Messiah's vision had promised a return to the old ways, that the White Man would be gone from the Indian's land forever...the massacre of the Big Foot band promised and affirmed the contrary; by the end of January the Indians were back at the Indian agencies.
Thus, when Leonard Crow Dog revived the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee in 1973, he revived more than just a dance. At Wounded Knee at this time traditional Indians and members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) protested to the Government at the appalling living conditions on Pine Ridge Reservation. Wounded Knee was chosen for the protest because it symbolized a continuity with the suffering and injustice experienced by those who were massacred there in 1890, and where a 'dream' also died.
The Ghost Dancers had restored and affirmed the Sacred Hoop, the life-way and the solidarity of the Sioux people, whilst also denying the alleged superiority and sovereignty of Euro-American culture. The Sacred Hoop had, however, now taken on an international character, for at Wounded Knee in 1973 Indians of different nations stood side by side against a common foe, namely, Euro-American culture and the U.S. Government itself; the attendance at the Sun Dance also illustrated this international character, whilst the Dance itself, like the Ghost Dance here, became for many Indians a focus for rediscovering and reaffirming their Indianness'. It should, however, be noted that for some Sioux the participation of other tribes in the Sun Dance is a cause for concern (see Beatrice Medicine in DeMallie;Parks:1987 pp.163-164).
The Sun Dance, Yuwipi, Purification ritual (Sweat lodge ), and Vision Quest are still regularly held. In all of these rituals one's kinship with the Earth, with Wakan Tanka, continues to be affirmed. In the modern Yuwipi prayer is still offered to the spirit of the stones, and a spirit stone is still offered to patients or clientele for protection against danger or illness, thus signifying the continued belief in a spiritual force in all forms of Creation. The Sacred Pipe, given by the White Buffalo Woman and handed down through the generations is still a symbol of unity for the Sioux people. The present Pipe Keeper, Arval Looking Horse, says of it, "The Sacred Pipe is the center, all the other pipes are the roots. When people pray with the Pipe, then the spirits come. Sometimes it takes time, but they do come. It is our way. The Sioux people believe in the Sacred Pipe" (DeMallie;Parks:1987 p.73) The Sacred Pipe thus remains the mediator between Wakan Tanka and humankind reinforcing the kinship ties of the Sioux people with all aspects of Creation. This sense of unity and kinship is further reinforced in the Sun Dance as Arthur Amiotte (Oglala Sioux) explains: "... for the one who understands it, there is a profound realization in the dance, a sacred ecstasy, a transformation whereby he realizes the wholeness and unity of all things... Through this the individual transcends all that we know of this life and finally arrives at the real world, the real place" (DeMallie;Parks:1987 p.89).
Ritual teaches the people how to live; it defines one's responsibilities to both the human and non-human communities, and affirms one's kinship with the land itself. These relationships have, however, been seriously damaged by assimilation, Government educational policies, relocation, high unemployment (up to 90% on reservations), the indignity of poverty, domestic violence on reservations, and alcohol and drug abuse; children who were separated from their families often never returned. The re-establishment, then, of the traditional life-way requires no less than the rebuilding of the community from the family upwards, and there is much being done toward this end7.
Symbols DeMallie has referred to the concept of 'Wakan' as the dominant "intangible symbol" of Sioux religion, the core of its belief, and the reader should turn to the section on Belief for a discussion of this important concept. The present section discuses the circle symbolism, the Sacred Calf Pipe, and sacred numbers, so important for understanding the structure of Sioux belief.
The circle was indicative of life itself and was thus held to be sacred (wakan). "Everything", said Black Elk, "tries to be round - the world is round" (DeMallie:1985 p.291). The human body, the tree-trunk, the seasons. time (day, night, moon), a bird's nest - all of these were circles. The Sioux imitated this natural order by configuring the camp in circles, by sitting in circles for ceremonial occasions, and also by constructing circular tepees. Metaphorically, the camp circle was the 'sacred hoop', within which all was "safe, knowable, auspicious" (Powers:1982 p.41). So, the circle symbolizes wholeness and "helps us to remember Wakan Tanka, who, like the circle, has no end" (Black Elk quoted in Brown:1953 p.92).
The Sacred Calf Pipe, brought to the people by the White Buffalo Calf Woman, one of the Wakan Tanka, is the embodiment of all creation, all forms of which are understood to be one's relatives and to which one is bound by smoking the Sacred Pipe; by this act one accepts one's responsibility toward all one's relatives.
Black Elk tells us that the pipe-bowl is made of red stone and symbolizes the Earth, whilst a buffalo carved in the stone represents all the four-legged. The pipe stem, made of wood, symbolizes all growing things, whilst twelve feathers attached to it represents the eagle and all winged creatures. All of these "peoples" "send their voices to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. When you pray with this Pipe, you pray for and with everything" (Black Elk quoted in Brown:1953 pp.6-7). Thus, the Sacred Pipe symbolizes the identity of the Sioux peoples - "this is the Sioux religion" (Arval Looking Horse 'The Sacred Pipe' in DeMallie:1988 p.69). (See also the end of the History section).
Sacred numbers, four and seven. The structure of the Universe and of all those things within it reflect a four-fold division. There are, for example, four divisions of time: day, night, the moon, and the year; four parts to all growing things: the roots, stem, leaves, and fruit; and four stages of human life: babyhood, childhood, adulthood, and old age. "Since the Great Spirit caused everything to be in fours, mankind should do everything possible in fours" (George Sword quoted in Powers:1982 p.48). Hence, ceremonies preferably spanned four days or a period divided into four day sections. Also, the Purification Lodge was constructed, ideally, from sixteen willow branches so arranged as to mark out the four directions. The Sun Dance Lodge was built from twenty-eight poles (4x7) with a central pole symbolizing Wakan Tanka; both of the said structures represented the Universe. The White Buffalo Woman brought to the people seven sacred rites and she stayed with them for four days. The Sioux were also formerly known as the 'Seven Fire Places' (See History section). The numbers four and seven are viewed as sacred by most North American Indians.
Adherents
Tribal population estimates from the 1990 Census for American Indian Tribes and Alaska Native villages, gives the total Sioux population at 103,255. This figure, however, gives no indication of the number of Sioux who adhere to what may be understood as traditional culture. It has been noted that for native Americans generally, following much assimilation, "...large numbers of persons do not strongly identify with their American Indian heritage and do not resemble the socioeconomic profile of most American Indians... There are nearly 6 million such individuals, compared with the 1.4 million persons who better resemble conventional ideas about who is an American Indian", namely, a core group with strong ties to their tribal heritage, who are most likely to speak a native language, and probably live on a reservation (Snipp:1991 p.310). Nevertheless, it is much less clear to what extent this relationship applies to the population of any given tribe, or for our present purposes, the Sioux. This problem is complicated by the question of to what extent can Indian participation in Euro-American society be considered as acculturation. Powers suggests that acculturation studies have, by definition, been biased in favour of showing change and adaptation but not contEskimo-Aleuty (Powers:1982 p.xii).
Speaking of the Oglala Sioux, Powers makes the important observation that using the White man's technology, wearing White man's clothes etc., is no indication of the acceptance of the White man's values. Use of the White man's technology may be necessary for survival, but when the Oglala seeks his identity he does so in a "...religious system whose structure has remained in many respects constant since European contact" (Ibid. p.204). Whilst it is difficult to give a figure for the number adherents of traditional culture, there are certainly many Sioux organizations dedicated to its continuing survival. Many Sioux continue the struggle to hold on to the Black Hills, refusing a $100 million award for the Hills from the Indian Claims Commission (ICC) in 1980. The refusal of this award is a measure of the continuing vitality of and committment to traditional culture (See Beliefs section for a discussion on the sacredness of the Black Hills).
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
Nicholas Black Elk (1863-1950) was an Oglala Sioux medicine man in the transition period from nomadic to reservation life for his people and then, as an interviewee, a source for Native American tribal traditions and Plains Indian spirituality.
Born in December 1863 within a paternal lineage of shamans, or medicine men, Black Elk was nearly 70 years old when John Neihardt, Nebraska's poet laureate, interviewed him and several other Sioux elders in May 1931. This contact, the result of Neihardt's search to find survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre of December 1890, produced the literary classic in American western and Native American writing, Black Elk Speaks, published in 1932. Black Elk became known to the world beyond Pine Ridge Reservation through Neihardt's literary interpretation, which covered the first 27 years of his life.
The actual interviews highlighted prominent features of Plains Indian nomadic life, including accounts of military conflict with the United States government, concluding with the 1890 tragic encounter at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota. As a teenager, Black Elk had also been at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Montana, the last stand of General George Custer in 1876. Ten years later he joined William (Buffalo Bill) Cody's Wild West Show on tour in the United States, Great Britain, and the European continent between 1886 and 1889.
The central event in Black Elk's life, however, occurred when he was nine years old while suffering from a lifethreatening illness. He had then "the great vision" that took him to the spiritual center of the Lakota world where he was presented to the Six Grandfathers that symbolized Wakan Tanka or The Great Mysteriousness expressed in the powers of the four directions and of the earth and sky. In this transforming experience, Black Elk received instructions typical of shamanic initiation. For the rest of his life, the vision possessed determinative power. Especially in his young adult years, he sought to act out parts of it for the sake of preserving the unity and survival of his people. Aided by a wise elder and medicine man named Black Road, Black Elk launched his career as a shamanic healer at Fort Keogh, Montana, in the spring of 1881. Present as witnesses were his relatives, who had returned from Canada where they had been since 1877 following the death of the warrior Crazy Horse, a cousin of Black Elk's father.
The great vision, as told to Neihardt in 1931, became the center of the text of Black Elk Speaks. In remembering it so vividly, Black Elk resurrected its spiritual power, which had not waned despite his sincere conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1904. His depiction stands as a major source in visionary religious literature, attracting the interest in the last half century of symbologists, depth psychologists, and scholars in comparative mythology and prompting pan-Indian revitalization movements of traditional rituals.
Twice married, Black Elk's wife of 1892, Katie War Bonnett, died in 1903. Nicholas, added as a Christian name, lived with his second wife, Anna Brings White, from 1905 until her death in 1941. The father of four sons and a daughter, Black Elk was particularly dependent upon the third and last child by Katie, Benjamin, who provided him a home in his failing years and who also proved enormously helpful to Neihardt's projects. A victim of tuberculosis, Black Elk was treated first in 1912 and as late as the last years of his life. From the fifth decade of his life, he suffered from poor eyesight.
Traveling as a catechist for Roman Catholicism, Black Elk visited the Wind River, Winnebago, and Sisseton reservations between 1908 and 1910. But he kept some traditional practices alive in performing dances for pageants for summer tourists to the Black Hills, first probably in the late 1920s and certainly after 1935. When first hosting Neihardt, he ritualized the occasion of the telling of the great vision and of his deep involvement in the corporate life of his people. The event was so potent that Christian missionaries required Black Elk to disavow any intent to renew the traditional practices of the Sioux. Thirteen years later, he gave Neihardt another interview which became a novel entitled When the Tree Flowered when it was published the year after Black Elk died. After the interview of 1944, no disavowal was required of the octogenarian.
In 1947 Joseph Epes Brown, later a scholar of Native American religion and culture, met Black Elk in Nebraska. Brown spent the next winter with the elderly spiritual teacher in Manderson, South Dakota. Through that contact and their conversations Black Elk provided the details of seven traditional rituals of the Oglala people which Brown published as The Sacred Pipe. They included a purification ceremony (the sweat lodge), crying for a vision, female puberty, marriage, soul-keeping, throwing the ball, and the great medicine of all traditional Plains people, the Sun Dance.
Even though there is no public evidence that Black Elk practiced the healing rituals of a shaman after he converted to Catholicism, all of his adult life, beginning with his first major exposure to the world of "white" America and Europe, was spent creatively blending native and Christian perspectives. As catechist, he retained the role of spiritual leader, focused as always on the welfare and future of his people. Black Elk's bicultural religious orientation went far beyond the impression mediated by Neihardt's first book, which has no mention of his later Catholic roles and which presents an elegy to the last generation of Plains Indian survivors before the dominance of the reservation. With a spirituality infused by hopefulness and imaged as the sacred hoop and the flowering tree - symbols of the corporate reality of his people - Black Elk was continually devoted to trying to find a way for the tribe to live. His own long life, despite bad health and the economic difficulties of existence on the reservation, testified to a strong determination to endure while facing threatening cultural changes. Within a decade of his death the Sun Dance was renewed under his nephew, Frank Fools Crow. Such an action reflected the impact of Black Elk on the reservation where, coming full circle, what he described but no longer performed became a living practice again. Through the books with Neihardt and Brown, Black Elk made the world at large heirs of his spiritual wisdom, ensuring in them that the rituals of empowerment of the Sioux people would not depend on oral tradition. He died on August 19, 1950, at Manderson and was buried from St. Agnes Mission Chapel in a barren cemetery.
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
"The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men."
"Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss."
Black Elk
Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux, 1863-1950 (In Italiano)
"Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking."
"I cured with the power that came through me. Of course, it was not I who cured, it was the power from the Outer World, the visions and the ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-legged."
"If I thought that I was doing it myself, the hole would close up and no power could come through. Then everything I could do would be foolish."
Earth Prayer
"Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice. You lived first, and you are older than all need, older than all prayer. All things belong to you -- the two-legged, the four-legged, the wings of the air,
and all green things that live.
"You have set the powers of the four quarters of the earth to cross each other. You have made me cross the good road and road of difficulties, and where they cross, the place is holy. Day in, day out, forevermore, you are the life of things."
Hey! Lean to hear my feeble voice.
At the center of the sacred hoop
You have said that I should make the tree to bloom.
With tears running, O Great Spirit, my Grandfather,
With running eyes I must say
The tree has never bloomed
Here I stand, and the tree is withered.
Again, I recall the great vision you gave me.
It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives.
Nourish it then
That it may leaf
And bloom
And fill with singing birds!
Hear me, that the people may once again
Find the good road
And the shielding tree.
The Sunset
Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy...
But anywhere is the center of the world.
A long time ago my father told me what his father had told him, that there was once a Lakota holy man, called "Drinks Water", who dreamed what was to be... He dreamed that the four-leggeds were going back to the Earth, and that a strange race would weave a web all around the Lakota’s. He said, "You shall live in square gray houses, in a barren land..." Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking. (1932)
*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*<=-=>>>*
Quotes from Black Elk
A good nation I will make live.
-Black Elk
After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked.
-Black Elk
Also, as I lay there thinking of my vision, I could see it all again and feel the meaning with a part of me like a strange power glowing in my body; but when the part of me that talks would try to make words for the meaning, it would be like fog and get away from me.
-Black Elk
And as he spoke of understanding, I looked up and saw the rainbow leap with flames of many colors over me.
-Black Elk
And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
-Black Elk
And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me.
-Black Elk
And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.
-Black Elk
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.
-Black Elk
But I think I have done right to save the vision in this way, even though I may die sooner because I did it; for I know the meaning of the vision is wise and beautiful and good; and you can see that I am only a pitiful old man after all.
-Black Elk
Grandfather, Great Spirit, once more behold me on earth and lean to hear my feeble voice.
-Black Elk
Grown men can learn from very little children for the hearts of little children are pure. Therefore, the Great Spirit may show to them many things which older people miss.
-Black Elk
I cured with the power that came through me.
-Black Elk
I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it.
-Black Elk
I know now what this meant, that the bison were the gift of a good spirit and were our strength, but we should lose them, and from the same good spirit we must find another strength.
-Black Elk
I looked about me once again, and suddenly the dancing horses without number changed into animals of every kind and into all the fowls that are, and these fled back to the four quarters of the world from whence the horses came, and vanished.
-Black Elk
I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself.
-Black Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.
-Black Elk
I was four years old then, and I think it must have been the next summer that I first heard the voices.
-Black Elk
If you will read again what is written, you will see how it was.
-Black Elk
My friend, I am going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish; and if it were only the story of my life I think I would not tell it; for what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow?
-Black Elk
Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers.
-Black Elk
So I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation's hoop I thrust it in the earth.
-Black Elk
Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking.
-Black Elk
The boys of my people began very young to learn the ways of men, and no one taught us; we just learned by doing what we saw, and we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls.
-Black Elk
The soldiers did go away and their towns were torn down; and in the Moon of Falling Leaves (November), they made a treaty with Red Cloud that said our country would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow.
-Black Elk
There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk
They told me I had been sick twelve days, lying like dead all the while, and that Whirlwind Chaser, who was Standing Bear's uncle and a medicine man, had brought me back to life.
-Black Elk
To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see.
-Black Elk
When I got back to my father and mother and was sitting up there in our tepee, my face was still all puffed and my legs and arms were badly swollen; but I felt good all over and wanted to get right up and run around.
-Black Elk
You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer.
-Black Elk
You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me.
-Black Elk
The Great Spirit is everywhere; he hears whatever is in our minds and our hearts, and it is not necessary to speak to Him in a loud voice.
-Black Elk
"...all the wings of the air shall come to you, and they and the winds and the stars shall be like relatives.
-Black Elk
There can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk
And when I breathed, my breath was lightning.
-Black Elk
(Black Elk speaks of the deceased Crazy Horse.) It does not matter where his body lies; there the grass is growing... but where his Spirit lies, that would be a good place to be.
-Black Elk
It is good to have a reminder of death before us, for it helps us to understand the impermanence of life on this earth, and this understanding may aid us in preparing for our own death. He who is well prepared is he who knows that he is nothing compared with Wakan-Tanka who is everything; then he knows that world which is real.
-Black Elk
I think I have told you, but if I have not, you must have understood, that a man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see.
-Black Elk
I was ten years old that winter, and that was the first time I ever saw a Wasichu (white man). At first I thought they all looked sick, and I was afraid they might just begin to fight us any time, but I got used to them.
-Black Elk
The Sun, the Light of the world. I hear him coming. I see his face as he comes. He makes the beings on earth happy and they rejoice. O, Wakan Tanka, I offer to You this world of Light."
-Black Elk
Birthdays ~Happy Birthday from Warrior Nation!
Birthdays Today
Birthdays Tomorrow
Latest Activity
Blog Posts
In All Directions
Posted by Christopher Stewart on March 28, 2023 at 12:58pm 1 Comment 2 Likes
Blessings To Count
Posted by Christopher Stewart on March 21, 2023 at 12:47pm 0 Comments 1 Like
Compass Towards The Grail
Posted by Christopher Stewart on March 13, 2023 at 2:24pm 0 Comments 1 Like
Word Games & Fun from The Cozy Cabin
For the Warriors who fight and Die...
so the rest of us may fight to Live.
© 2025 Created by LadyHawkღ.
Powered by
