Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

Notes

notes Preface to the 1932 Edition 1.Neihardt uses the expression “inner world” only in this preface. He conceptualized Black Elk’s traditional religious beliefs and practices as an “entire system of knowledge that his vision represented,” knowledge that he kept locked inside himself after accepting the white men’s religion and joining the Catholic Church (The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, 28). 2.The exploration of “higher values” was a central theme of Neihardt’s life. See his Poetic Values: Their Reality and Our Need of Them. 3.For Neihardt’s account of his first meeting with Black Elk, written soon afterward , see Sixth Grandfather, 27–28. 4.See Hilda Neihardt, Black Elk and Flaming Rainbow: Personal Memories of the Lakota Holy Man and John Neihardt, for an intimate reminiscence of Neihardt’s relationship with Black Elk. For the 1931 interviews, see Sixth Grandfather, 101–296. 5.The expression “outer world” occurs only once in the transcript of Neihardt’s conversations with Black Elk: “spirit (outer) world” (Sixth Grandfather, 220). “Outer world” is Neihardt’s gloss; in the transcript, Black Elk uses “spirit world” twice and “other world” nine times. See Neihardt’s discussion of “outer field,” the fundamental dimension beyond time and space, characterized by images, rather than words (Poetic Values, 111). In his poem, “The Ghostly Brother,” based on a childhood dream, Neihardt is beckoned “Through the outer walls of sense” (Collected Poems, 164). 6.Black Elk’s impaired vision, according to oral accounts, resulted from his practice as a medicine man. As a demonstration of his power, he would hide charges of gunpowder in a fire, which allowed him to cause seemingly spontaneous explosions; one time the powder exploded in his face (Sixth Grandfather, 13–14). 7.Neihardt likely did not know that Black Elk was literate in his native language. Not only had he read parts of the Bible in Dakota, but beginning in 1888, when he was traveling with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in England, he wrote letters in Lakota that were published in church newspapers. See Sixth Grandfather, 8–10, 17–21. 8.For the transcript of a talk given by Benjamin Black Elk in 1969, see H. Neihardt and Utrecht, Black Elk Lives, 3–22. Preface to the 1961 Edition 1.During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cutting the hair, together with the change to Euro-American style clothing, was symbolic of Lakota men’s acceptance of the white men’s way of life. When boys attended 300 Notes to pages xxi–2 school their braids were shorn away, their hair was cut short, and they could no longer wear breechcloths and blankets. By the 1930s, only a few men refused to cut their hair. They were called “long hairs,” a term that designated not merely their hairstyle but their orientation to traditional Lakota culture. 2.Wicháša wakhᲠ‘holy man.’ The characterization of Black Elk as a “kind of a preacher” was probably intended to designate his role as a catechist in the Roman Catholic Church, not his identity as a traditional Lakota holy man, but at that time Neihardt would not have understood this. 3.In Sixth Grandfather, 26–27, I hypothesized that the interpreter was Emil Afraid of Hawk. That identification now appears to be an error. The interpreter was apparently Flying Hawk (1852–1931), who was a decade older than Black Elk. For Flying Hawk’s life story, see McCreight, Firewater and Forked Tongues: A Sioux Chief Interprets U.S. History. 4.Neihardt wrote that it had been used by Black Elk for “a long while in the sun dances in which he has officiated as priest” (Sixth Grandfather, 28). The sacred ornament is a circle with triangular notches cut around the circumference. It was made from a rawhide parfleche (that is, a rectangular storage container); the front is painted deep blue, while the back reveals part of the original painted design of the parfleche. A dark mottled eagle wing feather is suspended from the center, together with some shed buffalo hair woven with thread to form a pendant. 5.WakhᲠthá˛ka ‘great holy.’ 6.Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Penn., a boarding school for Indian students founded in 1879. See Prucha, The Great Father, vol. 2, 694–700. Benjamin Black Elk attended the school from 1915–17 (Sixth Grandfather, 23-24). 7.The complete transcript of the shorthand notes...