Black Elk Speaks: And So Does John Neihardt

S A L L Y M c C L U S K E Y Northern Illinois University Black Elk Speaks: and So Does John Neihardt Black Elk Speaks has been many things to many people, and has been studied at various times as anthropology, as sociology, as psychology, and as history. It has been cited as evidence of a re­ ligious revival and used as an ecological handbook. But no one, as far as I know, has written about Black Elk Speaks as literature, and while its protagonist, Black Elk, has become a sort of culture hero and underground prophet, the man who wrote Black Elk’s story, John G. Neihardt, has received surprisingly little credit for the artistry with which the book is written. Neihardt’s very faith­ fulness to Black Elk’s spirit and his skill in expressing that spirit have, ironically, eclipsed the effort he spent in writing the book, and often Neihardt has been ignored by press and scholars as if he were merely the instrument Black Elk used to tell his story, and not the shaping intelligence and lyric voice of the book. Black Elk Speaks is an underground classic fast coming above ground—Pocket Books plans soon to release 200,000 copies—and it is of some significance to American literary history that John Nei­ hardt’s part in the book’s writing be made clear. The book’s recent popularity is probably due to the fact that it seems to speak deeply to the twentieth-century yearning for simpler times and a more co­ herent universe. But it must also be due to the beauty with which that time and that view are presented. This paper was read at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association in October 1971 at Red Cloud, Nebraska. There are difficulties in discussing the book as literature, for it had a peculiar genesis and belongs to no clear-cut genre unless one accepts Robert Sayre’s term “Indian autobiography”: an In­ dian’s life story written down by a white interviewer, editor or trans­ lator. Black Elk Speaks is not really an autobiography, for Black Elk could neither read nor write; indeed, because he could not speak English, he told his story to Neihardt through his son, Ben Black Elk, who acted as interpreter. Neihardt’s daughter Enid took steno­ graphic notes, and Neihardt used the transcript of these notes to 232 Western American Literature write the book. The content is partly biography, partly history, partly anthropology, partly anecdote, but all told through Black Elk. Robert Sayre, who examined parts of Enid Neihardt’s original transcript and compared them to the finished book, concluded that Neihardt was faithful to what he had heard.1 Dee Brown pro­ nounced it the finest book in existence on the American Indian,2 and Oliver La Farge lauded it. Paul Engle wrote that it “seems as close as we can ever get to the authentic mind and life of the plains tribes.”8 But the book’s power is in the persona of Black Elk and in the texture of the prose itself. His story progresses in seemingly artless fashion and at a leisurely pace, but on closer examination we can see that Neihardt, as editor, was careful to catch the details that made Black Elk human. One can pick up any “as told to” auto­ biography recounting the life of some celebrity and encounter liter­ ary personality and prose style flatter than the pages that contain them. But Black Elk emerges fully rounded, and so does the world he lived in. He is a human being, a boy who cries all night when his cousin is killed by whites; a young man who went with Buffalo Bill to England and thought Queen Victoria fat, but nice; and an old man, who forty years after Wounded Knee still wept and prayed, “O make my people live!” He is not a saint, for he recounts quite calmly how he cut off a white man’s finger to get the ring, how he scalped a corpse at Little Big Horn, and laughed as squaws stabbed to death a wounded soldier. His faith, his...