Eagle Voice Remembers: An Authentic Tale of the Old Sioux World by John G. Neihardt (review)

Alongside Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition, the omnibus edition of A Cycle of the West, and the even-handed biography Lonesome Dreamer: The Life of John G. Neihardt, Bison Books now offers a new edition of John Neihardt’s When the Tree Flowered, newly retitled Eagle Voice Remembers: An Authentic Tale of the Old Sioux World. All of these books involve the travels, writings, and encounters of poet-scholar John G. Neihardt, whose career continually reapproached the history of the US West, and eventually the colonial violence of the late nineteenth century, from multiple generic angles.

At the center of all this, of course, is Black Elk Speaks, which was the product of Neihardt’s encounters with Black Elk at the Pine Ridge reservation in 1931. Though that book initially failed to find a substantive readership, Neihardt returned to Pine Ridge in 1944 to conduct further interviews with Black Elk and with another member of the Oglala Lakota, Eagle Elk. These accounts were synthesized into When the Tree Flowered (1951), which appeared with the perhaps more reflective, and I would suggest more accurate, subtitle The Fictional Autobiography of Eagle Voice, a Sioux Indian. The book, which is really neither an “authentic tale” nor exactly an “autobiography” (it has also appeared as a “fictional biography”) but something like an ethnographic novel, synthesizes some of Black Elk’s life narrative together with Eagle Elk’s, alongside expansive representations of Lakota culture, story, and spiritual belief. Unlike Black Elk Speaks, or in lieu of that book’s prefatory material, When the Tree Flowered relies on a frame narrative, with an unnamed Neihardt surrogate recording the life story of Eagle Voice in a series of visits.

In some sense the book reads like a retelling of Black Elk Speaks, modulated from the conventions of tragedy to those of Bildungsroman and romance. Composed in the decades-long period between the initial publication of Black Elk Speaks and its sensational “rediscovery” by the 1970s counterculture, When the Tree Flowered extends beyond the tragic terminus of Wounded Knee, thereby escaping the troubling foreclosure of Indigenous futurity that occurs in the much-quoted final paragraph of Black Elk Speaks. Or perhaps it does not; the massacre still functions as climax to the narrative, with the denouement a particularly rushed, perfunctory-feeling happy ending, one which enacts its own variety of sentimental, and ultimately apolitical, closure.

Yet When the Tree Flowered— or Eagle Voice Remembers— is an often quite beautiful book, featuring some of the finest writing of Neihardt’s career. The text, as Raymond DeMallie has previously noted, is inflected by Neihardt’s evident melancholy at what was, in his estimation, the passing of two cultures into oblivion.¹ But at its best, When the Tree Flowered is animated by the obvious love Neihardt felt for Lakota culture and the sincere affection and reverence he felt for Black Elk. Here is where the political dimension of the book resides: as a flawed but powerful demonstration of the possibility of empathy across an asymmetrical and often violent cultural divide, an empathy that could be the precursor to real solidarity and coalition. (If it sounds like I am becoming sentimental myself, see the muted fury with which Eagle Voice describes white settler incursion and Army aggression.)

This new edition of Eagle Voice Remembers is accompanied by a thoughtful introduction from DeMallie, whose enormous work of scholarship The Sixth Grandfather precipitated the revisionist approach to Black Elk Speaks even as it offered an uncommonly nuanced perspective on the Neihardt / Black Elk encounters. (That book contains the original transcripts of both the 1931 and 1944 interviews.) Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this new edition, though, is the extensive annotation of anthropologist and Native American studies scholar David C. Posthumus. Posthumus references the considerable body of twentieth-century Lakota ethnography, while offering precise orthographic updates to Neihardt’s interpolation...