Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition

Appendix 5

appendix 5 A Great Indian Poet In 1931 John G. Neihardt was not only a researcher preparing to write the story of the life and vision of the Oglala Lakota Holy Man Black Elk but was also a respected member of the staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Since 1926 he had been literary editor for the newspaper, providing the bulk of the material for “Of Making Many Books,” a daily column of book reviews and literary essays. Over the years Neihardt had developed a close relationship with his readers, and so it is not surprising that he would want to tell them about this most extraordinary man that he had just met. Neihardt knew, as he acknowledges in his 1972 preface to Black Elk Speaks, that the general public of the early 1930s had “practically no knowledge of Indians.” The prevailing attitude was that Native culture was uncivilized. In fact, the book had “a very modest reception,” and within two years it was forgotten. However, Neihardt thought highly enough of his readers to try to connect them with the wonder he had felt in his interaction with the holy man. Neihardt was not a writer given to overstatement. He often spoke in his columns against hysterical critics who exhausted their vocabularies of superlatives in attempts to out shout each other with praises of the “greatest this or the mostest that” ever written. Neihardt gave praise when he felt it was due, and when he did find genius, he made it clear to his readers. It is remarkable praise indeed, this acknowledgment to his readers that “he had been sitting at the feet of a poet fit to dine with the finest spirits that have sung in his discordant world and are now among the tallest of the dead.” The following was originally published as “A Great Indian Poet” on June 20, 1931. This writer has just returned to the modern world after spending a month in a contemporary antiquity that, in certain cultural respects, may be described as pre-Homeric. In company with his two daughters he has been living with his friends, the Ogalala [sic] Sioux, in lonely country empty of white men where there was little to remind one of our civilization save the usual injustice and the resultant poverty of a conquered people who deserve a better fate. The writer had only casual contacts with the younger generation, who, having little of their own racial culture and less of ours, seem lost some- 240 Appendix 5 where in a shadowy borderland that lies between the white man and the red and that has been crossed far less often by people by our race than is generally supposed. The writer’s host and intimate associates were the old pahuskas, that is to say, the longhaired old-timers who have retained their “pagan” culture with a passionate devotion; men who were in at the death when Fetterman and his 80 troopers died that blizzard day on Piney Creek now more than 60 years ago; men who, as boys of 12 and 14 and 16, slaughtered Reno’s panic-stricken cavalrymen “like fat cows” in the valley of the Little Big Horn, and helped to rub out Custer in the darkness of the hoof-dust and the smoke upon the hill; men who went through the tragic affair at Wounded Knee when their felling women and children were murdered as they fled and where a great dream died in the bloody snow. Well, we killed a bull and had a feast, cooking in the ancient way, and there were enough of us so that when the feast was finished little remained but the hide and the horns and hoofs. (To be quite accurate, later on we ate the hoofs.) And the old men and women danced in full dress and wrinkled old-timers made “killtalks,” remembering their youth before they had become prisoners of war, recounting deeds of prowess in quite the true Homeric manner while the rawhide drums boomed at high points in the story and the old women sent forth the tremolo of admiration. And it happened, so powerful was the spell of it all, that we three danced, too, mere white folks that we were, and we did it in no spirit of derision, but with a happy humility, as was fitting. And that night we danced the rabbit dance under the stars to the booming of the big drum while the young drummers...