Black Elk Speaks
by John G. Neihardt
A Lakota medicine man's vision, finally written down.
For you if
you want to understand the Lakota world through the eyes of someone who saw it destroyed and tried to preserve what he could in words
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Black Elk was an Oglala Lakota medicine man who witnessed the Battle of Little Bighorn as a boy and the Wounded Knee massacre as a young man. He told his life story to the poet John Neihardt in 1930, with his son translating. The result is the most important document of the Plains Indian world ever set down in English — the Great Vision, the sacred hoop, the destruction of a civilization told by someone who lived inside it. Complicated by the translation and transcription, essential despite that complication.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- North America
- Voice
- Written by a North America author
Same event, different angle
The same history — told by someone who saw it differently.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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