Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt: A Complete Review

Overview and Historical Context

In the summer of 1930, poet John G. Neihardt drove out to the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota to do research for his epic poem The Song of the Messiah, which concerned the Ghost Dance movement. He expected to gather background material. What happened instead was that he met Nicholas Black Elk, an elderly Oglala Lakota holy man who had been waiting, he said, for someone to come to whom he could tell his story.

The interviews took place over several days in 1930 and 1931. Black Elk spoke in Lakota; his son Ben translated into English; Neihardt's daughter Enid transcribed the conversation. Neihardt then shaped the transcripts into the literary form published in 1932 as Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux.

The book initially sold modestly and went out of print. It was rediscovered in the 1960s, translated into German (where it became a bestseller), and eventually returned to wide American circulation. It is now recognized as one of the most significant books in the literature of Native American experience and one of the most important spiritual testimonies of the twentieth century. Carl Jung, who read the German translation, considered it among the most illuminating accounts of visionary experience he had encountered.

Black Elk himself was born in 1863, two years before the end of the Civil War. He died in 1950, five years after the atomic bomb ended World War II. His life spanned the entire arc of the Lakota nation's destruction and the beginning of a slow, painful recovery. He was nine years old when he received the Great Vision. He was twenty-seven when Wounded Knee occurred. He lived the last sixty years of his life as a man who had been given a sacred mission and had watched every external condition for fulfilling it be taken away.

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The Great Vision

When Black Elk was nine years old, he fell gravely ill. His body lay unconscious for twelve days. During this time, he received the vision that would define his life.

He was carried up through clouds by two men who appeared as lightning bolts. He arrived at a great plain in the sky where twelve horses stood, three groups of three in four directions, white, sorrel, black, and buckskin. He was brought before a council of six grandfathers, ancient beings who represented the powers of the six directions: north, south, east, west, sky, and earth. Each gave him gifts.

The first grandfather gave him a wooden cup filled with living water, a power of healing. The second gave him a healing herb. The third gave him a peace pipe. The fourth gave him a bright red stick that became a great tree when planted, sheltering all peoples beneath its branches. The fifth gave him a sacred bow. The sixth, who was the earth itself in ancient human form, showed him a sacred red road running east to west and a black road running north to south, the road of the spirit and the road of difficulty.

He was shown the Sacred Hoop of his people, strong and flowering. He was shown it being broken. He was given a mission: to restore it. He was shown the tree of life at the center of the hoop, and he understood that if the tree died, the people died with it.

When Black Elk recovered and was able to speak, he did not immediately tell anyone what he had seen. The vision was too large, too strange, too demanding. He carried it in silence for years, aware that he had been given a responsibility he did not know how to fulfill and that the time for fulfilling it might not yet have come.

The Sacred Hoop and Its Breaking

The Sacred Hoop is the central symbol of the book and of Lakota cosmology. The circle is not merely a geometric shape in Lakota thought but a description of how reality is structured. The sun's path is circular. The seasons return to their beginning. The wind circles in its power. Nests are round. Tipi camps were arranged in circles. The proper form of community is circular: no beginning, no end, all positions equally near the center.

Black Elk describes this understanding with quiet precision: "Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle. The sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nests in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours. The sun comes forth and goes down again in a circle. The moon does the same, and both are round."

Against this, he contrasts the square world of the settlers: houses built in squares, fields laid out in squares, towns gridded in straight lines. The square, in Black Elk's vision, is the shape of a world that has lost its connection to the sacred order of nature. The destruction of the Lakota's circular encampments and their forced settlement in square cabins is not merely a practical disruption. It is a cosmological one.

The philosopher and poet Gary Snyder, who was deeply influenced by Black Elk Speaks, later developed a related argument in his essays on wilderness and culture, suggesting that the grid pattern of the American land survey, dividing the continent into square townships and sections for agricultural exploitation, represents a kind of violence against the landscape's natural forms and patterns.

Little Bighorn and the Ghost Dance

Black Elk was thirteen years old at the Battle of Little Bighorn in June 1876, when Lakota and Cheyenne warriors under Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull defeated General Custer's Seventh Cavalry. He was present at the battle. His account is one of the most vivid and unromantic we have: chaotic, terrifying, interspersed with moments of extraordinary courage on both sides.

His portrait of Crazy Horse is remarkable. Black Elk does not present him as a warrior-hero in the Western sense but as a man who moved through battle with a quality of presence that he could only describe as spiritual. Crazy Horse seemed, to those who saw him fight, to be somewhere else while fighting, as if the battle were happening around him rather than to him, and he were choosing his actions from some point of stillness at its center.

The Ghost Dance movement, which reached the Lakota in 1889-1890, offered a different hope. Wovoka, a Paiute holy man from Nevada, taught that if the people danced the Ghost Dance, the ancestors would return, the buffalo (slaughtered nearly to extinction by this point) would return, the earth would be renewed, and the settlers would be removed. Shirts worn while dancing would protect the wearer from bullets.

Black Elk participated in the Ghost Dance. He saw in it something related to his own vision, the renewal of the sacred hoop, the return of the tree of life. But he also perceived something incomplete about it, a grasping quality that his own vision did not have. The Ghost Dance was a desperate hope rather than a grounded knowledge, and its desperation was visible to him even as he danced.

The U.S. Army, alarmed by the Ghost Dance's spread, moved to suppress it. On December 15, 1890, Indian police killed Sitting Bull while attempting to arrest him. Two weeks later, the Seventh Cavalry surrounded a band of Minneconjou Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek.

Wounded Knee

The Wounded Knee Massacre of December 29, 1890, is the emotional and historical center of the book's second half. Approximately 250 to 300 Lakota, men, women, and children, were killed by U.S. Army soldiers when a shot was fired (accounts differ on by whom) during the disarming of Big Foot's band.

Black Elk arrived after the shooting had begun. What he saw he describes without oratory or sentimentality, which makes it more devastating: "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there."

He fought at Wounded Knee. He pulled survivors from the wreckage. He was wounded. And in the aftermath, he understood that the Sacred Hoop, which his vision had charged him with restoring, had been broken in a way that no medicine he possessed could heal. Not yet, perhaps not in his lifetime, perhaps not for generations.

Neihardt's Role and the Authenticity Question

The question of authenticity has followed Black Elk Speaks since its publication. The book is not a verbatim transcript. Neihardt translated, shaped, condensed, and gave literary form to material that came through three stages of mediation: Black Elk spoke in Lakota, his son Ben translated into English, Enid Neihardt transcribed, and John Neihardt shaped the prose.

The original transcripts were published in 2000 as The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, edited by Raymond DeMallie. Comparing them to the published book reveals that Neihardt made significant changes: elevating the prose style, adding poetic rhythms, sometimes consolidating or reordering material. The Neihardt of the transcripts is often asking direct, curious questions; the Neihardt of the published book has largely disappeared, leaving what appears to be a continuous first-person Native American voice.

The Lakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr., whose afterword appears in the Complete Edition, was both an admirer and a critic of the book. He acknowledged its power and its genuine spiritual content while maintaining that readers needed to understand its collaborative nature. He was particularly concerned about New Age appropriations of the book that treated it as a direct, unmediated access to Native American spirituality.

The most honest position is this: the book is a genuine record of Black Elk's vision and testimony, shaped by a poet who brought his own aesthetic and spiritual sensibilities to the material. This does not make it fraudulent. It makes it what it actually is, a collaboration between a Lakota holy man and an American poet, producing something that neither could have produced alone, and that speaks with an authority neither could have commanded separately.

The Spiritual Legacy

The book's influence on American spiritual culture is difficult to overstate. It arrived at a moment when the counterculture of the 1960s was searching for alternatives to Western materialism and found in Black Elk's vision a complete, internally coherent worldview that was ancient, locally rooted, and radically different from anything in the European tradition.

Carl Jung's engagement with the book was genuine and deep. He saw in Black Elk's vision a map of the psyche that paralleled his own concept of the Self, the integrated totality of the personality symbolized as a circle, the mandala. The six grandfathers as the six directions correspond to what Jung called the quaternary structure of the psyche, extended by the addition of the two vertical dimensions (above and below, or spirit and earth).

Joseph Campbell, whose influence on popular spiritual culture through The Power of Myth and The Hero with a Thousand Faces is enormous, cited Black Elk Speaks as a primary example of the shamanic call, the involuntary divine election of the healer and seer. Campbell saw Black Elk's trajectory, from the Great Vision through the historical catastrophe to the final prayer on Harney Peak, as a complete mythological pattern: call, mission, failure, transformation.

The book has also had significant influence within Native American communities. The American Indian Movement (AIM) claimed it as an inspiration. The resurgence of Lakota traditional practices since the 1970s has been partly shaped by the vision it transmits. And the Standing Rock protests of 2016, which mobilized Indigenous and non-Indigenous people around the defense of sacred land and water, drew on the same symbolic vocabulary, the Sacred Hoop, the tree of life, that Black Elk articulated ninety years earlier.

Why This Book Matters

Black Elk Speaks endures because it does something rare: it transmits a living vision of the sacred without abstracting it from the specific suffering, beauty, and physical reality that produced it. Black Elk's cosmology is not a philosophy arrived at in a library. It is a knowledge received in extremity, in illness, in vision, in battle, in massacre, in the long years of dispossession, and tested against the hardest possible circumstances.

For spiritual practitioners, the book offers several gifts. The first is a detailed, vivid account of visionary experience, what it is like to receive a vision of this magnitude, what it demands, and what it means to live with the gap between vision and historical reality. The second is the Sacred Hoop as a spiritual technology: a cosmological framework that places human beings within the natural order rather than above it, requires the circle as the organizing principle of community, and understands all life as related.

The third gift is the example of Black Elk's grief. He does not pretend that his vision was vindicated by events. He does not construct a theology of triumphalism to cover the devastation. He weeps. And from within that weeping, he continues to hold the vision as true. This combination, unflinching honesty about historical reality and unbroken faithfulness to spiritual truth, is something that few spiritual texts achieve.

The connections to other traditions in Thalira's library are genuine. The Hermetic tradition's understanding of the earth as a living, ensouled being, anima mundi, resonates with Black Elk's perception of the earth herself as one of the six grandfathers, an ancient being of wisdom and power rather than an inert material substrate. The contemplative traditions' emphasis on the circle and the center finds its parallel in the Sacred Hoop. And the shamanic traditions explored in other books in this series find in Black Elk a historical figure of the first order: a man whose call was unmistakable, whose training was lifelong, and whose fidelity to his vision was tested by conditions that would break most human beings.