In the summer of 1930, the poet John Neihardt took a detour from his intended destination and drove his 1927 Gardner down a remote trail on the desolate and impoverished Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
The Reservation was home to the Oglala Lakota, or the Sioux Indians, as we call them. At the time of the American Revolution on the east coast, the Lakota were the proud and dominant native culture of the Midwest. This is the tribe most associated with John Wayne western movies and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. It is the tribe of bold-feathered headdresses and the buffalo hunt; of Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull; of the peace pipe. This is the tribe that cut down George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh U. S. Cavalry in 1876. It is the tribe that suffered the 1890 Massacre at Wounded Knee, that joined in their own version of the apocalyptic Ghost Dance movement, seeking to restore the American Indians to their greatness against White incursions.
What Neihardt discovered at the end of that trail, almost by accident, was a man who had participated in many of these nineteenth-century events of clash and show between Natives and Whites. A man called Black Elk.1
Black Elk had lived his whole life under the threat of a war of extinction from White expansion. Though he had fought in these wars and toured Europe with Buffalo Bill, Black Elk was not at heart a warrior. He was a traditional Lakota visionary and medicine man—a healer, seer (yuwipi), and sacred clown (heyoka). Black Elk came from a family of healers known as the bear clan—they would act like bears when performing healing ceremonies. Though he served as a battleground medic (an important role for a war people like the Lakota), what he is best known for is his visions.2
His first vision is especially interesting to Mormons, as it so closely resembles Joseph Smith’s. It came when Black Elk was five years old. He ran across a kingbird that said,
“Listen! A voice is calling you!” Then I looked up at the clouds, and two men were coming there, headfirst like arrows slanting down; and as they came, they sang a sacred song and the thunder was like drumming. I will sing it for you. The song and the drumming were like this:
Behold, a sacred voice is calling you;
All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.
Also interesting is Black Elk’s reaction to the vision. “I did not tell this vision to any one. I liked to think about it, but I was afraid to tell it,”—an attitude similar to Joseph’s after his initial tellings were ridiculed.
But that was only his first vision. Black Elk had another vision, at nine years old, of the Six Grandfathers who instructed him on how to save his people. New Testament scholar Norman Perrin compared it to New Testament apocalyptic, and, indeed, it teems with wildly colored animals and holy mountains. The famous Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung used Black Elk’s vision to demonstrate that revelation lay at the heart of all great religions in every culture.3
Black Elk’s vision—in fact, his whole life—was shaped by the inexorable advances of White Manifest Destiny. At first, the American government just wanted to negotiate safe passage for travelers to the west, but when gold was discovered all bets were off. Though the U.S. government initially made offers of peaceful purchase of the Lakota lands, most of the offers were rejected. So, the more extreme elements in the U.S. government engaged in a war of extermination on those Lakota who refused to settle.
One attempt at crippling the Lakota was to kill their prime food source, the buffalo. A U.S. Army colonel told hunters to kill all the buffalo they could find. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” This push led to the slaughter of 75 million buffalo during the second half of the nineteenth century. The great Indian culture of the Midwest was brought to its knees, and the Lakota who survived were relocated to undesirable reservations.
Today we all stand in the shoes of Black Elk, watching as forces that challenge our very existence darken the horizon. There is a Manifest Environmental Destiny at our door. Much as European settlers crept over continental America, sweeping the Native population away, so does calamitous environmental change loom over us. But it will affect not just one population, but all.
Members of Black Elk’s tribe have risen again as healers, seers, and sacred clowns as this new threat approaches.
The Black Rock Reservation, which straddles the state line separating North and South Dakota, is home to Hunkpapa Lakota, Sihasapa Lakota and Yanktonai Dakota. Beginning in 2016, thousands of Indians from hundreds of Indian tribes have been gathering at Black Rock for a protest against the nearly 1,200-mile-long Dakota Access Pipeline meant to transport oil from northwestern North Dakota to Illinois. The tribes say that it threatens their reservations, treaty lands, sacred sites, cultural areas, and water rights. Right now, the fate of the pipeline lies with the United States Army Corps of Engineers and President Trump, a lover of carbon based energy.4
But this protest is about more than a single pipeline. It represents a protest against the serious dangers we face from the overuse of carbon-based energy. If we burn all the fossil fuels at our disposal, global climate change will become the bell that marks a great funeral. We are already entering the greatest extinction of species since the death of the dinosaurs. It is as if our own buffalo are beginning to disappear.
It is instructive to consider how Black Elk tried to save his tribe, even though his actions were sometimes disastrous. For example, he created failed bulletproof shirts hoping to protect the ghost dancers on the battlefield. But he also facilitated new collaborations among tribes, risked his own life as a battlefield healer, developed war strategies, received visions, and—from time to time—simply ran for his life.
After the defeat of his people, Black Elk converted to Christianity and served as a Catholic preacher though, despite pressure to abandon them, he continued to believe and hold to the old Lakota ways.
Black Elk’s genius is something we should all try to cultivate: vision, versatility, and continuous seeking. Even after his cause was lost, he still sought the sacred, still sought to uplift his people. In order to be such a support to our own people, we need to allow our own unique vision to arise. We are all built with brains that can receive visions in times of crisis. We can become prophets that see and hear things others do not. Neihardt’s account of Black Elk’s vision still rings true as we seek to save our society from the new Manifest Environmental Destiny:
“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”
The earth is not a private commodity. Life is more than money. Black Elk’s view of the earth and every culture as sacred is core to our survival. As he said, “. . . Everywhere is the center of the world.”
NOTES
1. See Joe Jackson, Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).
2. After a series of interviews, Neihardt published one of the most influential books on American Indian culture Black Elk Speaks.
3. In fact, Jung’s writings were a large part of what made Black Elk famous.
4. Trump had investments in companies involved in construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. But, according to the Washington Post, he sold his interest in these companies in late 2016 to avoid a conflict of interest.