Black Elk

Black Elk was born in 1863 into the Oglala Lakota, present as a boy near the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 and a survivor, as a young man, of the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. He later toured Europe for a period with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. In 1904 he was baptized into the Catholic Church and worked for decades afterward as a catechist among his own people, a fact that later scholarship, notably Raymond DeMallie's critical edition of the interview transcripts behind the published accounts, treats as a genuine complication rather than a simple conversion story: Black Elk continued to hold Lakota religious authority and knowledge throughout the period of his Catholic service, and how the two commitments related to each other in his own understanding remains debated among scholars rather than settled.

His first extended public account came through the poet John Neihardt, who interviewed him in 1930 and 1931 and published the result as Black Elk Speaks (1932), a book that became, and remains, the most widely read single work associated with Lakota religion, for better and worse: it also reflects Neihardt's own literary choices as much as a direct transcript.

His long life meant he was among the last living witnesses of pre-reservation Lakota religious practice by the time later scholars and interviewers sought him out, a circumstance that gives his testimony particular weight in reconstructing practices that had otherwise gone undocumented by outsiders.

A second and, for documenting Lakota ritual practice specifically, more systematic record came from the ethnographer Joseph Epes Brown, who interviewed Black Elk in 1947 and 1948 and published the results as The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux in 1953. The book sets out seven rites in turn, among them inipi, the sweat lodge, hanbleceya, the vision quest already catalogued in this atlas as a Discipline, and wiwanyang wacipi, the sun dance.

This atlas records the documented existence and general outline of these rites as Black Elk himself described them for publication, not ritual instruction, and the most restricted elements of rites such as the sun dance remain closed to outside description regardless of what any published summary includes. Black Elk's account, given by a named individual with his own religious authority and recorded by name, sits differently from an outsider's field report, which is part of why Brown's book has held the place it has in the study of Lakota religion for seventy years.

Brown's introduction to the book situates his own role as recorder and translator rather than author, a framing later scholarship on Native American religious texts treats as significant: the book presents itself, and is generally read, as Black Elk's own account rather than an outside ethnographer's interpretation of Lakota belief.