Black Elk

Heȟáka Sápa, known in English as Black Elk, was an Oglala Lakota wičháša wakȟáŋ (holy man) and later a Roman Catholic catechist whose life ran from the last years of independent Plains existence into the mid-twentieth-century reservation world. He was born in December 1863 along the Little Powder River in country that later became Wyoming, the son of a medicine man also named Black Elk and of White Cow Sees. Through his father’s line he was a second cousin of the Oglala leader Crazy Horse. In boyhood, around the early 1870s, he experienced what he afterward described as a great vision: thunder beings carried him into the clouds, where the Six Grandfathers showed him the sacred hoop of the nation, a flowering tree at its center, and a charge to help restore his people. That vision, known above all through later interviews, became the interpretive center of his public memory, whether read as traditional Lakota revelation, as a narrative shaped in old age, or as both.

As a youth he was present at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. After years of warfare, flight, and confinement he took part in the Ghost Dance movement and was at Wounded Knee in 1890, where he was wounded. In 1886 he joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West exhibition and traveled to Europe, performing before Queen Victoria and audiences in England and on the Continent; separated from the company, he spent further time with another show before returning to the United States in 1889. Reservation life brought poverty, epidemic disease, and intense missionary and government pressure on Lakota custom. In 1892 he married Katie War Bonnet; they had children who were baptized Catholic. After her death in 1903 he married the widow Anna Brings White in 1905. Their household included children from both marriages, among them Benjamin Black Elk, later a well-known interpreter of Lakota culture, and Lucy Looks Twice.

He was baptized Nicholas Black Elk on 6 December 1904 at the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation. For decades thereafter he served as a Catholic catechist, traveling widely among Lakota communities to instruct, prepare converts, and work with Jesuit missionaries, while many continued to regard him as a traditional healer and keeper of sacred knowledge. The relationship between his Lakota ceremonial life and his Catholic practice has been much debated. Testimony associated with his daughter Lucy Looks Twice stresses sincere Catholic devotion in his later years; other relatives and readers have emphasized continuity with Lakota rites. In his own career the two were not treated as simple opposites: he taught the catechism and also remained a figure of traditional spiritual authority.

In 1930 and 1931 the Nebraska poet John G. Neihardt interviewed him, with Black Elk’s son Ben as interpreter. Black Elk Speaks (1932) presented the great vision and the destruction of the buffalo-and-horse world as a tragic American epic and later became a central text of Native American literature and of renewed interest in Lakota spirituality. Interviews with Joseph Epes Brown, published after Black Elk’s death as The Sacred Pipe (1953), set out seven Lakota rites in a more ethnographic religious frame. Scholars continue to weigh Neihardt’s literary shaping, the long catechetical career, and traditional practice against one another rather than treating any single book as an unmediated transcript.

Black Elk died on 19 August 1950 at Manderson on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and was buried in Saint Agnes Catholic Cemetery there. In the early twenty-first century the Catholic Diocese of Rapid City opened a cause for his canonization; he is titled Servant of God. He has not been beatified or canonized, and the Holy See has assigned no universal feast day or official patronage. His historical importance rests on a documented path from the last free Lakota generation through Wild West performance, reservation Catholicism, and the books that carried his vision far beyond the northern Plains.