Kindred Spirits: Black Elk and John Neihardt

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This week’s post is a continuation of last week’s post Black Elk and the Way of the Shaman.

Black Elk Speaks was not written by Black Elk himself. It was primarily dictated by Black Elk in Lakota and interpreted into English by his son Ben. Hilda and Enid Neihardt – John Neihardt’s daughters – took notation and John Neihardt listened and asked the occasional question. Black Elk was accompanied by some of his older friends who were able to attest to Black Elk’s stories and provided context and details on events that happened when Black Elk was a young boy. The stories were narrated out in the open in the grasslands of Pine Ridge reservation in May 1931. Afterwards, John Neihardt reviewed his daughters’ notes as well as his recollection, and wrote the book.

Naturally, the question arises to what degree Black Elk Speaks reflects the Lakota shaman’s words and how much is a literary product of Neihardt, who was by the early 1930s a reasonably well-known “man of letters” (poet and author of short stories, novels, and journalist) whose focus was on the history and grandeur of the Great Plains. In fact, when he initially got in contact with Black Elk in August 1930 Neihardt was working on his poem The Song of the Messiah, the final poem in his epic work Cycle of the West (which he laboured over for 29 years). Neihardt was merely wanting to interview a native elder who had first-hand experience with the Ghost Dance phenomenon in 1889-1890 in order to give authenticity to his poem. Neihardt himself never claimed that Black Elk Speaks was a verbatim retelling of Black Elk’s narration; hence the subtitle of the book was “as told through John G. Neihardt.” A close comparison of Black Elk Speaks with Hilda’s notes revealed that text which is not authentically Black Elk’s (that is, which was written entirely by Neihardt) provided either historical context or a description of historical events which would make the book more accessible to the Western reader. Neihardt stated that at times he reworded the text to better capture what he felt was what Black Elk was trying to communicate. This may seem to be presumptuous, or even a case of falsifying a narrative. Scholars in the decades following the publishing of Black Elk Speaks certainly had a field day on the topic of authenticity in this unusual and unique literary work, but close scrutiny has revealed that Neihardt was remarkably faithful to Black Elk in word and especially in spirit.

Even a quick review of John Neihardt’s life history and literary works helps one to feel reassured that Black Elk Speaks was far from being a work of fiction claiming to be non-fiction. In fact, it would seem that Neihardt’s life naturally culminated in his writing of Black Elk Speaks. His standing as an informed recorder – or perhaps even an authority – of the history of the American West was well documented. Neihardt’s literary works both celebrated the spirit and accomplishments of early explorers like Hugh Glass, Jedemiah Smith and Thomas Fitzpatrick, but also acknowledged the tragic cost of this western expansionism on the native peoples of the Great Plains. As a young man, Neihardt worked in Bancroft, Nebraska, as a clerk for an Indian trader, where he met and befriended many Omahas to the point that, as his daughter Hilda said, Omaha members would set up their teepee in their yard and spend many hours talking with John. It has been recorded that on one occasion Chief White Horse stopped a ceremony to introduce Neihardt as a “fine young man who has the heart of an Indian.” Clearly, it would be out of character for a writer who had devoted his career (he was 50 years old when he met Black Elk) to faithfully voicing the peoples of the Midwest and cultivating relationships of trust with its native peoples to suddenly and inexplicably write a bogus autobiography of an old Lakota man.

John Neihardt was also a “son of the soil” so to speak. Born in Illinois, he spent much of his early childhood in rural Kansas living in a sod hut in the Great Plains. Throughout his life, John resisted the lure of the big cities of the east coast (New York City in particular), preferring the wide-open spaces and the peace and quiet of the Great Plains. He was a religious man but often wrote that he felt closest to God when he was out in nature rather than in a church.

Simply based on a review of his life, it is clear that John Neihardt was an honest and faithful recorder of Black Elk’s experiences and stories. But it goes further than that. Much further.

The mystical bond between these two men was evident right from the beginning. During their first encounter, Black Elk told Neihardt that he was aware of a spirit standing behind Neihardt that had forced the poet to come to Black Elk and “learn a little” from him. In his preface to the 1961 edition of the book, John Neihardt writes about his first meeting with Black Elk:

Black Elk, with his near-blind stare fixed on the ground, seemed to have forgotten us. I was about to break the silence by way of getting something started, when the old man looked up at Flying Hawk, the interpreter, and said (speaking Sioux, for he knew no English): “As I sit here, I can feel in this man beside me a strong desire to know the things of the Other World. He has been sent to learn what I know, and I will teach him.”

Even more extraordinarily, during the first meeting of these two men, Black Elk gifted Neihardt with a star-shaped necklace which Black Elk had inherited from his father (who was also a holy man): not the kind of present which would be given away casually. As John, his son Sigurd and the Lakota interpreter Flying Hawk drove off following the meeting, they all mused on how it seemed that Black Elk had expected their visit, as he had been standing outside his cabin looking in their direction before they drove up. It would have been impossible for Black Elk to have received word about people coming in a car to visit him. “He’s a funny old man,” Flying Hawk commented.

For Black Elk, as per First Nations tradition, the visions in which one obtains powers or medicine teachings are not to be treated lightly and are not communicated to all and sundry. In fact, Black Elk had not spoken of his visions to anyone for more than a quarter century, not even his immediate family, as he had given up his healing practices and traditional ceremonies by the turn of the century, been baptized in 1904 and became an active member of the Catholic Church.

Before communicating his visions to Neihardt, however, Black Elk felt that it was necessary to formalize the relationship between them. So, a public feast was held in which Black Elk adopted John Neihardt as a son and gave him the name Flaming Rainbow (which was such an important image in his Great Vision: it was through a door of multicoloured flames that Black Elk had to pass through in order to gain the knowledge and gifts of the Six Grandfathers). John respected this special relationship by stating in the book’s subtitle, “as told through John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow)” and “by Nicholas Black Elk”.

Both men shared a belief in the power and importance of visions/dreams. After Black Elk told Neihardt the Great Vision that he had received at the age of nine years, John Neihardt told Black Elk about a dream that he had seen at the age of eleven years, while ill with fever. Three times during the same night, Neihardt felt himself hurtling through a vast emptiness at tremendous speed, with his arms stretched forward and a great voice propelling him on. When he recovered from this illness, John felt it to be his mission to become a poet and that the “something” that propelled him both drove and aided him in his writing. The dream was potent enough that twenty years later, Neihardt transformed it into a poem entitled “The Ghostly Brother” in which the speaker realizes:

Though I seek to fly from you,
Like a shadow, you pursue.
Do I conquer? You are there,
Claiming half the victor’s share.
When the night-shades fray and lift,
‘Tis your veiled face lights the rift.
In the sighing of the rain,
Your voice goads me like pain.

Black Elk called Neihardt’s dream a “power vision” and said, “I think this was an Indian brother from the happy hunting grounds who is your guide.” Further, Black Elk had been long burdened with a sadness of wanting to communicate his visions to the world but had never found the means to do so; hoping that Neihardt would be the vehicle, Black Elk said to Neihardt, “It seems that your ghostly brother has sent you here to do this for me.”

Black Elk may have communicated his visions, but it was necessary for Neihardt to translate mystery into language, which is no small feat under the best of circumstances. But Neihardt believed that this was the unique responsibility of an artist. In his view, the artist has an expanded consciousness and is able to peer into a world that most people are not aware of. It is the artist who can bridge the gap between the ordinary states of consciousness and the outer boundaries of consciousness. Art, in its highest expressions, captures and shares a brief glimpse into the mystery.

John Neihardt’s daughter Enid kept a detailed diary of the events and conversations that occurred throughout their three-week stay with Black Elk in 1931. These were made public through the publication of The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt, by Raymond DeMallie. In it, Enid describes the situation when her father told Black Elk about how he had written The Song of Hugh Glass, which describes in great detail Glass’s 100-mile crawl through the wilderness after being attacked by a grizzly bear, based on his imagination because he had been unable to visit the route while composing it. When he was finally able to go to visit parts of Glass’s route, John was bracing himself for the inevitable discrepancies between his imagination and real life – but was astounded to see that his poetic vision and on-the-ground reality tallied to an uncanny degree. But Black Elk was not at all surprised and said to Neihardt, “As you sit there, in your mind there is a kind of power that has been sent you by the spirits; and while you are doing this work in describing this land, probably there is a kind of power that did the work for you, although you think you are doing it yourself.”
In a letter to his friend Julius House on June 3, 1931, Neihardt described the amazing sympathy of understanding between himself and Black Elk:
A strange thing happened often while I was talking with Black Elk. Over and over he seemed to be quoting from my poems, and sometimes I quoted some of my stuff to him, which when translated into Sioux could not retain much of their literary character, but the old man immediately recognized the ideas as his own. There was often an uncanny merging of consciousness between the old fellow and myself and he seemed to have remembered it.

In another June 1931 letter – this time to his publisher William Morrow – Neihardt explains his understanding of the extraordinary relationship between himself and Black Elk:
At various times Black Elk became melancholy over the thought that at last he had given away his great vision, and once he said to me, “now I have given you my vision that I have never given to anyone before and with it I have given you my power. I have no power now, but you can take it and perhaps with it you can make the tree bloom again, at least for my people and yours.”

In her book Black Elk and Flaming Rainbow, Hilda Neihardt describes the mystical connection among all those who participated in the weeks-long project of recording Black Elk’s words, especially after their experience at Harney Peak. After the evening meal shared among the Neihardts and Black Elks, they were all “enveloped in the feeling that we had been in the presence of something very large, very mystical, very meaningful” and that “that feeling was to remain with us and to grow in power.”

So complete was the harmony of souls between these two men that Black Elk Speaks impacts many readers viscerally, with Neihardt’s voice blending so well with Black Elk that it seems that only the latter is speaking. It is not just a testament to superb writing style; it is a testament to a shared vision of the world despite the two “visionaries” having very different backgrounds.

Looking at the bigger picture, it has occurred to me that it is not uncommon for a person who has had holy visions to rely on somebody else to serve as their voice. Moses had his experiences with the Divine, but it was his brother Aaron who communicated these experiences and teachings to the assembled tribes of Israel. A similar story is told by the Iroquois (also called Haudenosaunee) of the Great Lakes regarding the “heavenly messenger” Deganawidah who had Hiawatha as his spokesman regarding his visions of the Tree of Peace and the Confederacy of Five Nations (one of the world's first participatory democracies). In India, the holy mystic Ramakrishna spoke a great deal but had limited reach (mostly in and around Calcutta, Bengal); it was his disciple Vivekananda who travelled the world and bowled over audiences with his speeches on Ramakrishna’s teachings in English. The situation of Black Elk and John Neihardt seems to fit a similar pattern, but with a twist: although their cultures and languages were divergent, both shared a deep inner resonance that transcended language, culture and religion. Such a bond is extraordinarily rare and through it a rare gem of mystical literature was created.