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Untold numbers of readers of Black Elk Speaks and When the Tree Flowered have wished to understand more fully the relationship between Neihardt and Black Elk and the role that Neihardt played as Black Elk's amanuensis. They have also been curious to learn about Black Elk's life after the Wounded Knee massacre. How was it that a nineteenth-century Lakota mystic could live a full half of the twentieth century on the Pine Ridge Reservation in ..
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Raymond J. Demallie |
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Thus the six grandfathers were the six directions. Black Elk became the sixth grandfather, the spirit of the "below" direction, the earth, the place where mankind lives, the source of human life. By becoming the sixth grandfather through the vision experience, Black Elk was identified as the spirit of all mankind. And the vision foreshadowed his life as a holy nman-as thinker, healer, teacher."
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Raymond J. Demallie |
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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 eves 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. It was a beautiful dream.
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Raymond J. Demallie |
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The author's postscript relating the ceremony on Harney Peak does little to buoy hope. There the old man prayed that the sacred tree might bloom again and the people find their way back to the sacred hoop and the good red road. He cried out, "O make my people live!"-and in reply a low rumble of thunder sounded, and a drizzle of rain fell from a sky that shortly before had been cloudless. Whether this sign was a hopeful one or, more likely, ..
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Raymond J. Demallie |
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Despite such secular acclaim, the book put Black Elk in an awkward position in relation to the Catholic Church. His reputation on the reservation was built as a Catholic catechist, not as a native religious leader. The Jesuit priests at Holy Rosary Mission were shocked and horrified at the suggestion that one of their most valued catechists still harbored beliefs in the old Indian religion. For them to accept Black Elk Speaks at face value ..
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Raymond J. Demallie |
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intended to include the prayer on Harney Peak in the book. Although the old man was embarrassed in front of the priests who had been his confessors and advisors for many years, he never denied the sincerity of his final appeal to the six grandfathers.87
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Raymond J. Demallie |