Mystical Sacrifice in the Contact Zone: Black Elk Speaks of the Encroachment of the Wasichus 'Little by Little and Step by Step'
This paper will examine Black Elk’s narrative, given in 1831 to Nebraska poet laureate John Neihardt, of the near genocide of the Oglala Sioux and of his great vision in which he is given a mandate to save his people. Because Neihardt was interested in recording for posterity a disappearing culture and religious sensibility, Black Elk’s trauma becomes in his own narrative part of the ambient background of the as-told-to autobiography, a painful terrain wherein lay the true Native American experience. A reading of Black Elk Speaks invested in recovering not only its speaker’s representative status, but also personal cost he paid for expansionist policies and the removal to reservations of the Indians reveals, as Caruth has observed of witnesses to cataclysmic historical events, that “the ability to witness” such events fully may come “at the cost of witnessing oneself.”
Black Elk’s narrative is not only a record of a shaman’s mystical visions, it is a record of the tremendous psychological stress he and his people were under in attempting to resist, and later accommodate to the encroachment of the wasichus—the Euroamericans. His earliest memories are of fear and of an understanding that the wasichus were coming to take the land and destroy his nation. Although Black Elk’s great and lesser visions provided him with a coherent narrative to direct him in the midst of cataclysmic historical events, they also made him responsible for repairing the Lakota universe. According to the mandates of his great vision, he was to use the deadly weed at age 37 to defend his people against their enemies. I hope to illuminate what his decision not to carry out this final aspect of his great vision reveals about the cost he paid for survival in the contact zone.
Click here to return to TOP of Conference Program
Use the browser's BACK button to return to the session you were viewing.
© 2004 ROCKY MOUNTAIN MODERN LANGUAGE
ASSOCIATION