And while I Stood There I Saw More Than I Can Tell and Understood More Than I Saw

“And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.”

 Black Elk (1863-1950)

Black Elk, with his near-blind stare fixed on the ground, seemed to have forgotten us...when the old man looked up to 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...What I know was given to me for men and it is true and it is beautiful. Soon I shall be under the grass and it will be lost. You were sent to save it, and you must come back so that I can teach you.” And I said: “I will come back, Black Elk. When do you want me?” He replied, “In the spring when the grass is so high” (indicating the breadth of a hand).

(“O Raphael, lead us toward those we are waiting for, those who are waiting for us: Raphael, Angel of happy meeting, lead us by the hand toward those we are looking for.”)

  What makes Black Elk Speaks great—and it is great—is exactly the thing that we cannot know well and that we therefore pick at constantly: the combined aesthetic and spiritual relationship between Black Elk and John Neihardt that shows up in the gaps of meaning and the interlocked words and phrases of narrator, translators, and author...

  For me, the lessons of the book continue to gain clarity with the passing of time and with each new edition and each new reading: there is real power built into it, which makes it fundamentally mysterious; there is deep historical complexity built into it, which makes it a puzzle for contemplation; and there is aesthetic beauty built into it, which makes reading Black Elk Speaks a timeless act of pleasure. All these things are gifts, and we should take them as such.

Philip J. Deloria

“It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell, and of us two-leggeds sharing in it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things; for these are children of one mother and their father is one Spirit...But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people’s heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people’s dream that died in bloody snow. But if the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.

I am a Lakota of the Ogalala band. My father’s name was Black Elk, and his father before him bore the name, and the father of his father, so that I am the fourth to bear it. He was a medicine man and so were several of his brothers. Also, he and the great Crazy Horse’s father were cousins, having the same grandfather. My mother’s name was White Cow Sees; her father was called Refuse-to-Go, and her mother, Plenty Eagle Feathers. I can remember my mother’s mother and her father. My father’s father was killed by the Pawnees when I was too little to know, and his mother, Red Eagle Woman, died soon after. I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees (December) on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed (1863), and I was three years old when my father’s right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain. From that wound he limped until the day he died, which was about the time when Big Foot’s band was butchered on Wounded Knee (1890). He is buried here in these hills. I can remember that Winter of the Hundred Slain as a man may remember some bad dream he dreamed when he was little, but I can not tell just how much I heard when I was bigger and how much I understood when I was little. It is like some fearful thing in a fog, for it was a time when everything seemed troubled and afraid...”

Photo Black Elk

Artwork Standing Bear

https://www.amazon.com/Black-Elk-Speaks-John-Neihardt/dp/0803283911