Introduction

Black Elk, Indians, and the Problem of Time

The Savage Within: Noble, Barbarian, or Civil?

Flaming Rainbow's "Wakinyan"

Black Elk's "Wakinyan"

Black Elk Becomes Nick

A Spirit Vision Written in Ink

Conclusion

Bibliography

It was in August, 1930, when John Neihardt, a "Wasichu" (white man), went in search of what he would later perceive to be a fateful meeting with a Lakota holy man. Neihardt expected to find a man to interview who had participated in the Ghost Dance. He found one--and more. An epic poet and storyteller, Neihardt was working to finish the epic poem The Song of the Messiah. It would be the completion of five "songs" in his greatest poem, the magnum opus, A Cycle of the West. This last song would tell the story of the Ghost Dance, ending the great poem with the massacre at Wounded Knee in the winter of 1890. This scene would symbolize the tragic and ironic consummation of the white man's conquest of the New World. Neihardt believed that Western expansion and the Indian wars formed a national story of epic proportion. He set out to capture this story of "Manifest Destiny" in the manner that Homer and Virgil remembered their histories. In describing the westward movement of the white peoples, he wrote:

The period with which the Cycle deals was one of discovery, exploration and settlement--a genuine period, differing in no essential from the other great epic periods that marked the advance of the Indo-European peoples out of Asia and across Europe. It was a time of intense individualism, a time when an old culture was being overcome by that of a powerful people driven by the ancient needs and greeds. For this reason only, the word 'epic' has been used in connection with the Cycle; it is properly descriptive of the mood and meaning of the time and of the material with which I have worked. But the encounter with Nicholas Black Elk temporarily put his epic work on hold.

The sun shone bright when Neihardt and his son, Sigurd, arrived at the red-brick agency office on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A group of old Indian men watched the small, middle-aged man and his tall son get out of a dusty car with Missouri license plates and enter the station. Neihardt greeted agent Courtwright, and, after polite conversation, asked if he knew of anyone on the reservation who had participated in the "Ghost Dance craze." The agent could not think of anyone, but he questioned the old Indians gathered there. They spoke together in Lakota for a few moments when one of the Indians who spoke English rose and told him about an old man who lived in the hills west of Manderson. His name was Black Elk, "a kind of preacher," and he had been involved not only on the Ghost Dance but also the massacre at Wounded Knee. Neihardt asked if someone would take him out there. One of them, Flying Hawk (or Emil Afraid of Hawk), agreed to guide him to the old one's house and interpret for him since the old preacher did not speak English. The three of them left Pine Ridge for Manderson immediately.

Flying Hawk said he did not think the old man would talk. Just the week before he had refused to talk to a white woman who was writing an article on Crazy Horse. The famous chief was the old man's second cousin. Neihardt responded that he had known Indians for many years, and they had always talked to him. The old men [the long hairs on ponies], who followed the car up the narrow, dust-filled, dead-end road, would see a meeting that day that would come to be considered sacred. It would be the meeting of yesterday, today, and the future, the meeting of tragedy and comedy, the binding of two sticks.

The meeting between Neihardt and Black Elk is important, not only for the literary products that emerged from their joint efforts, but also for the insight into the character of the Lakota holy man and the Native American character in general that this story provides. The Black Elk who graces Neihardt’s pages is a simple man of faith and tradition, the romantic tragic noble savage who dominates fully half of the American imagination. But lurking beneith Neihardt’s poetic facade was another Black Elk, a man of complex substance and vision. He is more than a tragic figure; he is also a comic archetype, a man of hope and cross-cultural understanding. This other Black Elk, who emerges only with careful critical reading and background research into the cultural foundations of Lakota life and experience, stands as a powerful critique of efforts, whether undertaken by self-styled "friends of the Indian" like Neihardt or more damning critics of Indian savagry, to cast native people in a single preconceived mold. Despite Neihardt’s romantic predilections, the Black Elk who emerges from careful study of the poet’s words and acts can provide a picture of a sort of "Indianness" that has eluded historians, ethnologists, and others who have sought to tell the Native American story.

This study will focus on the various efforts by scholars to capture the concept of "Indianness" and the shortcomings modern critics have revealed in these efforts. Then, by employing Kenneth Burke’s models of rhetorical critique to Black Elk’s words and actions, it will show how this remarkable man may personify a new and more convincing sort of Indian, the recognition of whom may allow historians to rise to the challenge posed by even the most pessimistic of today’s commentators.

The chapters that follow will analyze historical and ethnological literature with an eye to placing the problem of "Indianness" into a clear context. The arguments raised by modern critics like Martin will then be used to illustrate the problems inherent in traditional approaches and to sketch the specific limitations which seem to constrain continuing scholarship concerning Native American history. Finally, Black Elk’s story, as revealed in Neihardt’s writings and in a number of lesser-known sources, will be presented as an alternative to the prevailing stereotypical characterization of Indians, suggesting a possible solution to the apparent impasse that Robert F. Berkhofer and others have noted as the main source for stagnation and inertia in Indian scholarship. Along the way, the study will suggest alternative approaches for historians which may help them better to recognize the historical world that was and is Native America.

Before launching into a description of the literature and its perspectives and scapegoats, it is imperative that the terms "traditional" and "progressive" be examined more closely along with their relationship to time. These terms are loaded with value, and although they are necessary to any discussion of American Indians, their limitations must be pointed out. First, the term "traditional" is anachronistic when applied to Lakota religion prior to the Christian and reservation period. "Traditional" religion can only exist when it is being challenged by another religious system. Therefore, to label Lakota religion before the onslaught of reservation Christianity as "traditional" is to project onto it a struggle with Christianity. This of course was not always the case. For example, Columbian Plateau Indians incorporated Christianity into their world prior to the missionary period in a syncretic religious movement known as the "Prophet Dance." Similarily, Black Elk, before his conversion to Catholicism, found no problem incorporating Christianity into his spiritual vision. His role in the Ghost Dance and his Messiah vision are evidence of this syncretism.

Beyond this, "traditional" presupposes some state of being that existed in a time before something else. When is this division in time? When did "traditional" exist? Was it before the advent of Catholicism: before the reservation system, before any kind of Christian influence, before any contact with the white culture, before contact with white diseases? The problem is evident; religion and culture are never static. The Boasian-descriptive-anthropological view of native religion does not describe the process of history. It can only capture a particular moment in time and describe that. Indian religious experience is far too fluid, far too event oriented. This is the weakness of observational science when applied to history. History is, if nothing else, a process, a continuum, something moving. To date, ethnohistory has been the answer to this problem, but ethnohistory does not adequately deal with the problem of time, at least not mythic time. According to Calvin Martin, mythic time is central to any discussion having to do with native religion.

Martin asserts that Native American culture and Euro-American culture are, "mutually irreconcilable, mutually antagonistic, and mutually unintelligible." Thus, works written by non-Indians about Indian history, even using the methods of ethnohistory, are biased by the authors' particular world view, which in most cases is the anthropocentric western paradigm of history. This western paradigm was also at the root of the church and government's reservation plan of reform. Just as the priests and bureaucratic reformers of the reservation system believed that society was on a progressive-evolutionary path, so also does the whole western paradigm of history. Martin says that this western paradigm "colonizes the Indian mind," and the historian or anthropologist is guilty of "ideological colonization." Just as the Bureau agent, missionary, and priest colonized the Indian, the historian and anthropologist does so also in their writings. A western point of view is projected on to them.

The western paradigm of history is, first of all, anthropocentric. It is a world view embodied in the rhetorical constructs built from Aristotle, St. Augustine, John Calvin, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Marx, and so on to its manifestation in the current scholarship of historians like Francis Jennings, William Cronon, and anthropologist Eric Wolf. Martin accuses these men, and others, of giving the Indian the "business outlook," interpreting Indian-white relationships in economic terms. In The American Indian and the Problem of History, Martin essentially says that the western mind is incapable of writing Indian history at all. The book is a series of essays which Martin asked prominent writers of Indian history to write in response to the topic: "The Metaphysics of Writing Indian History," which is also the title of the essay he submitted for the book and circulated among the scholars he asked to write essays.

The Indian lives by listening to "the strains of an older, more ancient muse. . . An older voice, an older song," says Martin. Western historians are analogized as "confidence men" performing a "card trick" of shoehorning the Indian "into the dominant culture's paradigm of reason and logic." The problem of history is that we do not, and from our ivory towers cannot, fully appreciate or understand Indian culture. There are some problems with Martin's approach that are immediately apparent, but they can be dealt with and his viewpoint is provocative.

One of the biggest criticisms of Martin's thesis is his monolithic approach to "Indian" culture, as if it is static, holistic, impermeable, somehow sealed off from interaction. Thomas Biolsi writes that "Martin's proposals for historiography will obscure rather than contribute to our understanding of Native American cultures and societies and the history of Indian-white relations." Biolsi insists that Indian cultures are the products of interaction, that they are dynamic, ever changing. They cannot be viewed as somehow separate from white culture, currently or historically. This is one of the central issues when talking about Nicholas Black Elk. Both he and the religious experience surrounding his visions were the product of interaction. Biolsi is correct in asserting that a stereotypical approach to Indian people in particular is problematic. But Martin is not talking about a particular people or person but some area of commonality in world view. If there is some sort of foundational world view in the western tradition that we have inherited from our fathers, then there is also some inherited foundation to a Native American world view. This fundamental way of thinking, this way of perceiving reality, is what Martin is claiming to be "mutually unintelligible" and "irreconcilable." Whether they are "unintelligible," "antagonistic," and "irreconcilable" or not is still in question, but that native worldview and western perception are fundamentally different and that this difference has serious effects on the interaction is not in question.

Father Francis Paul Prucha, the eminant Jesuit priest and Native American scholar, also worries about the apparent divisiveness of Martin's statements. He writes: "I worry that his heavy emphasis on the differences that divide Indians and whites might actually obstruct an understanding of the relations between the two races in historic times and especially in our own age, when cooperation and joint action between Indians and whites are of such great importance." Father Prucha is right to be concerned about our ability to cooperate with one another, but in order to do so, we need to understand each other's perspective. Understanding that we are different is the first step in the direction of trying to view reality from a different perspective than our own. In this respect Martin has begun to delineate the boundary that we must try to step across. Without Martin's "heavy emphasis" something worse might continue--another century of hearing each other's sound but not listening to one another. There is something to be said for the awakening quality of polemic argument. Hopefully, Martin's criticisms will cause scholars to take another look and listen in a new way to the changing nature of Indian/white cultures and their responses to one another.

The "older voice," the "older song" Martin is speaking of is the mythic voice. For Martin, this is not a primitive voice but a forgotten voice, a voice lost in the western paradigm. His answer is that the exotic items and ideas that came to the Indian from the white world were "folded within the mythic system;" that is to say that they became part of the myth. And myth is not bound by time; it is always present with us. Father Prucha’s rather pragmatic approach in his work does not lend itself easily to mythical considerations. Martin’s complaint is that the western paradigm is the problem. Even a priest, one who is comfortable and familiar with spiritual substance, is bound by the paradigm. Mythic time is very present in the thinking of many native people today. In a recent class of freshmen and sophomores, the task of writing a book review on Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog, the story of a young Lakota woman's involvement in the American Indian Movement during the early 1970s, there was one overwhelmingly common response. The majority of the papers included some form of criticism that the story was a little hard to follow. The scenes were "out of time" and "out of sequence." "It was difficult to always know whether you were with Mary in the 1970s or with her ancestors in the past somewhere." Western concepts of progress and its linear, historical consciousness are still somewhat foreign to numerous Native American societies. Indian culture still approaches time differently than western culture, even after centuries of ideological colonization. For Martin, the primary difference between Indian views of time and western-culture views is the difference between what he labels as "anthropological time" vs. "biological time." He describes anthropological time as being unable to embrace the true conceptual frame of the mythic, and mythic reality is central to the Indian's world. This is fundamental to all Indian cultures, the myth is alive, it is present with us. Martin tries to describe this presence reality as biological time, an event-oriented mind set. The telling of the mythic story involves the presence of the actors in the story; the mythic is as biological to the Indian as he is himself.

Western perception is in many ways the "antithesis of the traditional mythic reality perceived by the Amerindian." Martin is reminded of the melancholy Columbia River Indian, Chief Broom, in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, a self imposed deaf-mute in an insane asylum ruled over and defined by "Big Nurse." "Historians might entertain the proposition that the world we have generated and defined for the Indian at large is also a kind of insane asylum in which he is more or less spiritually impotent, frustrating his efforts to communicate with either the mythic world or our Western world." In this respect, Martin is much closer to the reality of Indianness than his critics. The Indian has a communication crisis, an identity crisis. The history of the American Indian translates into the people of myth trying to comprehend the people of history while the people of history shoehorn the mythic into their Aristotelian, Judeo-Christian hybrid concept of rationality.

In the concluding essay of The American Indian and the Problem of History, Martin reveals the direction his historiography will take him in his next book, In the Spirit of the Earth. This closing essay is entitled, "Epilogue: Time and the American Indian." Calling on Mircea Eliade and Loren Eiseley, Calvin Martin asserts that if we are to "succeed as a species,. . .we, in the West, must discard our anthropologically blinded view of the world." The people of myth and the people of history have two entirely distinct orientations of time. The historical is linear and progressive, while the mythic is cyclical, possessing the ability to bring the participant back to the tremendous events that occur at the beginning of time. To experience the mythic events of creation, to participate through ritual the "all important acts of life" revealed by gods and heroes in the archetypes of myth, is to be renewed, given direction, to be, if you will, redeemed. These mythic-redemptive acts make sense out of human activity and behavior. "The aim is thus to arrange one's life so that these sacred acts, these archetypes, can be experienced (conjured up) as frequently as possible," is Martin's claim. He is calling progress back to myth.

Ethnohistory, as revealing as it has been in helping to understand the Indian, is still encased in the anthropological time of Western progressive history. History for Native people is sacred. The mythic narrative is the voice of history, the voice of recollection, the voice of identity. Eliade wrote that people recreate themselves "through the paradox of rite." As a kind of intercessor, the American Indian views himself as a cosmic connection between human, animal, earth, and heavens, a kind of "glue holding it all together," transcending time and restoring the creation order, the original relationship. This description of reality will go a long way in helping to explain Nicholas Black Elk's actions in relationship with John Neihardt. What is disconcerting about Martin is not that he helps us to understand someone like Black Elk a little better, it is that he is telling us, we scholars, that "This, is our true and best roles as historians." Martin would apparently have us assume this role of myth keeper. This is the historiography that Martin attempts to employ in his next book.

In the Spirit of the Earth begins with the assertion that the entire concept of Western history is fundamentally flawed. History is an illusionary view of reality, separating humans from nature. When separated from nature, it is impossible to embrace a native view. Not only is an understanding of nativeness impossible, so also is any understanding of "truth" itself. The linear consciousness of Western historical thinking must be abandoned, and an earth centered rhetoric, based in an environment/animal/human, mythical relationship must replace it. This we must do if we are to survive at all. Ironically, he begins his argument in complete agreement with the Biblical precedent that "Words" are the creative substance of all reality. The idea that symbols create reality is basic to both Judeo-Christian and Native American metaphysics. Martin believes that the illusion created in our human consciousness of reality is the product of our word pictures, our language. This of course is nothing new, and a multitude of philosophers, historians, and theologians would agree. The Kiowa novelist N. Scott Momaday wrote, "A word has power in and of itself..." a word "comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things...And the word is sacred." Martin tentatively agrees. He writes: "Words, says Scott Momaday, are names. Yes, possibly. I like to think of them more as forces that mold the space around me, into which I then pour my sense of reality and my energies,..." This "idea is aboriginal," Momaday says. But this idea is not only aboriginal, it is also Judeo-Christian. Here is a place where Martin's argument and Judeo-Christianity might find common ground; "In the beginning was the Word," wrote the Apostle John. This idea is also exactly what Kenneth Burke is talking about when he says symbols are "consubstantial" with reality. Symbols are more than the representation of substance. They are "consubstantial" with the substance, or "of the same substance." In other words, Burke assrerts that, words, analogies, metaphors, all symbols, are equal to the substance they portray. Momaday, Martin and Burke are all embracing this rhetorical concept. Martin points to the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer as a model for proper thought. Martin believes that hunter-gatherers possess the rhetorical direction humankind must travel, and walking this road will break "history's hammerlock on our imagination."

The hunter-gatherer societies of the North American continent, which Europeans encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to a lesser extent, those that remain in the Arctic regions of Alaska and Canada today, are used as referents by Martin to gain an understanding of the Paleolithic mind set. He asserts that they represent the hunter-gatherer world view of the Paleolithic. In this frame of reference, nature and human are one; they are kin. There is no animosity between the two; nature is willing to care for human. The essence of the Paleolithic mindset is "nature conserves me, not I it--this is the underlying ethic." Humankind's problem began with the rhetorical shift from this ethic. The fear of nature crept into the Paleolithic psyche. As the idea that nature would no longer care for humans grew, they began the process of trying to control nature. This move, from faith in nature to fear of nature, is the conceptual birth of the Neolithic. Modern man is the product of this change of mind which occurred some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago, a period that covers only about one tenth of "homo's" existence.

Neolithic human is an agrarian human. Mankind created a god to justify subduing and having dominion over the earth. Farming was at first occasional. The switch from hunter-gatherer to farmer was gradual as the fear of lack grew. Within the span of a few thousand years, across the entire planet, the fear grew and the shift to agrarian, larger populations, division of labor, and urbanization took control. Martin uses the eastern woodland bands of North America just prior to Euro-contact as an example of this dynamic which preceded the gathering of food into barns. The inventions of the early Neolithic are: the creation of sky gods as opposed to the human animal relationships of the hunter-gatherer, the invention of linear history rather than cyclical history, and the loss of dialog between humans and animals. This is also, according to Martin, the beginnings of monotheism. He believes that the directive in the book of Genisis, "Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," to be the most destructive utterance of the Neolithic mind. The words of Jesus Christ, "I am the way, the truth, and the life," also displaced truth from nature. It is humankind's self deception to place truth in the sky with a messiah, awaiting his future return, when truth is here resident in the earth. Beginning with the Neolithic, history has become the story of progress and development whose mission was justified by the gods it invented. Martin writes, "Who, then, is this Jehovah? In my opinion, a frank and virulently potent icon of a newly emergent historical consciousness..."

What Martin is describing here may well be true. But if we look at this transition from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic, not from the perspective of a Judeo-Christian progress paradigm, but a mythic viewpoint, one finds a different story. If the story (myth?) in the book of Genisis is approached from the mythic perspective, from a symbolic and metaphorical view, we have thus: The Sky-God comes to earth. Together the "elohyim" (a Hebrew word for god, goddess, or angel, but plural--so "gods") make Adam in "their" own image. Genisis 1:27 reads, then, in this manner: "So Elohyim (Gods) created man (Adam) in his (their) own image, in the image of God(s) created he him; male and female created he them (them at this time is Adam; Eve is in him about to be taken out). Adam, the earth-god (having been given the earth by his/her creator the plural Sky-God) walks in harmony and peace (in the cool of the day) with the Sky-God who gave it to him. Adam is also at peace with the animals and can talk with them as he or they please; he searches among them for a help-mate, a friend, one to walk along side him and one is not found (as yet, her; female is still in him/her-Adam).

This is a very different story than the Protestant Sunday school version, but it is what the Hebrew text says. Adam and Eve are gatherers in a garden, mother earth cares for them (from whose bosom they came). Then a separation comes to them through an animal and their disobedience. Ashamed they cover their guilt with flimsy fig leaves. When they are confronted about their fear and nakedness they point to another as the scapegoat. "The woman you gave me. . ." blames Adam. "The serpent . . " Eve says, as she points her finger at the animal. Now they are separated from the Sky-God's peace, they must toil in the earth and become growers, until the Sky-God's promise of redemption comes (in the fullness of time or a progression begins). So, as Adam points his fingers at his wife, and Eve at the animal, and they transfer their blame, the Sky-God kills an animal and covers their nakedness with the animal's skin. Now, it is evident here that a mythic view of this story tells us much the same story Calvin Martin has told in his analysis of the transformation from Paleolithic to Neolithic time. The story changes the view of time, from an eternal (non-linear) perspective in the garden, to a progressive (linear) perspective wrestling with the earth until the fullness of time. Myth gives an interesting, if not enlightening, perspective to this ancient biblical story. The mythic and symbolic story tells us deep truths about humanness and our relationship to sky and earth that could not be seen if we, as Darrow and Bryan did, argue about the rationality of the story.

There is a strong criticism brought against Martin's views of the wrongness of the Neolithic and the rightness of the Paleolithic from Gerard Reed. But Reed did not look at this monumental transition in human history and thought from the mythic perspective as we have just done. Reed asserts that Martin is projecting his bias into the story through reminiscing about his father's attempts to "hack out a kind of heavenly geography" from a portion of woodland along the Ottawa river. The portion of In the Spirit of the Earth where Martin uses his childhood experience as an analogy of this progressive ideal caused Reed to remark, "Martin's spiritual odyssey seems anchored in a deep conflict with his father." On the surface this bias seems abundantly evident throughout the whole discourse. Martin claims his father wanted to "Make the place look Protestant." This, for Martin, is representative of Neolithic man's bent toward progress and his father was also a victim of the western paradigm. Reed sees this as a deep-seated resentment in Martin toward his father. Whether this is true or not, Martin's analogy seems a good one. An anger with Christianity and his father, if it does exist as Reed supposes, does not detract from Martin's argument about the dangers and foolishness of progress as an ideology. This same concept of the foolishness of progress has been dealt with very effectively by Jacques Ellul in The Technological Society and more recently in The Technological Bluff. Yet, Ellul is an eminent Christian theologian and he takes an ecological position very close to Martin's. If Reed's accusation of a bias against Protestant Christianity is accurate about Martin, it is an unnecessary bias, and it does not change his ecological point. Nevertheless, I do not believe that Martin's attack on Protestant Christianity is an attack against religion as much as it is an attack against the pragmatic, and legalistic nature of western European-based Christianity. If it is the tragic nature of a law-based Christianity which sees progress as redemption that Martin is biased against, then Reed's claim that Martin is just angry with the Christian religion and his father is misdirected.

Reed calls the philosophical underpinning of the "truth" Martin espouses nothing more than "a simplistic, reductionist materialism." It is true that spirit, for Martin, exists in biology. Biological, evolutionary science becomes an ideology for Martin. In the Technological Bluff, Ellul warns against this philosophic deism of science. He writes: "Science, thanks to ideology, has now become divine as never before. This is precisely the greatest danger. Kaplan put it well when he said that the danger is not so much the biologizing of ideology as the ideologizing of biology." Martin may be standing on highly questionable philosophic ground here. There is a difference between attributing spirit to biology and making biology spiritual. Yet, it is possible that he is simply saying that the two, biology and spirit, are not separate from one another. This, I think, a philosopher like Ellul would agree with. Nevertheless, putting Martin's "faith" aside, his criticisms of the western historical perspective are enlightening. The idea that the "creation" (or biology to use Martin's term) has spirit is fundamental to the native world view.

Using Ralph Waldo Emerson's metaphor from his 1841 essay History, Martin calls western history a "shallow village tale." The chronicle which has been told is simply an exercise in "hubris," an establishing of the sacred myth of progress. He charges historians to embrace a deeper view, to expand the narrative in both space and time. Man must view himself as part of nature not as its lord and protector, and historians must extend the time frame of history beyond what has been traditionally narrated. We must relearn what the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer knew and experienced. As to how this transformation should be accomplished and what tools might be employed to bring it about, Martin is vague. His response to the statement, "But we can't go back," is "But we never left--never left our true, real context." We are still on this planet. We have only "left" in our "fevered imagination." We left through fear. Martin would have us return to faith by the corrective process of the word--the Paleolithic Word that the "hunter-gatherers knew to the core of their being." Apparently it is up to new historians, who are willing to use artists, poets and spirit-beings as sources, to speak into existence a new ancient rhetoric. Martin is right in pointing to rhetoric as the vehicle of change. But as historians, forsaking seven thousand years of tradition completely is a radical call. Is the alternative Calvin Martin has presented history? Possibly; as historians we are always involved in the work of rhetoric, but rhetoric demands examination of the evidence. In the Spirit of the Earth crumbles under its own rhetorical weight in a neo-Aristotelian critique. But, then, this is what Martin is espousing-- a total rejection of such a world view.

Whose perspective of history should be utilized, then, when talking about Black Elk? What is the accepted paradigm to be? When we, as historians, adhere to the myth of scientific objectivity, which is the foundational principle of our discipline as a social science, is it our Achilles heal when approaching Native American study as Martin claims? I believe it is, especially when dealing with religious history. Reinhold Niebuhr, the eminent theologian, has expressed the nature of modern science in this manner:

As Niebuhr so clearly points out, this dominant idea in western culture is more than just a confidence in reason, but it transcends to a faith in history. This is again, the philosophical foundation of the Indian Agent, the priest, and the historians describing them. They all have faith in the redemptive quality of progressive history. Science and reason have become avenues to redemption. The modern age is based on the concept that humankind, through the evolution of history, is progressing toward utopia by the faculty of reason. This also is a foundation stone of the "western paradigm" that Martin is so opposed to. This idea is the product of the underlying myth of western civilization, "progress." And modern "professional" history has been largely the work of the "Progressive" school, which means that it carries a significant load of ideological baggage. Beyond progressivism is the polemic critique of "postmodern relativism" which asks, "Is there any discourse that embraces all other discourses about human identity? Or are all traditions closed to each other simply because there is no common grounding or transcendent reality available for all traditions to point toward in the midst of their collective discourse?" The problem for American Indian history is clear, if there is no common ground Martin is correct; we cannot write a history. As it has by now become self-evident, there is no problem with native history as long as it consists of primitive savagism being replaced by progressive civilization. As long as history is progressing, the scientific, rational perspective justifies itself quite nicely. But if we are going to accept the concept that native culture is not barbaric, primitive, or savage, and place it on an even plane with western "civilization," then the native world view must be equally embraced and observed. The problem, of course, as we have seen, is that the native world view (at least that of central and western North American natives) does not place its faith in the progress of history through reason; it has faith in the power of myth, metaphor, and symbolic ritual.

Howard Harrod's study of Northwestern Plains Indians demonstrates that although there were a number of differing world views among the Plains cultures in 1850, they have deep similarities. Native understanding of the world is "shaped by deeply shared symbolic forms sustained by ritual processes." Harrod's method of study was to describe the shared meanings which constituted the Plains Indian's world views. He found that through the process of ritual, "deeply shared symbols gave shape to native experience." He found the Plains Indian world view to be highly metaphorical and symbolic. Symbolic ritual is central to understanding the world, and it is the vehicle by which Natives acquire knowledge. His description of native symbolism delineates the difference between native and western world views.

If this is the criteria by which cultures differ, Indian and western European cultures are at opposite poles just as Martin insists. How then can a cohesive paradigm for the study of the history of these polemic cultures be found? Ethnohistory has been unable to agree on one. I insist that bringing Kenneth Burke's symbolic interaction paradigms into the discussion is a logical step toward an answer.

In order to help transcend the incommesuablility of traditions and attempt to reach beyond the either/or propositions of "metaphysical biology" and "postmodern relativism," I propose to use Kenneth Burke's "dramaturgical perspective" of rhetorical critique as a frame of reference to view the discourse between Nicholas Black Elk and John Neihardt. Burke asserts that a definition of man as a rational animal is inadequate. For Burke, the "common ground" of humanness does not rest in the individual but in the human's ability to use symbols. Therefore, traditional critiques of human discourse, which focus on the speaker/rhetor, limit understanding. On the other hand, the relativist's experiential focus examines the effects of the discourse on the critic/receiver. It asks the question: What is a discourse/tradition doing to the one involved in it? Rather than focusing on the individual speaker or the experience of the receiver, Kenneth Burke proposes that the locus should be on their interaction, their "symbolic interaction." Like MacIntyre, Burke asserts that it is the narrative that defines what it means to be human. If we are to critique the narrative, to judge between traditions and the differing discourses of traditions, a rhetorical critique that explores the discourse itself must be employed.

Burke proposes the "dramaturgical perspective," which simply assumes that "all the world is a stage." Dramatism could be said to be an attempt bridge the gap between science and the humanities. The human animal is more than the sum of his/her parts. Oedipus and Ahab tell us as much as the laboratory about what humanness is. How the so-called "social sciences" fit in the gap between science and the humanities is the subject of endless debate. Dramatism is offered as a paradigm that bridges the gap. Theater becomes the root metaphor for a "contemporary image of man." One description of this perspective says, "Dramaturgical thinking is not a linear sequential explanation of human behavior based on mechanistic assumptions as most positivistic social science is. Its point of departure is Kenneth Burke's profound assertion that the difference between a thing and a person is that one merely moves whereas the other acts, and therefore the language of mechanism is inapplicable to the study of human selves." The human being is an actor on the stage of history.

Behavior then, is expressed in "dramatistic terms." Man is an actor, and his conduct is the action he performs in the drama of living, in order to achieve what he deems the "good life." The most straight forward definition of dramaturgy is that it is the study of how human beings accomplish meaning in their lives through this process of symbol sharing. What makes man different from other creatures is that he engages in symbol using, "symbolic interaction." Therefore, Burke's definition of man is revealed in this poem:

As a symbol user and misuser, identification takes place in the interaction. The identification with symbols transfers the substance of the symbols. Burke calls this the "consubstantiality" of substance. Symbols are more than the representation of substance. They are "consubstantial" with the substance, or "of the same substance." Burke describes this process of symbolic identification in this manner: A is not identical to B, but A can be identified with B. "Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is 'substantially one' with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique . . . Rhetoric deals with the ways people are at odds with one another; identification implies division . . Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall."

Beyond the uniqueness of symbol using and misusing, Burke asserts that within the use of symbols man has invented the negative and has then been moralized by it. Unlike other symbols that have some kind of substantial referent, the negative only exists symbolically. "It is not" has no specific referent. The negative is a specifically linguistic invention. Additionally, man is moralized by this symbol; "it is not" is translated into "thou shalt not." This implies the ideas of "obedience" or "disobedience" and translates into "order"/law which implies "disorder"/lawless. Between the slopes of order and disorder exists the "ACT of will," where "will is viewed as derivable from the idea of an act." From the ideas of will follow the ideas of sacrifice and grace, "the mortification of some desires." Sacrifice is intrinsic to order, and substitution is intrinsic to the symbol user. Hence, vicarious sacrifice as the way to the ultimate reward, "the Good Life."

This vicarious sacrifice is what is known as scapegoating. The symbol using/misusing human transfers guilt symbolically to the scapegoat. The symbol carries the substance, or to use Burke's terminology, the symbol is consubstantial with the substance. The scapegoat, then, is not a survival from earlier eras, but a device natural to, and inherent to language. Burke writes: "Dramatism, as so conceived, asks not how the sacrificial motives revealed in the institutions of magic and religion might be eliminated in a scientific culture, but what new forms they take." The dramaturgical perspective then, has humankind playing symbolic roles on the stage of history with their script being the symbolic interaction of language (verbal and nonverbal), and the play is basically a tragedy, a story with a scapegoat which supplies a catharsis.

This theory of being is also addressed in Erving Goffman's conception of "Impression Management." Being is constructed by doing; for without a presentation of self, a self is not possible. Therefore, individuality is basically a social rather than a psychological phenomenon. Goffman used the word "face" to describe the socially approved identity that an actor presents. This "face" defines the actor by transfering the substance of the symbols into his or her being. Each of us becomes a kind of playwright, writing the role we play, as well as an actor in the play. Or in other words, "theater occurs when one or more human beings, isolated in time and/or space, present themselves to another or others . . .Theater is a glutton. It will swallow any kind of material and experience that can be turned into performance." Burke's claim is that this play that we are all acting in defines us while we write and act out our scripts. And the script that we are acting out, at least in the western tradition, is a tragedy. This need of a scapegoat (vicarious victimage) is a form of "antithesis." Combined with substitution, it provides identification in terms of an enemy shared in common. He describes this tragic world view, this historical play, in the following poem:

The tragic frame of reference, then, is the foundation of being in western society, and Burke believes this to be the central temptation that must be somehow corrected. He writes: "A dramatistic view of human motives thus culminates in the ironic admonition that perversions of the sacrificial principle (purgation by scapegoat, congregation by segregation) are the constant temptation of human societies, whose orders are built by a kind of animal exceptionally adept in the ways of symbolic action." Burke's answer to this ironic dilemma is to change the play of history from a tragedy to a comedy. Since humans are the writers of the script, as well as the actors, we can begin to change the script; we can begin to improvise, begin to play a comedy. Burke asserts that viewing life as a comedy rather than a tragedy should enable people "to be observers of themselves, while acting. Its ultimate would not be passiveness, but maximum consciousness. One would "transcend" himself by noting his own foibles. He would provide a rationale for locating the irrational and the non-rational."

This of course is no small request. Nevertheless, a "comic corrective" to a tragic theme is an intriguing idea. Carol Burnette once said, "Comedy is only tragedy plus time." This statement has a western linear picture of history inherent in it. Yet, if one was to subject this idea to a cyclical view of history, the result would be the antithesis. If comedy corrects tragedy, would not an overly comic theme need a tragic corrective? It is this paradoxical relationship between the comic and tragic discourse of traditions that we wish to employ as we explore the question of whether, and to what extent, it is possible for those who live within one tradition to actually be able to "hear" what another tradition has to say.

Humanness has two faces. There would appear to be a perspective here that could supply common ground to absolutists and relativists. If the essence of humanness is carried in the discourse, in the symbolic interaction, then the statement: "In the beginning was the word," has a clear appeal to rationality. Not only so, but the idea that we play a role in directing the script of the narrative is also evident, even if the absolutists insists that the director not tamper with the "words." Burke's methods of rhetorical criticism provide a foundation by which we might examine the symbolic interaction of two very different traditions.

Where does all this musing bring us with Nicholas Black Elk then? Can Black Elk be viewed as some sort of bridge between a hunter-gather, earth-centered, mythic reality and a sower, sky-centered, progress to harvest time reality? Possibly. I propose that the historical figure of Nicholas Black Elk presents to us an example of the ability to straddle traditions; that he was authentically conversant with two traditions that would be identified by those invested in this contemporary philosophical issue as incommensurate.

In order to set the proper stage for this historic play, I propose that we attempt to view the whole of western history from a mythic point of view beginning from the event that Martin claims is the beginning of an incorrect way of thinking, the Neolithic revolution. This should prove to be most revealing: to look at this most ancient struggle from a mythic rather than a progressive view, to examine symbolically and metaphorically what the progressive mind would call the struggle of the savage climbing up to the state of civilization. To use Emerson's language, let us tell this "shallow village tale" from a mythic sensability. The one thing it will do is describe the roots of the world view that I think John Neihardt brought to the meeting with Nicholas Black Elk. Neihardt had a mythic-epic-romantic view of history which must be explored before going on to any analysis of what went on in the production of the book, Black Elk Speaks. In order, then, to find some kind of philosophical common ground, I propose that a kind of symbolic/metaphorical view of the progress of the myth of "noble savage" be explored. This underlying myth of the American frontier is central to the thought of John G. Neihardt, the Romantic-epic poet.

Since the earliest of times, this struggle between the "savage" and the "civilized" has sought for some kind of synthesis, some kind of integration. It not only eludes us as individuals, it is elusive to our society as a whole. The myth of this "noble savage" and his struggle to come to grips with the "progress" of humankind embraces the struggle from innocence to experience. It fills American literature, our art, our politics, our geography, and for many of us, even our daily lives. But this struggle reaches much farther back into the western psyche than America and the "frontier."

The noble savage is one of our most enduring myths; one whose beginnings stretch back beyond the ideals of the Romanticism of western European history. When the first hunter-gatherers bent to the hoe, their dagger pricked them at the belt. When the great city, wall, and temple builder of Uruk, Gilgamesh, ventured into the dark forests to fight evil and find cedar timber to build his civilized temples, he encountered the wild man, Enkidu. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest legends known to humankind. Fragments of the earliest versions date back to the invention of writing itself, about 3000 B.C. Enkidu the wild man is ignorant of cultivation, innocent of humans. He lives with beasts, and is covered with matted hair. Gilgamesh sends a Love-priestess to the wild to trap him. After Enkidu is "glutted on her richness," his friends the beasts will no longer have anything to do with him. "Seeing him the gazelles scattered, wheeling: the beasts of the wilderness fled from his body." He is tainted with the scent of urban corruption. He returns to the woman who teaches him to shave, adorn clothing, and eat bread, instead of sucking the milk of wild animals. Enkidu becomes a shepherd. One day, he wrestles with Gilgamesh in the city and defeats him. The two become beloved companions.

So the epic myth begins. The savage is tamed, civilized, domesticated, and in his challenge of authority, he learns to accept and even cherish the authority of the king. Gilgamesh decides to attack and destroy the shadowed source of evil brutishness, the dark force of the forest. Humbaba is the giant of the cedar forest, and he stands in the way of obtaining cedarwood for the building of cities and temples. Enkidu is afraid for his friend and master and protests because he knows Humbaba and the vastness of his forest. Humbaba is "like a fire, like a storm, like the very jaws of death." Yet, moved by his destiny, Gilgamesh believes that the men of the city are filled with despair and its source is Humbaba. The darkness of the forest is to blame; the savage Humbaba is the scapegoat; he stands in the way of redemption. They must have cedar to build temples to the sky-gods in order to rise above earthly despair.

At the entrance to the forest the two heroes find a perfect cedar gate. Enkidu cannot find it within himself to destroy the beautiful passage. He is torn between his opposing desires. Caught at the boundary of savage and civilization, he stands at the point where the wild meets the tame. His hand falters as he pushes the portal open, but Gilgamesh encourages him to persevere. "They drew near the [gate]-bolt, the twoof them together. Brought to silence they stood: they entered the forest." There, in the chtonic forest, they engaged the giant. Humbaba is one with the wood, an elemental spirit charged by the gods as keeper of the dark forest. Enkidu is terrified, but Gilgamesh animates his spirit saying, "Take your ax in your hand and attack. He who leaves the fight unfinished is not at peace." When Gilgamesh cuts a cedar, Humbaba blows out fire to consume him, but when the seventh cedar is cut and its branches bound, the giant is delivered, "like a noble wild bull roped on the mountain, a warrior whose elbows are bound together." The giant begs for mercy. He says he is like Enkidu now, a tamed force of nature. He will help to cut the forest and will build Gilgamesh a great palace of cedarwood. But Enkidu is jealous, and the two heroes hack the giant into pieces. But instead of containing evil, the gods are enraged and evil is loosed. They are now able to cut the forest, making way for fields and cities, but the angry gods give the giant's fire to the barbarians who will use it against civilization. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the primary legends of humankind's change from hunter-gatherer to city dweller, the primal examination of the relationship between savage and city, the root myth of the origins of "civilization."

The word savage has been corrupted from its original meaning "wooded" to meaning "bestial." In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the wild and the savage are perceived by Gilgamesh as evil enemies, but the gods seem to disagree. Yet, even though the forest is ominous, Gilgamesh is drawn to the savage Enkidu. There is a sublime attraction to that which must be overcome in the name of progress.

The Bible provides us with a different perspective on this dialectic. This ancient story is a struggle from innocence to experience, from the harmony of the garden to the toil of a life of works. After the fall in the Garden of Eden, Adam is cursed to become a farmer. He and Eve's gathering days are ended. The earth will no longer give of its bounty freely after the fall, but Adam is told "cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Here, the transformation to the cultivated world of the Neolithic has a very different quality than in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Man does not progress to farming but falls from his friendship with Sky-God and earth. The giving relationship is ended, and the struggle begins. Not only is man separated from his estate, Sky-God is separated from his earth. He had given the earth to Adam, and Adam had given it away for the knowledge of good and evil, a law to live by. Sky-God is divorced from his wife, Mother Earth, if you will, and their children must struggle to survive. There are myths that earth was taken from the side of the sky; one wonders about the nature of the rite performed in the story on Adam that produced Eve. But this is the nature of myth. Myth is speculative, imprecise, full of patterns in the chaos, and certainly unscientific. Mythic narratives are open to the teller’s interpretation.

Regardless of which of these mythical views one takes -- the move from Paleolithic to Neolithic as progress or fall -- these archetypes speak to us of the opposition, the struggle between animals and trees and man. Hunter is set against farmer. Anarchy opposes authority; instinct vs. self control; natural man is pitted against civic man. These battles appear in the literature and philosophy of western civilization throughout our history, and the moral condition of the savage vs. the civil has always been a problem. Aristotle declared that an arrogant, gifted man, who could not find a way to fit into the civil life should live outside the city "like a god or a wild beast." Both the superior and the inferior are better off outside the city gate. The root metaphors of our civilization do not clearly delineate for us the moral quality of those who dwell on the other side of the gate in that realm of the wilderness. The savage is out there. The barbarian is out there. The sublime God is out there.

Moses met God in the wilderness and took the children of Israel out of Egypt to wander there until cleansed to enter the promised land. The scapegoat had the sins of Israel placed upon him by the laying on of the hands of the High Priest and was then sent into the wilderness. The prophets found God there, and John the Baptist announced the coming of the messiah as a "Voice in the Wliderness." When Jesus began his public work he came from a battle with Satan in the wilderness ready to speak the Words of God. He was crucified by the powers of state and religion outside the gate of Jerusalem. The Romans were following their custom of displaying their power as an example on the road to the city, but they did not know that they also consummated the law of the scapegoat sent outside the city gate. The paradoxical nature of the wilderness as a harsh, dry place of temptation and trial, and in contrast, a cleansing place of refuge and refreshing has been a constant presence in the Judeo-Christian mind. Roderick Nash contends that by the time William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower, he stepped into a "hideous and desolate wilderness" starting a tradition of "repugnamce" toward wilderness. But wilderness in America would not remain so, The Romantic notions of Europe would overcome the initial aversion of the Puritans.

It is said that Tacitus invented the myth of the "noble savage" in response to the decadence and urban iniquity of Rome. He praised the barbarian peoples who could decimate a Roman legion. For the Roman historian, the Germans represented the virtues that had once been Rome's. Frugal living, courage, and chastity described the Germans. These are the qualities that once had given Rome the power to break through the Apennines to conquer Italy. The Germans were a plain, strong and lusty people, committed to family and tribe, compassionate with slaves, free to work their own plots of land and build their own houses. As long as the barbarian was far away in the North, this picture was gratifying when mirrored against the squalor and decadence of the Roman city, but when the noble savage swept down out of his forests and glens to sack Rome, he became a barbarian horde, devoid of culture, pagan in worship, and brutal in nature. It would not be until Europe began to discover "new worlds" that the nobility of the savage would return to Europe.

Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, and John Locke inspired the advance of reason over myth in the European mind. Organized thought, rationality, and the increase of knowledge became the road of truth during the Enlightenment. Pagan and Christian myth had been married in the monasteries of the middle ages, and enlightened thinkers cried out to be delivered from this gothic, feudal darkness. Bacon saw the jealous monastic suspicion of free thought as the chief obstacle to enlightenment. He wrote:

This kind of pious fear of excessive knowledge and intelligence would never be crushed by Baconian taxonomies, Descartes' clockwork, or Locke's empiricism. The Enlightenment of reason and rationality would have continual foes in the hearts of a great many Europeans. The schism between Europe's heart and head grew, but the heart would not surrender so easily.

The gentle and tender mystic, Saint Francis, distrusted books and increasing knowledge. He saw them as sources of worldly pride. His intimate relationship with the animals and nature, combined with his distrust of scientific enlightenment, paved the way for the ideals of Romanticism that would arise in Europe in response to the excesses of economic individualism. The noble savage became the antithesis of the rational metamorphosis that continued from Bacon's and Descartes' organized mechanical world to Locke's and Adam Smith's individual economics. The noble savage would be the Romantic's ideal of innocence, and for many, Europe had lost its purity, both at home and abroad.

The simple cottage of feudal Europe began to disappear in the face of the urban growth of the nineteenth-century. A new age had come to Europe. It was a transformation as powerful as the move from Paleolithic to Neolithic. The innocence lost in the metamorphosis from hunter-gatherer to farmer was no more traumatic than the pains of the birth of industrialization. Liberal and scientific ideology had produced a Europe who had lost her innocence somewhere along the way. Eden was again left behind. Rousseau had said in his Social Contract that "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." The discoveries of the Enlightenment had produced a materialistic, increasingly industrialized European society in desperate need of a cathartic redemption. The Romantic era of European history is a search for the innocence of childhood again. Utopia could only be found, not in progress, but in regress. Humankind must return to simpler and purer times, but the question of what was pure and what was simple was still being contended. Now there were two Edens -- the first savage and the second pastoral. No one contended with the goodness of the pastoral life. It was clearly edenistic in the eyes of Europe, but the first Eden was not yet redeemed. The Enlightenment view of the savage corresponded more to the ideology of the Epic of Gilgamesh, rather than to the Garden of Eden.

At the beginning of the formation of reason, Thomas Hobbes had defined the natural state of man as savage in its most negative sense. In Leviathan, Hobbes held that the natural state of humans is constant war with each other; their lives are "nasty, brutish, and short." A society can arise only by convention and common agreement. From self-interest, people make peace and obtain security inasmuch as they delegate total power to the state, and in Hobbes day this was ultimately the monarch. The monarch's decrees were absolute in all areas of life, including the family and religion. Hobbes concluded that rebellion against the state breaks society's basic contract and is punishable by whatever penalty the monarch may exact in order to protect his or her subjects from a return to the original barbaric state of nature. But unlike Hobbes' century, in the nineteenth century, the monarch was no longer supreme. The state was now the benevolent and moral middle class. In order for the social contract to be valid, it must protect the individual rights of the enlightened, rational class. These rights, Locke claimed, naturally belonged to free men. The state's purpose was not to protect society from humans' brutish nature, rather the social contract's purpose was to protect the individual human's freedom from the excess of the state. The question of the human's natural morality was not as important as the fact that the human's natural state is free and innocent. It is the influence of society that corrupts, and individuals must be protected from that corruption. From this idea, Jean-Jacques Rousseau brought nobility back to the savage.

Rousseau must be understood in terms of his relationship to both the eighteenth-century enlightenment and to his influence on nineteenth-century Romanticism. To begin with, he shared the later Enlightenment view that society perverted natural man. Rousseau viewed natural man as the "noble savage" who lived harmoniously with nature, free from selfishness, want, possessiveness, and jealousy. He argued that the restoration of the arts and sciences had not contributed to the purification of humankind but to its corruption. He also believed that social relationships of all kinds were based on an inequality that resulted from an unnatural distribution of power and wealth. Rousseau was utterly opposed to the materialism and determinism of the emerging middle class. He did not believe that human motivation could be explained by the desire to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain but believed that an inner life of feeling and sentiment was central to the human animal. He contrasts self-love, which is naturally good, to pride, which requires a ghastly comparison with another. Science and art did not lead automatically to progress, and the notion that progress led to the ultimate perfection of humankind was foolish.

For Rousseau, primitive man was just an animal, "weaker than some, and less agile than others; but taking him all round, the most advantageously disposed of any." What makes humans different than the rest of the animals is their ability to alter their condition through the exercise of the intellect. But this, which should be man's greatest glory, is paradoxically his downfall. Rousseau says of this "faculty of self-improvement" that "it would be melancholy, were we forced to admit that this distinctive and almost unlimited faculty, is the source of all human misfortune; that it is this faculty, which, successively producing in different ages his discoveries and errors, his vices and his virtues, makes him at length a tyrant both over himself and over nature." However, humans in their natural state have few temptations to alter the innocence of their situation. They have never experienced the pleasures of civilization, and therefore, have never felt the need for them. They have not had to pay any price for progress, and so are not miserable, primitive, and brutal as Hobbes would have them, but innocent having no idea of wickedness. This philosophy is an intriguing mix of Gilgamesh and Adam. He embraces the paradox of the two ideals. The "faculty of self improvement," which Gilgamesh accepted so completely in his quest to "make a name for himself, is wedded in a struggle with Adam’s original state free of temptation. The Romantic ideal of returning to simpler and purer times was reborn. Either Eden, the savage or the pastoral, was better than the excess corruption of capitalistic technology.

The Romantic ideals of nineteenth-century Europe are rooted in this ideal of natural man and a desire to return to innocence. But the noble savage of the Romantics was not Rousseau's good-natured, amoral brute, simply satisfied with "food, female, and sleep" and free from the burdens of progress. He was more, because he was not only an intellectual construction; he could be found in Africa, Australia, the islands of the oceans, but most vividly in the European's imagination and experience, in America. For the three hundred years that Enlightenment thinkers mused away concerning the nature of the natural state of man, European travelers were discovering, befriending, converting, and exploiting the men and women they considered to be savages. But intellectual constructions and "New World" realities were very different things. Utopian dreams and expectations met harsh constraints in the New Worlds, and the outcomes of their choices in dealing with those restraints produced an unique noble savage that would one day become the ideal American that would one day produce a man like Neihardt.

For the most part, the first waves of Spaniards to wash ashore in the Americas probably saw the Indians of the forest in the same light as they saw the characters of the wild men of the woods from their medieval village plays. These characters from the morality plays were dressed in leaves and carried clubs. They represented the rude and brutish life of the forests that had been cleared to make the pastoral fields and villages of Europe. Religious images of the forest were equated with demons, imps, and the evil forces of Satan. The medieval Christian view of the forest was more akin to the Epic of Gilgamesh than it was to their own Book's Eden. Views of the savage Indian, or anything from the forest, having value were few. Sir Thomas Moore's Utopians relegated hunting to their slaves. "For they count hunting the lowest, the vilest and most abject part of butchery . . . the hunter seeketh nothing but pleasure of the silly beast's slaughter and murder." Montaigne too, like the great body of Europe, saw humans as being above all other creatures, but he also saw that man's duty was to be humane, "not only to such animals as possess life, but even to trees and plants." But these more moderate views of the savage were not the norm. The medieval explorer brought the myth of Gilgamesh with him to the New World. The Indian was a beast, either to destroy as a devil or, at best, utilize for labor. There were a few voices raised calling for, at least, the show of compassion one would extend to any life, but they were hard to hear in the New World.

By the time of the dispute between Bartolomé Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the official Spanish policy concerning the native inhabitants of the New World, it was too late for the Indians of the future Mexico. Every Spanish adventurer from some village in Castille was transformed into a caballero the moment he set foot on the American continent. He was elevated above the status of mere toil, and all he could do with his hands amounted to the administration of war. Like a crusading knight, his loot was his due. Whatever he had been in Spain made no matter; in America, he was a warrior lord supported by his brown peasants and serfs. The Las Casa-Sepúlveda debate amounted to little more than justification after the crime. Thirteen years after Pope Paul III issued the bull, Sublimus Deus, in 1537, which stated that the Indians were not to be made into slaves but should be treated as possible converts, the argument still persisted. Bartolomé argued for the peaceful conversion of the Indians while Sepúlveda consigned the Indian to repression and exploitation by reason of Aristotle and the Christian fathers. Sepúlveda's argument came from the perspective of a learned philosopher who stayed in Spain to ponder great questions. He knew next to nothing about Indians, never having traveled to the New World. His case was based on European philosophies, the idea of the beastly savage. Las Casas on the other hand, had a passion for the Indian out of experience. He had been a traveler and missionary among them for fifty years. Throughout the history of the Americas, those who lived among the savages would have a very different perspective than those that lived on the civilized side of the cedarwood gate to the forest.

Native Americans played four primary roles in the minds of early European colonists. First, they were enemies to be overcome and evicted from the land. This role would prove to be a central viewpoint of Euro-Americans even to the end of the nineteenth century. They were also viewed as potential converts to Christianity, souls to be saved and civilized. The Spanish saw them as porters and miners, a convenient labor force. When the French came to America they also needed a labor force for the fur trade, but the fur traders lived with the natives. The French married into Indian families in order to build the relationships necessary for extracting the bounty of the forest. It is from the French that the positive connotations of the word "savage" come, simply meaning "from the wood or forest." But the fourth role of the native, that of interpreter of the land, was to the greatest extent exploited by the British. The first English colonists would have died quickly without the help of the savage Indian. There is no doubt that the Indian's first role in the eyes of the English was enemy, but when their attempts at survival had failed, the Indian became foremost a wise farmer, a good hunter, and an invaluable teacher.

The English colonists were not supported by a strong monarchy like Spain or France. Joint stock companies of rising middle class merchants possessed economic power in Britain that rivaled and would soon exceeded the resources of the king. The liberal ideas of John Locke were to take deep root in the psyche of the English colonists. The individualism that grew in America, alongside the influence of the Indian on the lifestyle of the colonist, produced a people suited to the idea of a noble savage. Indians like Squanto and Pochahantus could quickly take on the mythic qualities of the noble savage. The colonists needed noble savages in order to survive, and needed, they appeared. But even if the colonists needed the wisdom of the Indian, they still wanted him and her to remain outside the gate, and they did not look favorably on Europeans who ventured outside the gates of civilization. The Pilgrims and Puritans of New England fought the wilderness by denying it. They stayed inside their stockades that separated them from the Satanic influences of the savage, decadent forest. But the exclusive and defensive religion of the Puritans and their stout stockades could not keep these children of Adam from the savage within themselves. The greatest evil among the Pilgrims was the devil in their midst, best represented by Morton and his maypole. Morton brought in immigrant European degenerates and Indian women into his community to celebrate midsummer orgies, dubbing himself as the Lord of Misrule. The scene of a white man outdoing the lewdness and barbarianism of the Indian was too much for the Pilgrims. Not only was Morton decadent, he sold arms to the Indians. Eventually he was deported back to England, but even from the beginning, the barbarian displayed within the European settler to the New World appeared as great as the savageness of the Indian. This startling realization would become the catalyst of the development of the idea that the noble savage was one who possessed the best qualities of both worlds, savage and civil.

Thomas Jefferson was a pastoral romantic, and noble Indian savages were potential pastoral converts. The industrial exploitation of Europe was the primary evil that America needed to avoid. America could become the agricultural producer of the world with her unlimited resources and land. The boundary between savage and civil was steadily moving toward the Mississippi River, and the boundary was clearly marked by the transition from field to forest. For Jefferson, the incorruptible yeoman farmer was the ideal citizen. Noble in character, individual, married to the land he could not be contaminated by avarice and greed. Americans were a self-conscious people. They prided themselves on their Republican government, not bound to a king or the masses, bound only to the pursuit of liberty and justice for all. Americans believed they were destined to lead humanity into the will of God's progress. Their unlimited natural resources coupled with their limited government would enable the individual to lead the advance of a righteous civilization. Their ideas of government had not only come from the philosophers of Europe but also from the examples of the people who first inhabited the land they now farmed. Franklin had viewed the Iroquoian Confederacy as a model for the Articles of Confederation. The ideal countryside was the prosperous, expanding agrarian economy dotted with small villages with churches and schools--a pastoral family farmland connected by canals, steamboats, and rails. The spirit of a secular Christianity was becoming the driving force behind the nation's "Manifest Destiny," a religion that embraced the Franklinian habits of temperance, frugality, order and industry all working together for the reform and regard of the community. The primary player on this expanding frontier stage of romantic pastoral bliss was the frontiersman, the independent, incorruptible pioneer. Like the mythic Gilgamesh, the ones who dwelt at the gate of the savage forest had become heroes in nineteenth-century Europe and America. These mythic men and women despised the excesses of civil society, reveled in hard work, and would become the backbone of the new American society.

Into this Euro-American archetype stepped Natty Bumppo. No figure in literature embraces the character of what a truly noble savage should be like those in the Leatherstocking tales. In these fictions, James Fenimore Cooper brought the culmination of three hundred years of European political thought and religious belief and married it to the sublime terror and pristine majesty of the savage, unspoiled wilderness. These tales are credited as one of the most important portrayals of the clash between the red and white cultures. The whole world's image of the "Red Man" owes more to the Last of the Mohichans than any other single text. Accurate or not, Uncas and Magua are our faces of noble and savage, and the relationship between Chingachgook and Hawkeye is the epitome of the kind of bond that "should" exist between civil and savage. It is the model of the kind of multiculturalism that is the ideal of this republic, this product of Europe and wildness. Yet, regardless of the noble appeal of this relationship, the inevitable tragedy is that the savage is doomed to destruction. It is no wonder that when the close of the nineteenth century was upon us, Frederick Jackson Turner chose the tragic epiphany of the end of the frontier as the defining characteristic of American history.

The bond that is portrayed between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook is interracial, asexual, often wordless, but even more poignant, alienated from both races. I believe it is this alienation that is the central issue in the concept of the noble savage. We love these two men even when we recognize the stereotypical nature of the story. We love these two men even when we realize that the story is filled with Cooper's own prejudices, with society's prejudices. We love them because the stereotypes themselves illustrate and contain important elements of truth. Natty Bumppo is one of the true epic heroes of our time. Leatherstocking is no bastion of virtue. He is human, with prejudices and failings. He can be verbose and vain, but his fervent love of all that is natural, all that is honorable, gives him a credibility, an ethos, that makes his criticisms of society's hypocrisies seem utterly valid. Cooper's summary of him is that he is a "character that possessed little of civilization but its highest principles." Whatever these highest principles are, the western mind has projected them onto the noble savage since the time of the Roman Empire.

Leatherstocking is a man on the cultural margin. His imagined identity is a conglomeration of his moral courage, his biracial clothing, his weather reddened skin, his ability to assimilate the best qualities of two races, two diametrically opposed cultures. His inner integrity and ability to see God in the trees, to hear Him in the winds, to bow down to His will in the cathedral of the forest enraptures the heart of the Liberal American. Yet, the tragedy of the annihilation of an entire people is inevitable in this epic noble picture, and one wonders how nobility can come from such a sin. The removal and destruction of the Indian cultures was continually justified by the argument that, because of the high ideals and tender mercies of Christianity, the native was better off knowing these values rather than remaining in his fallen barbaric state. The only truly noble savage was the one who adhered to the higher principles of Christian mercy and love. The barbarian still lived by the old law of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. How much force was justified when the red man refused to live by this new law? The constraints of the New World forced the frontiersman to revert to the law of the barbarian, kill or be killed. If the Christian frontiersman is unwilling to shoot first and ask questions later, can he survive living at the gate of the savage forest? The answer of course, from the first Spanish ethical debates to the close of Turner's frontier was "no," he had to shoot. Like Gilgamesh and Enkidu, even though when they wrestled Enkidu won the match, just touching civilization separated him from the wild, and changed, he submitted to the greater force, Gilgamesh. The red man was as much a part of Leatherstocking as anything else, he was savage, he was wild, but the greater power of those "higher principles" dominated him in his deepest heart whether he knew it or not, and we admire him for it. It is an alarming paradox that has not only plagued the American dream from its inception, it is a paradox that has plagued what we call civilization from its inception. To think that we can resolve such a primal paradox may be the utmost of vanity. Nevertheless, American romantics have continued to try, and no one more so than the twentieth-century epic American poet laureate, John G. Neihardt. For, Neihardt saw this noble spirit in the American west, and not only in the frontier did he see it, he saw it in himself, and he saw it in Nicholas Black Elk. Black Elk is Leatherstocking "through the looking glass," and as the Mohichans lived on in Bumppo, Black Elk and his vision would live on through Neihardt.

Neihardt and Black Elk were joined by their commitment to the ideals of nobility which they shared on a spirit or mystical level. Yet, for Black Elk at least, spirit and practicality were one place. Walter Principe defined spirituality as, "the way in which a person understands and lives within his or her historical context that aspect of his or her religion, philosophy or ethic that is viewed as the loftiest, the noblest, the most calculated to lead to the fullness of the ideal or perfection being sought." This definition of "spirituality" was posted on a Native American literature, internet discussion list. Ron Grimes submitted this definition, along with others, in response to the topic, "What does it mean to be spiritual?" Concerning this particular definition, Mr. Grimes notes, "The problem with Principe's definition is that it supposes all people organize their values hierarchically and that one such value is the highest and most normative. I suspect this way of imagining the organization of human consciousness is left over from patriarchally inspired monotheism, so it does not serve the cross-cultural, inter-religious purpose that Principe hopes his definition will serve." Ironically, of the twelve definitions on Grimes' e-mail post, this one described the famous spirituality of John Neihardt and Nicholas Black Elk the best. And, these two men collaborated "cross-culturally" for an "inter-religious purpose" more successfully than any other two men in the history of America and maybe even the world. Neihardt and Black Elk worked together to bring to pass a lofty, noble ideal, which they believed they held in common, from their own "historical context," "religion," and "philosophy." These men labored to take what was "noble" from both their cultures and deliver it to the other's culture, and to a great extent, succeeded in communicating nobility to the savage in both their cultures.

Like Leatherstocking, Both men lived on the cultural margin of their societies. Both were born in the last of the "frontier" years. They saw the geographic boundary of the frontier disappear. They watched the gate between savage and civil torn down, and they worked to preserve for future generations the nobility of both savage and civil that they had seen at that boundary. They did not do this for some esoteric, anthropological purpose, but for the purpose of healing the nation, to see the tree of life flower again. Yet, as noble as this purpose sounds, both Black Elk and Neihardt were practical men. They both lived off the fruits of their craft. The poet and the holy man’s visions were the spiritual and physical bounty in their lives.

John Neihardt has become our premiere Western-American poet. Much of his poetry is epic in the Homeric tradition; all of it is romantic and celebrates the Western-American historical experience. Vine Deloria Jr., the prolific Lakota writer, describes Neihardt saying, "No one has attempted to recapitulate the western historical experience in quite such comprehensive and ambitious terms as he. Nor have many American poets approached his power to invoke a historical period, his vision in discerning the hidden strengths and weaknesses of the human personality, and his wisdom in placing human activities within the larger stage of nature. In the sweep of his epic poetry, virtues often transcend their incarnate form and speak to us of eternal qualities which we like to imagine we all possess in our best moments." These "eternal qualities" that we humans somehow mythically know the noble savage possesses, the tragic poet from middle-of-the-road Nebraska and Missouri spent his life trying to communicate.

Neihardt was born in Sharpsburg, Illinois, on January 8, 1881, just short of a decade before the Massacre at Wounded Knee that supposedly ended the Indian Wars he wrote so vividly about. His father deserted the family, and his mother took his brothers, sisters and him to live on his uncle's farm in Wayne, Nebraska. From there he lived a very ordinary life, but as he grew, his understanding of life was extraordinary. At the age of eleven, in the summer of 1892, during a serious bout of fever, he had an out-of-the-body experience, a hallucination, or if you will, a vision. He felt himself flying through space, in another reality, a place so complete and real to him that afterward he dedicated his life to writing poetry, specifically, to reciting the story of western settlement. He portrayed the world of the Indian and the frontier with a beauty and power that embodied the best of both cultures and the worst of both cultures.

He was a tragic poet. Carl Starkloff said, "He showed to his European-American compatriots the terrible things they were doing to the natives of the land they were invading. Thus Neihardt was a tragedian describing for white Americans the death of their own innocence as noble seekers for truth and freedom. This loss of innocence was reflected in the grief and agony of those who suffered at their hands--not without incredibly harsh and often brilliantly conceived wars of resistance--as they trampled out the vintage of Manifest Destiny." The range and scope of his writings are wide and deep. He wrote poetry and prose, short stories, short poems and epic poems, books, plays, articles, essays, reviews, and literary criticism. His work centered on two themes: the exploration and settlement of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains and the universal mysticism he saw in the religions of the world. His longest work is A Cycle of the West, the series of poetic, epic "Songs" which he was working to complete when he met Nicholas Black Elk.

Neihardt thought that Americans needed to be reminded of their heritage, but not the history book kind. He deplored the elitist attitudes of academicians, especially those who would quench the spirit. In poetry he came to despise free verse and considered Whitman one of the worst influences on American literature. He believed Americans had become "hopelessly provincial" in their sense of time. He found George Edward Woodberry's theories of "race memory" and Carl Jung's discussion of the "collective consciousness" centrally important as a historian-poet. Poetry, for Neihardt, was song, a musical utterance that should reveal the deepest truths of the human heart. He once wrote, "I have undertaken to preserve a great heroic race-mood which might otherwise be lost. Someone must do this, and I seem to be the one."

When he spoke of his methods of writing, he spoke of an "Otherness," and said, "it's glorious to suspect that something stronger than oneself is on the job." He did thorough research for his "songs." When A Cycle of the West was published in 1949, it included: "The Song of Three Friends" (1919), "The Song of Hugh Glass" (1915), "The Song of Jed Smith" (1941), "The Song of the Indian Wars" (1925), and "The Song of the Messiah" (1935). His work was often cited by historians, and Frederick Jackson Turner sent two students to talk to him once, telling them, "The poet is the best historian." His most creative years were spent in Branson, Missouri, in the Ozark Mountains. There he could work in greater seclusion. His income was always sparse. He received some remuneration for writing a few book reviews, but the bulk of his income came from speaking tours which he would schedule when funds were depleted. His family lived a simple existence in Branson where he built a studio for his wife Mona, a sculptor who had studied under Rodin in Paris before they were married. As talented and sophisticated as she was, she dedicated her life to her family and her husband.

They led a "country existence in the Ozarks, and collected a family of animals: a Jersey Cow, a goat, horses, and an assortment of small pets. His garden was a not only the main source of food, it was a spiritual place for him and a source of great joy. Of his time there he wrote, "During most of my creative years I managed to arrange my life so as to realize and maintain much of the primitive relationship with earth, sky, and weather. In order to do this, we lived in a small country town and produced most of our food in the old-fashioned biblical way, by 'the sweat of the brow'" He took great pride in raising a big garden that most often overflowed in its abundance to friends and neighbors. His favorite schedule consisted of writing in the forenoons and after a one hour nap, toiling in the garden in the heat of the afternoon. There, while working in his pastoral garden one day, Neihardt stepped across a liminal threshold:

John G. Neihardt was an uncommon man, a man ideally suited to a meeting with Nicholas Black Elk. There were times, Neihardt once confessed, when the barrier of language disappeared and the two minds, Black Elk's and Neihardt's, worked as one in transmitting the reality of traditional Sioux life. Even though they came from mutually "unintelligible," irreconcilable," and "antagonistic" cultures, these two particular men transcended all of these things. There is no doubt that both voices of their cultures are married in the book they produced. Maybe both voices were necessary for the vision to come to pass. Black Elk Speaks was to have a profound effect, not only on Indians and poets, but on the nation as a whole.

The relationship between the two men was established on their first meeting. Remember, that when Flying Hawk had questioned whether Black Elk would talk to the wasichu, Neihardt responded that he had known Indians for many years, and they had always talked to him. Just the week before Black Elk had refused to talk to a white woman who was writing an article on Crazy Horse. The famous chief was Black Elk’s second cousin. The young woman was Mary Sandoz, who, along with Eleanor Hinman, were conducting interviews with very elderly Oglala chiefs and former warriors about some of the most controversial issues in the band’s history. Not only was the problem of gender and age a detriment to the women, they had also stirred up the memories of the events that had bitterly divided the Oglalas during the Indian Wars. In July the women had interviewed He Dog and Short Bull. These men were related to Red Cloud who had opposed Crazy Horse. Even though He Dog and Short Bull had sided with Crazy Horse themselves, the fact that the women had talked with these "Red Cloud Indians" closed the door for them to talk to many of Crazy Horse’s relatives. Among those who refused to talk to the women was Black Elk. Other than the friction between the factions, Black Elk’s reasons for not seeing the women are unclear, but a month later, he seemed to be waiting for Neihardt.

For Black Elk’s purposes, Neihardt was the ideal writer to communicate and further his wic'as'a wakan’s [medicine man or holy man of great vision]dreams and visions. Like Sandoz would in the future, Neihardt had written about Crazy Horse. In just a short time, the two authors would meet and become fast friends and admirers of one another’s work. The spiritual and mystical aspect of Crazy Horse’s life was what most appealed to both authors. "He was a ‘god intoxicated man’ who lived his life according to mystical power-visions and experiences." This is also an accurate description of the great chief’s younger cousin, Black Elk. But what Neihardt did in Black Elk Speaks was very different from what Sandoz would do with Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Even though Sandoz believed as firmly as Neihardt in mystical truths, she did not have the romantic ability to tap into that awareness in her writing. She considered herself a historian and almost always judged or discussed a work based on its historical accuracy. The literary style was not the primary criteria for her. Neihardt, on the other hand, could, as a poet, focus his entire attention to the mystical. Neihardt not only became the amanuensis for Black Elk, he became the holy man’s disciple and a participant in the vision himself. He became a part of the old man, kin, and an integral part or member of the holy man’s vision. Black Elk was able to cross the gap of culture and ethnicity by imparting his vision to Neihardt. Helen Stauffer writes, "This meeting with Black Elk became the single most significant influence upon the writer’s life and thought. From his meetings with Black Elk he felt he had become the instrument to preserve the wisdom and culture of the Sioux." But his role was more than preserver of culture, it was that of co-creator or seer and foreteller with Nicholas Black Elk in disseminating the holy man’s vision. Even so, when Neihardt first approached the holy man, he came asking the same kinds of questions that Mary Sandoz would have most likely asked. It would be Black Elk who would establish the direction of the discourse. Neihardt thought there was a supernatural guidance in their first meeting.

What Neihardt perceived as supernormal, Black Elk more than likely viewed as practical and normal. What the old Indian saw in the encounter was not mystical but a symbolic encounter that conformed to appropriate ritual. The symbolic nature of their first encounter is important to an understanding of their relationship and communication. Clyde Holler has postulated that the ritual content of this meeting is at the core of the two men's relationship. Neihardt must have been conversant enough in the culture to understand some of its norms. He had brought cigarettes. This act established the appropriate context for a meeting. Neihardt explained his purpose to the old man. Black Elk listened patiently as Flying Hawk translated the poets questions. Black Elk responded politely but briefly; he seemed uninterested in Neihardt's questions. A number of times he mentioned a vision he had when he was nine years old. Silence rested on them for a time as they smoked. Finally Black Elk began to speak as if he were talking more to the landscape in front of him than to his visitors, "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."

Holler points out that since Black Elk perceived that Neihardt had been sent by the Spirits, and his arrival was established by an appropriate smoke, he would instruct him. Black Elk's expectations here differ significantly from Neihardt's. The poet wanted to "talk" about "old times" and the "Messiah Craze." In essence, he wanted historical information and at this point probably had no conception of the old man's intentions. Black Elk had singled him out as a disciple, for lack of a better term. Black Elk then gave Neihardt a necklace representing the morning star, the Lakota symbol of wisdom and peace, saying, "Here you see the Morning Star. Who sees the Morning Star shall see more, for he shall be wise." After explaining the symbolism of this sacred ornament, which he had worn when officiating over the Sun Dance, the holy man began to speak of his power vision. Black Elk focused himself on the vision and ignored the questions of Sioux history Neihardt wanted the answers to. When the night came, Black Elk announced, "There is so much to teach you. What I know what was given to me for men and it is true and it is beautiful. Soon I will be under the grass and it will be lost. You were sent to save it, and you must come back so I can teach you." Neihardt was instructed to return in the spring, which would be the appropriate time for his instruction.

Neihardt described his experience that day in a letter written shortly after the event:

Neihardt attributed Black Elk's actions to supernatural powers. A few scholars have suggested that the poet constructed the details of this first encounter for literary effect. But there is strong evidence against this supposition. Their meeting conformed to a traditional ritual process that would have produced just the kind of response Black Elk demonstrated. Holler uses William K. Powers' work, Yuwipi, to demonstrate the nature of this ritual process. In Powers' account of the dialogue between a modern Lakota Holy man, Plenty Wolf, who is being sought out by Wayne Runs Again who wants the holy man to perform the Yuwipi healing ceremony on him, Plenty Wolf acts as if he knew Runs Again was coming. Yet, it is clear that Plenty Wolf does not know Runs Again is coming. Because of his poor eyesight, he has to ask his wife who it is at the gate. Yet, paralleling Neihardt and Black Elk's encounter, when Runs Again approaches Plenty Wolf, he greets him with the ritual hail (Hau Tunkasila, Hau Grandfather) rather than the common (Hau Kola, Hau friend). Plenty Wolf, then, like Black Elk, speaks of the Spirits that are present and acts as if he were expecting Runs Again. The dialogue is thus:

The similarity here to Black Elk and Neihardt's encounter is striking. Like Plenty Wolf, Black Elk may not have been claiming to have a literal precognition of his arrival as Neihardt thought. Rather, Black Elk acknowledged a recognition of the ritual which would make the encounter spiritual. Spirits were present and involved because symbolic ritual had been initiated. Neihardt arrived in the appropriate manner, establishing and confirming the proper relationship of kinship between the two men.

Neihardt would most likely have had no concept of the ritual that was taking place. For centuries, whites and Indians have stumbled into relationship rituals not understanding one another's expectations and intentions. When Columbus gave gifts of beads, he unknowingly established a kinship relationship with natives who were astounded when that kinship was later violated. The giving of spiritually-charged objects was a traditional ritual, full of meaning that whites, who thought they were trading beads for goods, simply did not understand. These kinds of adoption rituals frequently appear in the history of native-white encounters. Pocahontas' symbolic intercession has been viewed as a ritual that adopted John Smith into the Powhatan confederacy. Infamous encounters like these only point to the surface manifestations of the depth of Native American kinship relationships. Yet, Black Elk's affinity with the spirit world must be understood outside of the Western mind's conception of the mystical and metaphysical. The practical, everyday relationship, experiential attitude of this means of perceiving reality has been addressed by Calvin Martin in a unique manner.

Martin examined the kinship relations between early fur trappers, Indians and the beaver they hunted and trapped. Martin's answer to the question of why Indians would participate with whites in the exploitive extermination of fur bearing animals reveals the practical nature of the native spiritual kinship reality. Traditionally, scholars have postulated that the Indians were not able to foresee the consequences of what they were doing in the fur trade, and that their motivation was purely economic, to obtain trade goods. Martin insists that the "fur trading Indian . . . was simply too skilled a hunter to overlook the ultimate consequence of wildlife overkill." If the primary impetus of the fur trade was not economic, and the Indian understood the results of overkill, what then is the primary cause of the Indian's abrupt change from a subsistence hunter to an exploitive pursuer of furbearing animals?

Martin's answer is that on the eve of European contact the Indian and furbearing animals, especially the beaver, were engaged in a "holy war of extermination." As Martin asserted in Ethnohistory: A Better Way to Write Indian History, Eastern Algonkian Indians such as the Micmac and Ojibway (and by implication other hunter-gatherer societies) maintained a kinship relationship with the animals, birds, and places in their environment. This relationship or "power" was preserved through rituals of respect and cultural taboos. Shamans mediated in these rituals of communication with the spirits of the earth. Prior to direct contact with whites, European diseases ravaged the native's world. Their traditional rites and rituals were ineffective in responding to these epidemics, and a spiritual breakdown occurred. The shamans' rituals failed to bring healing. The stress of widespread smallpox, measles, tuberculosis and other maladies caused a crisis in the native's confidence, a breakdown in faith. They blamed the outbreaks on the fur-bearing animals and their guardian spirits. The epidemics coincided with an increase in the rodent population in the area. Colder and wetter climate conditions during these decades promoted the fur-bearing animals population. Using the stories of two early trappers, David Thompson and Alexander Henry, Martin demonstrates how the link between the animals' expanding population and malevolent animal spirits existed in the natives' mind. Thompson's narrative states, ". . . the banks at the water edge were occupied by their [beaver] houses. To every small Lake, and all the Ponds they builded [sic] dams. Even to [sic] ground occasionally overflowed, by heavy rains, they also made dams, and made them permanent ponds. . . Thus all the low lands were in possession of the Beaver, and all the hollows of the higher grounds. . . the dry land with the dominions of Man contracted, every where he was hemmed in by water without the power of preventing it." As the beaver took more land the plagues also grew in intensity. Two old Cree near Lake Winnipeg told Thompson, ". . . the Beavers had been an ancient People, and then lived on dry land; they were always Beavers and not Men, they were wise and powerful, and neither Man, nor any animal made war on them. . . I have told you that we believed in years long passed away, the Great Spirit was angry with the Beaver, and he ordered Weesaukejauk (the Flatterer) to drive them all from dry land into the water; and they became and continued very numerous; but the Great Spirit has been, and now is, very angry with them and they are now all to be destroyed [emphasis added]."

Fitting these and other legends together Martin finds that the Indian's impulse to destroy the fur-bearers may not have been for the purpose of trade, at least not originally. Economic dependence came later; initially, they were at war, and the fur trade was simply a convenient (and profitable) coincidence. The Indian simply took the "scalp" of his enemy, and Europeans with their powerful medicine (technology) were a strong ally. The failure of the Indian's traditional medicine power and their new "kinship" with the white traders caused a "sweeping and monumental despiritualization." A new outlook, a reforming world view which combined native traditions and beliefs with European rational motivation and Christianity, produced a mind set that paved the way for the wholesale slaughter of game. Nevertheless, the Indians' spiritual predilections survived. They were simply modified to suit the current circumstances. Martin's story is one of an amazing biological, ecological, psychological, as well as economic coincidence. It is an almost surreal historical coincidence that converges on the early fur trade. Martin asserts that the historian must have an understanding of all of these different factors and their relationship to one another in order to understand the history of early Euro-Indian contact.

So also must an account of the relationship between Black Elk and John Neihardt begin with an understanding that the two men saw the world from very different eyes. Neihardt's first impression of Black Elk is colored by a romantic mysticism that is a central ingredient of the make-up of an epic poet. The true mystic in this encounter is Neihardt. What Neihardt understood Black Elk as saying, "there are spirits who have informed me of your arrival," would from Black Elk's point of view, be more of a statement of this nature: "You have arrived at the appropriate time and in the appropriate manner. We should be kin (allies) in the task set before us. It is good. It is fitting. We will begin at the appropriate time--in the spring." The task in Neihardt's mind was to collect information to preserve in a book. The task in Black Elk's thinking was to establish a relationship of master/disciple by means of the traditional ritual process of Lakota culture.

The cross-cultural aspects of the encounter between Black Elk and Neihardt are extremely important to an understanding of the documents that would come out of their relationship and the effects on the history of both Indian and white that those documents would eventually have. Holler writes that, "In accord with their different cultural backgrounds, each man conceived the project differently. Black Elk agreed to give Neihardt sacred instructions; Neihardt proposed to write a book." Producing a book was not Black Elk's idea or intention, at least at the beginning. According to Hilda Neihardt, her father came home from the meeting filled with excitement about he and Sigurd's "chance" meeting with Black Elk. He immediately contacted William Morrow, the New York publisher, and described his trip, proposing a book that would not only tell the holy man's story but also the story of his people during this monumental period in the history of the United States. Neihardt told the publisher that the story of Black Elk's life would make a book "unlike any that had yet been written--a book truly Indian from the inside out." He also added that Black Elk had several friends that would contribute to the story. Morrow agreed to publish the book and to advance Neihardt one thousand dollars on the royalties. This would make it possible for Neihardt to spend time with Black Elk and his family and conduct the interviews.

Neihardt's approach to the situation was entirely in keeping with traditional anthropological and historical process. His purpose at this time was that of the literary preservation of the way of life of a dead, or at best dying, culture. As a tragic poet, he could see the task in no other way, and this perspective would become an integral part of the history he and Black Elk were about to create. It would be a panorama of history, anthropology, and literature from Neihardt's conception. Neihardt wrote Black Elk to propose his plan of a book:

This letter reveals that Neihardt saw the massacre at Wounded Knee as the end of the "complete story" of Black Elk's people. This conceptual frame would effect the book and the future of the religious ideas that would come from it. Black Elk obviously accepted the proposal, but his intentions were not necessarily to have a book produced. It is evident from the ritual process which Black Elk invoked that his intention was to initiate Neihardt as a disciple and charge him with the power of the sacred vision and knowledge he possessed as a holy man. Black Elk intended to give the power of his vision to Neihardt, and by doing so he was giving it to another culture, also.

Clyde Holler's description of how Black Elk made ritual preparations for Neihardt's visit is most revealing. They indicate that the entire project from Black Elk's point of view was the initiation of the white man into the sacred. He erected a ceremonial tipi decorated with sacred symbols, and planted a ring of pine trees around the site. The symbol over the door of the lodge was a rainbow which represented the rainbow door to the Grandfathers in Black Elk's great power vision. Neihardt was also given the name, Flaming Rainbow. His daughters were also given Lakota names, adopting them all into the tribe. The vision could not be given to outsiders. The pipe was smoked at a feast given by Neihardt where kill talks were given and the people danced. The poet was presented with a sacred hoop and a family pipe. His adoption was complete. From the name Black Elk gave him, Flaming Rainbow, it is clear that the holy man saw him as the door to his sacred vision. Neihardt's role was much more than author; it was holder of vision power, an entrance into the sacred, as well as, sender of words.

Thus began a relationship that would result in one of the most important documents ever drawn up between an Indian and a white man. In the 1960's, Black Elk Speaks, became a favorite book of the counterculture which had rejected the materialism of modern America. Through the book's popularity, Black Elk's words found their way back to not only the Lakota, but to Indians and whites from many tribes, uniting them in a common vision that had seemed for many decades to have been lost. But this vision would not be a traditional Lakota vision. It would be a vision produced out of the heart of both men, a product of two cultures. It would be a dynamic, transforming vision, not a static vision, not one frozen in time.

Black Elk was born on the Little Powder River in the "Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed on the Tongue River" (1863). He grew up as a member of Big Road's band which wandered and hunted in the western-most part of the Sioux country, on the other side of the Black Hills. The band was Oglala Lakota. There are three divisions of the group of Indians known by the white name Sioux. The Santee speak a dialect called Dakota and they inhabited the territory that would come to be known as Minnesota. They were the first to encounter the whites. It was the winter before Black Elk was born that the 38 Dakotas were hung in Mankato. Further to the west, on the prairies of what is roughly now the Dakota states, wandered the Yankton. They spoke a dialect called Nakota. Black Elk came from the westernmost division, the Teton, who spoke Lakota. They covered parts of western South Dakota, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Montana. Big Foot's band of Oglala Lakotas were Black Elk's people. They camped and hunted in the most westerly portion of the Teton country, past the Black Hills. Black Elk's father was a medicine man, as were several of his father's brothers.

In 1863, these western bands still followed the old ways of the spirit beings. When Black Elk was four years old he would hear voices singing now and then when he was playing. He did not pay too much attention to them. When he was five his father made him a bow and some arrows, and he went out to the woods one spring day to get a bird. Just before going into the woods, he saw a thunderstorm coming, and he heard a voice coming to him. He looked up and saw two men coming out of a cloud carrying spears and singing a sacred song. A kingbird that was sitting nearby told him to listen to them. The bird said, "[Look] the clouds all over are one-sided, a voice is calling you." The men were singing:

They were coming from the north and turned to go west transforming into geese as they went. The vision lasted about twenty minutes. This vision was in the year Red Cloud made the treaty that ended the so-called Red Cloud War (1868). The army agreed to close the Bozeman trail and abandon Forts C. F. Smith and Philip Kearny. This treaty would become the foundation for all the further legal negotiations between the Sioux and the United States government.

Black Elk continued to hear voices calling him now and then but most of the time he forgot about it. On August 5, 1873, the Oglalas and Brules attacked the Pawnees during a summer Buffalo hunt; they killed over a hundred of the enemy. The bands were moving west and as they came to the Little Big Horn they camped for the night. Black Elk was now nine years old. A man named Man Hip invited the boy to have supper with him. During the meal, Black Elk heard someone say, "It is time, now they are calling you." Black Elk thought to himself, "I am being called upon by the spirits," so he decided he would just go where they wanted him to be. As he left the lodge, he felt his thighs aching. The next day, after they broke camp to move on, he rode with some of his friends. They stopped at a creek to get a drink, and when he dismounted his legs would not hold him. He collapsed, helpless; he could not walk. The boys with him helped him along until the band camped again. He was very sick, his legs, arms, and even his face badly swollen. As he lay helpless and sick in a lodge, he saw through the tipi into the clouds. The same two men that had come to him while hunting birds when he was five years old came to him out of the clouds and said, "Hurry up, your grandfather is calling you." The men turned and started back up into the clouds; Black Elk got up to follow. Just as he got out of the tipi he saw a small cloud coming for him. The two men were disappearing into the big clouds. He got on the little cloud and was raised up after them. When he looked back he saw his mother and father looking up at him; he felt sorry he was leaving them.

Standing Bear, Black Elk's friend, was about thirteen at the time. He said Black Elk was unconscious for twelve days. The people said it was a "queer sickness," nobody knew what it was, and no one else in the camp was sick. Black Elk's father visited Standing Bear's lodge for supper a couple of days after Black Elk revived, and the senior Black Elk described his son's condition:

Black Elk reported feeling that his "mother and father did not welcome" him when he awoke. This feeling of alienation extended to most everyone in the band. He was up and physically cured, so he participated in the boys' games surrounding the buffalo hunt but could not fit in. The whole time he felt out of place and could not forget about the vision. Describing his feeling at the time, he said, "I felt that I did not belong to the people--they were strangers to me. I wanted to be away from the people and often would go away from them." He went off to think about the vision.

Whirlwind Chaser, the medicine man who had treated him, got a great name and was given a horse because he had cured Black Elk so quickly, but Black Elk thought it was the power of the vision that cured him. He became afraid of the medicine man and would hide from him and avoid his gaze. One night, just after Black Elk was cured, the shaman had told Black Elk's father. "Your son there is sitting in a sacred manner. I can see that there is a special duty for him to do. Just as he came in I could see the power of lightening all through his body." The only person that Black Elk felt comfortable with was his grandfather, Keeps His Tipi. His grandfather accepted him, and the boy would ask him questions, but Black Elk did not talk about the vision with him either. Even though Black Elk was acting strangely, his behavior was soon overshadowed by scouts bringing the news that buffalo had been found.

The young boy had received his "Wakinyan" (a guiding vision from the Spirit of the West, from the Thunder-beings), but it had not come in the traditional way. He had not fasted and gone out on a vision quest. He had not sought the vision; the vision had sought him. He did not have the instruction and direction of the medicine man in his quest; on the contrary, the vision separated him from the others, especially the medicine man. His vision came from the Thunder-beings giving him prophetic power. At this time Black Elk was still called by his boyhood name, "Kahachnigapi." It means "Chosen." Although no one but he knew about his vision, his boyhood name was fulfilled. It would be eight years before Black Elk would seek help from his elders to have his vision "straightened out." They would be monumental years for the Lakota, and Black Elk grew to manhood in them.

In July, 1874, Long Hair Custer left Fort Lincoln for "Paha Sapa," (Hills that are Black). The Black Hills acted as a storehouse for the Sioux. The hills were filled with small game; their lodge Pole Pines for tipi poles and sheltered valleys for winter camping drew small bands year round. But it was not the utilitarian value that stood out in the Indians' mind when they thought of Paha Sapa. Rising four thousand feet above the yellow plains, what stood out was the august power tha