Indigenous and Roman Catholic Canonizations of Nicholas Black Elk: Postcolonial Issues and Implications of Black Elk Speaks

Abstract

This article explores questions surrounding the status and teachings of Nick Black Elk, in dialogue with certain postcolonial and decoloniality theorists, as well as with commentators on Black Elk’s spirituality. It highlights liberation spirituality and theology in analyzing the religious hybridity of Black Elk and his actions of decoloniality. It also shows how Black Elk’s recent nomination for Roman Catholic canonization might continue to support certain shifts in various areas of Christian spirituality in light of Lakota influences: to respectful approaches to visionary mysticism and dreams; to positive affirmations of embodied spirituality; to ecological connections, consciousness and responsibility; and to a transformed sense of spiritual intimacy with nature.

Keywords

Black Elk colonialism decoloniality Indigenous spirituality Lakota spirituality liberation theology Ignatian spirituality John Neihardt postcolonialism Roman Catholic saints

In his intimate every day family life Black Elk may fairly be described as a saint in the deeper meaning of the term, as signifying a rare form of genius. The members of his family and his friends all feel this, and the devotion shown to him by those who know him best is striking. Though a profoundly melancholy man, he is cheerful in all his human contacts and radiates an element of kindliness even when he sits brooding with that look of heart-break in his face that has made at least one white man love him. He longs for the time when he can enter the “Outer World,” and yet during our extended visit with him and his friends, he was never slow to enter into any sport that might make my daughters happier, and he could remember many a funny story and good joke with us to liven the spirits of our party in our duller moments. He could enter into a game of hoop-and-spear with the gusto of a care-free boy, and he would dance half the night away with us under the stars to the booming of the drums and the strangely beautiful songs that he knew in his youth.

John Neihardt, Preface to the 1932 Edition, Black Elk Speaks, xviii.¹

Introduction

For many years I have had students read the book Black Elk Speaks (1932) in a comparative theology course I teach, mainly because it provides such fine examples of embodied visionary mysticism and shamanic healing. This is in striking contrast to the predominant spirituality of major streams of some of the other world religions—those that traditionally discourage visions and neglect or even disparage the body, in highlighting more inward-focused and nature-transcending spirituality. Black Elk Speaks is also a wonderful source of other features of Lakota spirituality and primal Indigenous religion, and it is an extremely accessible and attractive read. It has become very influential. In his “Foreword” to Black Elk Speaks, Vine Deloria Jr. calls the book a modern “religious classic” which “has become a North American bible of all tribes” (xiv), including young Indigenous people uncovering the sources of their own spirituality, while Raymond DeMallie refers to it as “the paradigm of American Indian religions.”²

Initially, at its 1932 publication, the book was positively reviewed but largely ignored. Reprinted in 1961, it drew renewed interest in the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the rise of the countercultural “hippie” movement, and amongst certain academics, who recognized its historical and spiritual significance.³ Today, the scholarly secondary commentary on Black Elk Speaks is vast, in various fields of anthropology, sociology, literature, history, theology, and religious studies. This very popular book, in combination with two other related books—When the Tree Flowered (1951), written by John Neihardt, and The Sacred Pipe (1953), edited by Joseph Epes Brown⁴—has become an authoritative guide for various areas of North American First Nations religion, including spiritual theory and practice, ritual, visionary mysticism, and shamanic healing. It has been “canonized,” so to speak, in Indigenous circles.

When I first read and began to teach about Black Elk Speaks about twenty years ago, I had no idea that Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa, 1863–1950)—the Oglala Lakota holy man and healer—had converted to Roman Catholicism on the Feast day of St. Nicholas, December 6, 1904, some 28 years prior to its publication in 1932, becoming “Nicholas” Black Elk, a devout and popular catechist in his community in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. John Neihardt, who wrote Black Elk’s account of his life, had failed to discuss this crucial biographical fact, and it is not mentioned in the story. This article explores Black Elk’s Lakota-Roman Catholic religious hybridity: How are we to understand Black Elk’s transforming identity in light of this apparent shift to Lakota Sioux-Roman Catholic multiple religious belonging and/or participation?⁵

“Multiple religious belonging” involves the engagement of a person—typically as a formal member—in the beliefs, rituals, rules, and praxis of more than one religious tradition, including possibly even community life. More than “inculturation,” where Black Elk is thought to have appropriated Christian faith in terms of his Lakota sociocultural framework, this article will show how Black Elk participated in a form of dual-religious belonging that came to influence developments in both Lakotism and Christianity, within a postcolonial framework of social, political, economic, and religious repression and exploitation that significantly colored the context.⁶ In exploring the harsh legacy of colonialism in relation to Black Elk, the article draws on Homi Bhaba’s theoretical model of cultural-religious “hybridity” to illustrate Black Elk’s fusing of Lakota and Christian dynamics, in creating and living a novel form of life that influences both these traditions. Bhaba speaks of the hybrid being “caught in a discontinuous time of translation and negotiation” with colonial or postcolonial matrices of power, a stance that challenges “the boundaries of discourse” and provides a unique “hybrid gap” or “hybrid cultural space”—a site of meaning that influences sociocultural developments. Black Elk fits Bhaba’s model of the coloniality hybrid.⁷

The article shows how Black Elk acted as an agent of “decoloniality”—as a force struggling against structures of destructive oppression—in maintaining crucial threads of Lakota spirituality through Black Elk Speaks, The Sacred Pipe, and other activities, while functioning as a Roman Catholic. Aníbal Quijana developed the concepts of “coloniality” and “decoloniality” in the 1990s to give voice to the way in which patterns of colonial power continue even after the formal dissolution of colonial governments (that is, in postcolonialism), in the forms, for example, of neoliberal globalism, right-wing nationalisms, current progressivisms, and ongoing religious domination, all of which continue to support the ideal of “the European paradigm of rationality/modernity.”⁸ “Decoloniality” works against such matrices of power—engendering, as Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo describe it, “liberations with respect to thinking, being, knowing, understanding, and living.”⁹ Postcolonial issues of Black Elk Speaks center around the immense poverty that the Lakota people underwent. Fundamentally, Black Elk is motivated by a proto-liberation spirituality, where he embraces and interprets the teachings of Christianity and Lakotism through the experiences of a severely impoverished people—at times literally a starving people. Black Elk and other Lakotas experienced in his lifetime a radically dramatic “irruption of the poor”—to use the famous words of Gustavo Gutiérrez—as they became a colonized group who lost “the opportunity to give expression themselves to their sufferings, their comraderies, their plans, their hopes.”¹⁰

Black Elk responds to the crisis as a religious hybrid, gaining an influential voice as a Lakota holy man and popular Roman Catholic catechist who participates in features from both religious traditions, in supporting a beleaguered people. His significance is accentuated and complicated by the 2017 initiation of the cause for his sainthood.¹¹ How might this process towards canonization function to continue the role of the Roman Catholic Church in colonial matrices of power? How might it work to support the Indigenous spirituality that Black Elk articulated so influentially and enhance movements towards decoloniality? The analysis shows how Black Elk’s nomination for canonization might continue to support certain shifts in various areas of Roman Catholic spirituality in light of Lakota influences: to respectful approaches to visionary mysticism and dreams; to positive affirmations of embodied spirituality; to ecological connections, consciousness, and responsibility; and to a transformed sense of spiritual intimacy with nature. The article begins by outlining Black Elk Speaks and clarifying four major integrated threads of Lakota spirituality and theology in the book, following preliminary discussion about controversies surrounding the authorship of the book.

Black Elk Speaks as Collaborative Autobiography

As I mentioned, there are three major published sources related to Black Elk’s life and spirituality: Black Elk Speaks, When the Tree Flowered,¹² and The Sacred Pipe.¹³ Basically, these books describe Black Elk’s life and teachings, with Black Elk Speaks being the core. In 1930, the poet-literary writer John Niehardt was looking for people who could give him firsthand accounts about a movement in the 1880s amongst some North American Indigenous people that focused on an expected Messiah—Wavoka (“the make like savior”), incarnated as Jack Wilson, a Paiute from Nevada—who would rescue and uplift the terribly oppressed and afflicted native people. Neihardt was put into contact with Black Elk at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. In initial discussion, Niehardt soon realized just how significant Black Elk and his life-story were, and Black Elk himself felt moved to share it with him, as “a fulfillment of a duty” (xviii ). The following year in May 1931 they got together for sixteen days to interview for the book. Black Elk’s son, Ben Black Elk, translated Black Elk’s spoken account; John Neihardt then immediately orally interpreted-edited Ben Black Elk’s descriptions to his daughter, Enid, who was taking stenographic notes; and Neihardt later relied on these notes in writing the story, Black Elk Speaks, which he presented through Black Elk’s voice, in the first person. So, Black Elk Speaks is classified as “collaborative autobiography.”¹⁴

Because Neihardt wrote Black Elk Speaks from translated interview materials, scholars have raised concerns about the significance of Niehardt’s creative narrative structuring, adaptations, and additions to Black Elk’s account. Neihardt was a Nebraska poet laureate and received three honorary doctorates and a 1927 Pulitzer prize nomination for one of his poems, The Song of the Indian Wars (1925), which was the third book of his five epic poems describing the American conquest of the West to 1890. Sally McCluskey describes Neihardt as “the shaping intelligence and lyric voice of the story,”¹⁵ Clyde Holler claims the “ultimate message of the book, not merely its details, is Neihardt’s, not Black Elk’s,” while G. Thomas Couser writes, “Black Elk Speaks is governed by a form of (at best) benevolent dictatorship … it is an act of ventriloquism, told not by Black Elk through Neihardt but vice versa.” Scholars emphasize Neihardt’s significance in authorship, as well as the pessimistic and tragic context he brings to the story, in highlighting the decline and passing of the native culture, which reflect his literary and academic passions.¹⁶

Although book reviews in the 1930s in New Republic, Books, and Saturday Review praised Neihardt for his apparent relatively unbiased treatment, as did Robert Sayer, who briefly compared selected portions of the book to the transcript,¹⁷ Raymond DeMallie highlights specific differences between the transcript and Black Elk Speaks. Neihardt added “historical events and cultural context” to the book in creating a “literary character” of Black Elk which (1) stresses the “theme of despair and death of the Lakota people,” (2) includes “critique of white civilization,” (3) excludes Black Elk’s reference to warfare and violence, and (4) “softens” Black Elk’s reference to the spiritual world and miracles.¹⁸ Indeed, it seems that some of the most popular passages of the book come from Neihardt, and I will highlight below significant material that appears to be his. Criticisms on this issue of authorship make clear that Black Elk Speaks cannot be classified as a wholly accurate Lakota autobiography, given the artistic literary influences and possible distortions of Neihardt, as well as, I would say, the translating influences of Ben Black Elk. One must always keep in mind that the book is collaborative autobiography. Moreover, Nick Black Elk entered into the project with the expectation of some financial remuneration.¹⁹ Though this never materialized, it highlights the relatively dependent position that Black Elk maintained in the creative dynamic. In the analysis of all three of the books relating to Black Elk’s teaching, one needs to be careful in discerning the likely contributions of Neihardt, Ben Black Elk, and Brown, and we need to be aware of any Euro-American coloniality policies and actions that might be distorting the Lakota perspective.

Still, in highlighting Neihardt’s role in creating an artistic exposé of Black’ Elk’s life, one must be careful not to lose accurate sense of Black Elk’s essential role. Some scholars emphasize the significance of Black Elk as primary source in this collaboration. Dale Stover writes, “Black Elk initiated a postcolonial dialogue by his extraordinary choice to tell his vision story to a European American writer, a decision he made intuitively during his initial visit with Neihardt that included the understanding that Neihardt would publish the vision-telling for the European American world.”²⁰ Black Elk chose to establish a kinship connection with Neihardt and share with him his knowledge of the Sacred, and for the most part he himself structured the 1931 interviews.²¹ There is much evidence to suggest that Black Elk’s motives in this collaboration were not solely financial and it is a mistake to downplay the integrity and primary influence of Black Elk in the authorship of the book, in overemphasizing Neihardt’s contributions or unfairly accusing Neihardt of neglect or even intentional disingenuousness. Moreover, Ben Black Elk and Enid Niehardt were also present at the interviews and played a role in the dynamic.

Black Elk was a resourceful and independent person who knew the coloniality authorities intimately, through travel, firsthand experience of major historical events, and his work for the Roman Catholic Church for over twenty years prior to his relationship with Neihardt. Moreover, Neihardt’s artistic vision seems to represent the stenographic transcript fairly effectively—Raymond DeMallie suggests the differences between the transcript and Black Elk Speaks are minor and consistent with the task of editing an accessible and attractive biography, while other influential scholars insist Neihardt is certainly faithful to its spirit.²² Also, I wonder if Black Elk’s English would not have been strong enough for Black Elk at least to comprehend an oral recitation of the book, in order to have affirmed the veracity of the publication, which he never said contained fabrications by Neihardt.²³ Perhaps most importantly, one must keep in mind that Neihardt had other more informal discussions with Black Elk and sufficient background knowledge of native life to aptly frame and interpret Black Elk’s account, so much of his creative adaptations might actually reflect Black Elk’s point of view. Indeed, given Black Elk’s core role in initiating this dialogue—which structures Lakota spirituality around his background and life experiences—I think we should presume that concepts, teachings, and practices expounded in the book reflect Black Elk’s perspective, unless we have evidence to suggest otherwise. Overly de-emphasizing Black Elk’s contributions as coauthor is just as problematic as downplaying or ignoring Neihardt’s role in writing the story.

This dynamic is complicated by the issues of colonial repression that Black Elk needed to navigate to make his voice heard; and there is also the issue of Christian influences on Black Elk’s Lakota spirituality—which I will outline below—as well as Lakota influences on Black Elk’s Christian spirituality. The more interesting questions for me relate to the enduring value of Black Elk Speaks as influential historical record of Lakota spirituality, one that stimulates and inspires other Indigenous peoples and other religious traditions, especially Christianity, and how his nomination for canonization might further color that dynamic.

Themes of Lakota Spirituality and Theology in Black Elk Speaks

The story constellates around a major visionary experience of Black Elk, described and interpreted in detail, in seventeen pages of the book (13–29). Briefly, in outline, at the age of nine, Black Elk becomes extremely ill and experiences a radical altered state vision over a twelve-day period, wherein he encounters various spiritual beings and animals, and receives insights, prophecies, and powers from the six Grandfathers, which are related to his future vocation as a holy man and healer, nourisher, guide, and protector of the community. The book describes how Black Elk goes on over his lifetime to interpret and ritualize communally features from his vision, and participate in shamanic healing. It also recounts major Lakota beliefs and practices, Black Elk’s participation in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show, his other travels in Europe and to Canada, and his personal experience of major historical events, such as battles with General Crooks and Custer, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, his participation in the Messiah-Ghost Dance movement, and the traumatic cultural repression, suffering, and shifting to reservation life. It is a remarkable story.

Within that biographical context, the book illustrates various aspects of Lakota spirituality, which I would categorize under four major integrated threads: Intimacy with Nature; Visionary Mysticism; the Spirit World; and the Shaman.

Intimacy with Nature. In Black Elk’s Lakota spirituality, there is acknowledgement of a profound interdependence and deep physical, emotional, and spiritual affinity among people and between people and nature, that is well illustrated in: (i) the communal sharing of food and responsibilities towards children; (ii) the tradition of giving people the names of (a) animals (e.g., “White Cow Sees,” “Plenty Eagle Feathers”—Black Elk’s mother and grandmother); or of (b) natural phenomena (e.g., “Drinks Water,” “Red Cloud”—a famous holy man and an important leader); and in (iii) attitudes of respect and gratitude that are extended to nonhuman creatures. Black Elk/Niehardt says, “The birds and other animals are the only race that we really get along with. We, [the] Indian race, and the beings on this earth—the buffalo, elk, and birds in the air—they are just like relatives to us and we get along fine with them, for we get our power from them and from them we live.”²⁴

Visionary Mysticism. Black Elk/Niehardt says: “Sometimes dreams are wiser than waking” (7). Black Elk periodically enters into altered states of consciousness involving paranormal voices and visions that mark him at a young age as a shamanic holy man (wicaśa wakan) and healer (wapiyapi and pejuta wicaśa).²⁵ Visions and dreams are significant features of Lakota spirituality because they are thought to connect a person to a spirit world and spirit beings in helpful ways for self and community.

Spirit World. Lakotas believe in a spirit world that underlies and penetrates the natural world, including unified creator spiritual beings and a sacred Divine (Wakan Tanka). It also includes spirits of ancestors, some of whom established fundamental relationships that stand as ideal archetypes of harmonious bonds in the natural world. Moreover, differentiated phenomenal reality has its own spirits that animate objects and give them their life-force. Relating to these various spirits through visions, ritual ceremonies, drumming, and dancing brings prophetic knowledge, healing power, prosperity, and communal support and harmony. It requires various purification practices and deep humility and openness. In the 1944 interviews, Black Elk recalls a Lakota creation story related to the teaching of Chief Slow Buffalo, an ancient archetypal character: “Up in the heavens, the Mysterious One, that is your grandfather. In between the earth and the heavens, that is your father. This earth is your grandmother. Whatever grows on this earth is your mother. It is just like a sucking baby on a mother. Remember that.”²⁶

Shaman. Black Elk/Niehardt describes his first healing of a sick boy: “Everything was ready now, so I made low thunder on the drum, keeping time as I sent forth a voice. Four times I cried ‘hey-a-a-hey,’ drumming as I cried to the Spirit of the World, and while I was doing this I could feel the power coming through me from my feet up, and I knew that I could help the sick little boy” (124).²⁷ The role of the medicine man is to be a special channel or medium of spiritual healing and prophetic powers generated from the spirit world for the physical and spiritual benefit of the community. As Julian Rice provocatively and insightfully comments, “while the Christian mystic receives a vision to bring his flock closer to God, a Lakota vision feeds a community enduring on the earth.”²⁸

Black Elk’s Lakota-Christian Context

Christian Influences on Black Elk’s Lakota Spirituality and Theology

Although I would say the mystical visions of Black Elk focus both on an afterlife ideal and a this-worldly well-being and flourishing, this last comment by Julian Rice highlights nicely Black Elk’s underlying commitment to a kind of proto-liberation spirituality and theology, which I will argue colored his approach to and encounter with Christianity. Moreover, in light of concerns about authorship and Neihardt’s contributions to the story, I should stress how these four themes of Lakota spirituality present in Black Elk Speaks are also expressed in the transcript materials of the 1931 and later interviews. There is no evidence to suggest that Black Elk is not the source of these views, even if Neihardt might have creatively colored certain transcript accounts. Also, it is important to note that these four themes of Lakota spirituality were either not present or not prominent in Roman Catholic theology/spirituality during Black Elk’s life. If anything, Black Elk’s espousal of these points of view reflect a resistance on his part to certain currents in Christian spiritual theology and culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which tended generally to distance and disconnect nature from spiritual life, in stressing an approach to nonhuman aspects of nature in terms of its use-value, determined by a powerful elite, in the interests of economic profit (in contrast to themes 1 and 3). Moreover, the predominant spirituality of this period in modernity was hierarchical, emphasizing a body-transcending contemplative ideal, one that criticized visionary mysticism as inferior and precarious (in contrast to theme 2), and downplayed or criticized ancient charismatic healing methods (in contrast to theme 4).

Yet, despite his resistance to such Christian leanings, Black Elk was attracted to other significant aspects of the Christian tradition and he genuinely embraced it, becoming a Lakota-Christian hybrid, as I will illustrate below. Moreover, his Lakota spirituality is colored fairly significantly by his Christian religious belonging. I will not go into detailed analysis here, but will note some major elements. Biblical influences abound, including his account of Chief Slow Buffalo’s creation story, mentioned above, which goes on to parallel developments in the Christian creation story in Genesis 2:19–20.²⁹ There are also interesting parallels among Black Elk’s major life-vision and the book of Revelation, in terms of narrative, structure, and symbol.³⁰ More extensively, Raymond DeMallie notes the influences of Christian ecumenicalism, messiahship, love, peace, and salvation on aspects of Black Elk’s story;³¹ and Damian Costello gives a fairly detailed exploration of likely Christian biblical and catechetical influences on Black Elk’s spirituality on the themes of love, Black Elk’s major visionary experience, the sacred pipe, the sun dance, suffering, and his closing prayer at Harney peak.³² However, we need to frame the Christian influences—and Black Elk’s Roman Catholic orientation—around certain issues related to colonialism.

Issues of Colonialism

North American governments forcefully worked to suppress Indigenous cultures by instituting various repressive and destructive policies and practices: (1) by legally banning traditional religious ceremonies and tribal organizations; (2) by the displacement and dispossession of tribes—destroying their major food sources, such as the Bison—and shifting a hunting/sharing-migrant population to reservations divided into privately owned allotments; and (3) by forced cultural assimilation—for example, requiring children to attend residential schools focused on inculturation, including the banning of their native languages and spiritual practices.³³ Aníbal Quijana notes how such “systematic repression” by coloniality authorities over the modes of thinking, imaging, and expression of the dominated people was then followed up with the imposition of “the rulers’ own patterns of expression, and of their belief and images with respect to the supernatural.”³⁴ Some postcolonial commentators speak of this oppression as political, economic, and social aspects of “cultural genocide,” and critique the role of Christian institutions in supporting such destructive colonial practices. George E. Tinker writes, “In North American mission history, cultural genocide almost always involved an attack on the spiritual foundations of a people’s unity by denying the existing ceremonial and mythological sense of a community in relationship to the Sacred Other.”³⁵

In the case of Black Elk and his Lakota community, it would be the Jesuits of the Holy Rosary Mission of the Pine Ridge Reservation who were complicit in such cultural destructiveness. This is illustrated in the account of Black Elk’s conversion, as described by his daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, who apparently heard it from Black Elk himself. According to Lucy, Black Elk was interrupted by a Jesuit missionary, Fr. Lindebner, while leading a healing ceremony of a young boy in 1904. Lindebner, somewhat violently, stopped the ritual, threw “the drum and rattle outside the tent,” took Black Elk “by the neck and said ‘Satan get out!’”³⁶ In this account, Black Elk meekly acquiesced; and immediately following this episode, he agreed to accompany Lindebner to Holy Rosary Mission, where he was baptized following two weeks of religious instruction. At that time of his formal conversion, it is said by some people that Black Elk stopped all participation in traditional Lakota shamanic healing rituals, in embracing Roman Catholic beliefs and practices. Raymond DeMallie writes, for example, “Black Elk’s conversion was unquestionably genuine. By accepting Catholicism he at last put himself beyond the onerous obligations of his vision, and he never practiced the Lakota religious ceremonies again.”³⁷

However, such commentary is misleading in so far as it might be interpreted to suggest that Black Elk thought all such practices to be mere superstitious pretense, ineffective, or even evil, and that he ceased all participation in Lakota spirituality, which he certainly did not. I will return to this point below. Also, for a number of reasons, some people think that Black Elk’s conversion was much more gradual, and that this account from Lucy Looks Twice might have been creatively embellished on Black Elk’s part. Black Elk himself had recounted an almost identical story, where he was similarly confronted by a priest in 1901 or 1902, but the boy survived, Black Elk did not convert, and the priest soon died. Apparently, other Manderson residents doubted Lucy’s account and there are different descriptions of Black Elk’s conversion given by another Jesuit and a friend of Black Elk. Also, given the gentle and caring disposition of Father Lindbener, the esteem granted to the Rosebud missionaries, and the respect given to Black Elk, some people question some of the details of the story. Although such doubts about the account can easily be interpreted as another instance of coloniality misreading and cultural repression on the part of interpreters, one wonders if Black Elk might not have been playing a bit of a heyoka-trickster role in its telling to Lucy at the time.³⁸

Indeed, some eighteen years prior to this conversion, Black Elk formally encountered Christianity in substantial ways, in his participation in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in 1886–1888, at about 23 years of age. In fact, he was baptized Episcopalian, which was a requirement of employment, and letters he wrote at the time suggest that he looked favorably on aspects of Christianity—specifically conceptions of God, God’s providence, and the suffering and resurrection of Jesus.³⁹ Here it would appear we have economic concerns driving Black Elk’s initial participation in Christianity. Yet, surely these early encounters of Christianity colored his mystical experiences related to the Ghost dance in 1890, which he later interpreted in a Christian context.⁴⁰ There is much evidence to suggest that Black Elk eventually genuinely embraces Christianity.

In 1892 he marries Katie War Bonnet, who then converts to Roman Catholicism, and their three children are baptized. Katie dies in 1903 and, shortly after, in 1904, Black Elk also converts. Again, though some traditionalists argue that grief and harsh economic circumstances drove Black Elk into Roman Catholicism, it is clear that his commitment to Christianity became very deeply felt and influential. After his conversion in 1904 he worked for about 30 years as a devout and popular catechist and active member of the St. Joseph’s society. It is obvious that Black Elk was attracted to the Christian tradition—to its conceptions of God and Christ, to its approach to suffering and rituals, and message of hope and universal communion—and he genuinely and deeply embraced it, as numerous people attest—family, friends, and Jesuit missionaries. Moreover, as I illustrated earlier, his Lakota spirituality becomes colored by his participation in Christianity. But his Lakota-Christian hybrid context needs to be interpreted within a postcolonial reading of his spirituality.

It is important to note the general policy amongst the Jesuit missionaries in the repression of traditional Lakota beliefs and rituals, like the yuwipi ceremony and heyoka, the sun dance, the rabbit dance, and obviously other healing rituals, such as this one described by Black Elk’s daughter. Christopher Vecsey summarizes their intentions: “They meant to alter the fundamental conditions of Lakota existence: their family life, their economy, their spiritual orientation, their medicinal practices. Such was the basic ‘paradigm’ of the early missionaries.”⁴¹ Certainly, as Damian Costello argues, some Jesuits actually challenged the coloniality practices mentioned above, by the way in which they buffered between the natives and the government/military and evangelized in the Lakota language, which “tended to legitimate the totality of Indigenous culture.” In activities of “implicit dissidence” against government policies, some Jesuit missionaries also allowed the native people to maintain communal structure and leadership via their religious societies and their work as catechists; and some of these Jesuits even underwent a process of “Lakotization,” which included participating in ceremonies where they were made relatives and received Lakota names.⁴² Ross Alexander Enochs echoes this view, highlighting the Jesuit use and encouragement of the Lakota dialect, the openness to Lakota mythic storytelling and healing remedies, monotheistic parallels, and allowing for various forms of inculturation, such as funeral customs, art, and the smoking of the sacred pipe.⁴³

Yet, such nuancing of the dynamic of missionary activities needs to be always seen against the formal intentional repression of Lakota spirituality and ritual. Vecsy comments on the present-day perspectives on such treatment:

Resentment still exists over the decades in which whites refused to permit traditional religious practices, even amongst those who have forever eschewed those practices. Since traditional Lakota religious practice—with its emphasis on everyday behavior and effect on relatives was so embedded in community life, the impingements were not only on liturgical form but on the very way of life of the Lakotas, and Lakotas still resent white Christians for destroying that way of life. Many Lakotas perceive Christianity as the cause, not the cure, for contemporary Lakota social woes.⁴⁴

Even if we presume significant inculturation practices on the part of some of the Rosebud missionaries in relation to the Lakota, Black Elk’s public participation in Lakota beliefs and activities would have been severely restricted following his conversion to Roman Catholicism, if he hoped to maintain his positions in the St. Joseph society and as catechist.

This postcolonial issue of spiritual/cultural repression and destruction is accentuated by the extremely impoverished conditions of North American Indigenous people. In the 1944 interviews with Neihardt, Black Elk mentions at least four times that the greatest problem facing the Lakota was the acquisition of food: “Food comes first. … Food is the most difficult thing of all.”⁴⁵ In Black Elk Speaks, Black Elk/Neihardt give the moving account of the colonizer’s mass destruction of the Buffalo to sell the hides or tongues, leaving the meat to rot, without concern for its essential importance to the Indigenous people: “The Wasichus [white men] did not kill [the bison] to eat; they killed them for the metal that makes them crazy, and they took only the hides to sell. Sometimes they did not even take the hides, only the tongues; and I have heard that fire-boats came down the Missouri River loaded with dried bison tongues. You can see that the men who did this were crazy” (133).

Although DeMallie notes that this very moving passage is not to be found in any form in the transcript interviews⁴⁶—so is likely a contribution of Niehardt—it seems highly doubtful that Black Elk would have disapproved of it. In his interviews, Black Elk mentions various periods of famine amongst his people. This issue continued into reservation life, with governments at times withholding food or maintaining reduced rations in order to secure the cooperation of Indigenous peoples, while the Jesuits at Holy Rosary Mission provided food as “an inducement towards conversion.”⁴⁷ Black Elk’s participation in Christianity can only be understood in terms of his underlying concern for the well-being of his family, community, and tribe, which suffered immensely. Catherine Keller insists, “The engagement of postcolonial theory by theology is incoherent outside of the effects of liberation theology.”⁴⁸ This certainly seems to be the case in appreciating Black Elk’s spirituality and theology—a point which seems underplayed by some Black Elk scholars.

Black Elk and Liberation Spirituality and Theology

In the many accounts of the hardships of Indigenous residential school life in Canada—which some critics refer to as imprisonment—one common thread is the acknowledgement that the food at the schools, no matter how bad or good it might have been at certain times, was always regularly available and more nourishing than what one would get at home on the reservation. This is one of the stated reasons that many North American Indigenous people allowed their children to attend these schools—because of the very harsh, impoverished, and unstable conditions at home.⁴⁹ And this fact gives a certain authenticity and illuminating context to Black Elk’s curt answer to Neihardt’s question about why Black Elk had stopped certain Lakota spiritual practices when he embraced the Roman Catholic religion. According to Neihardt’s daughter Hilda, he replied simply, “My children had to live in this world.”⁵⁰

Surely, Black Elk’s position as catechist (1904–1932)—where he basically functioned in his Church community as a present-day Roman Catholic deacon—would have brought him some material benefits and security against the major difficulties and uncertainties of reservation life, in support of his family. It brought him a salary (apparently between $5–15 dollars per month), a residence, travel opportunities, prestige, authority, and other benefits, including even the use of a car. In a 1909 letter to Father Ketcham, Father Westropp reports that Black Elk would be receiving 80 head of cattle “within a year or so.” Though it is not clear if the Jesuits supported him on this purchase, Westropp indicates in the letter, “I am attending to him and he is on his way to prosperity.”⁵¹ In a postcolonial reading of Black Elk Speaks, one recognizes that Black Elk’s role as catechist—and his religious hybridity—is indelibly linked with the radical poverty of his people.⁵²

Black Elk’s Christian context can only be understood in terms of his underlying concern for the well-being of his family, community, and tribe, which suffered immensely. If we see him as first and foremost concerned about human healing and liberation in this life, as anticipation of ultimate salvation, we can appreciate the nuances of his Christian conversion and religious hybridity. Obviously, as a catechist, Black Elk would be better able to support his family and community, physically and spiritually, and his generosity in that context—pastoral and material—is well noted, to the point where one missionary priest complained that Black Elk’s giving was excessive and not discriminating enough.⁵³ This liberation spirituality is linked with the realities of colonial domination. Black Elk’s conversion to Roman Catholicism and activities as catechist were motivated by extremely difficult circumstances brought on by the repression of his people by colonial matrices of power, intent on destroying a cultural/spiritual way of life alien to their European Christian context. There were distinct economic and political advantages to Black Elk’s Christian conversion; and, later, even his connections with Neihardt were motivated, at least in part, by the promise of financial reward. His immersion in Roman Catholicism and collaboration with Niehardt were invigorated by concerns for the well-being of his family and the Lakota people and culture, within the midst of tremendous poverty and colonial oppression. This background underlies his religious hybridity.

Black Elk’s Christian-Lakota Context

Religious Hybrid

Damian Costello argues that “Black Elk’s Lakota discourse manifests a fundamentally Catholic orientation.”⁵⁴ However, for a number of reasons, it also seems clear that Black Elk’s Catholic perspective is colored deeply by his Lakota grounding and orientation. We need to question the claims that, after his 1904 conversion, Black Elk stopped all participation in traditional Lakota religious ceremonies and beliefs, in embracing solely the Roman Catholic tradition; and we need to highlight Black Elk’s four integrated threads of Lakota spirituality, which I categorized at the beginning of this article, in interpreting his Lakota-Christian hybridity. Within that context, it seems to me that one can make a plausible case that Black Elk influences Christian theology and spirituality in general but significant ways, which I will outline below.

Nick Black Elk is a polarizing figure. Some say that, following his 1904 conversion, he practiced Roman Catholicism as an essentialist Lakota holy man, simply for sociocultural survival,⁵⁵ while others claim he became Roman Catholic but integrated some Lakota spirituality along the line of some form of Christian essentialist, fulfillment, or completion theory,⁵⁶ while still others claim a bi-religious orientation or hybridity, of one sort or another, that does not prioritize one tradition over another.⁵⁷ It seems most likely to me that Black Elk was, as Julian Rice describes him, “an ingenious, syncretic Lakota-Christian”⁵⁸—though I would suggest that Black Elk was not just a Lakota-“Christian,” but also a genuine Christian-“Lakota.” I would also claim that Black Elk was not “syncretic” in the traditionally negative, Roman Catholic sense of the word, as an “unprincipled comingling” of religions, which distorts one tradition or another.⁵⁹ Moreover, as I said, it is obvious that Black Elk was enamored by the Christian tradition and it influences his Lakota perspective, but he always maintained a fundamental commitment to his family and community—to their survival and the future prosperity of Lakota spirituality and culture, in terms of his proto-liberation spirituality. Catherine Keller observes, “Postcolonial theory at its best resists the dissipation of liberatory energies into an urbane multiculturalism. It rightly recognizes that hybridity, in all its ambiguity, remains incurable—and contains great potential for resistance.”⁶⁰

The Catholic Church at the time banned traditional Lakota religious rituals and certain beliefs, so Black Elk would have been ostracized from the Church if he were known to be participating in any of them or resisting any specific teachings or practices of the Church. Yet, in his 1931 interviews, some twenty-seven years after his Christian conversion, Black Elk describes his Lakota visions and various traditional shamanic practices as if they were sacred happenings, genuine and efficacious, in support of the well-being of the community. Moreover, from 1935 until his death in 1950, quite apart from his Christian context, Black Elk continued to say positive things about traditional Lakota spirituality in other interviews (especially in 1944) and he regularly participated in the annual Alex Duhamel Sioux Indian Pageant in the Black Hills, which he himself had initially proposed to Duhamel. Billed as the medicine man, Black Elk was central to the show, which performed various forms of Lakota spirituality for audiences: death rituals, ceremonies of the pipe and the sun dance, other social and religious dances and chanting, and even the shamanic healing of a boy. There are also reports of some authentic healing activities on his part during this period.⁶¹

Black Elk maintained continuously a positive view of some of the banned Lakota spiritual beliefs and practices, even if he stopped participating in some of them—such as the yuwipi ceremony and heyoka—and criticized the motives of some of the traditional practitioners. Indeed, the evidence here seems so strong that I would not be surprised if other stories surface of his participation in some of these traditional practices in secret, or of his incorporation of significant aspects of them—such as shamanic openness to purification, intentional healing, and prophecy—in his performance of certain Roman Catholic rituals and prayer. And, surely, he never abandoned his respect for and dependence upon visions and dreams for spiritual direction and preaching. He always maintained the four integrated threads of Lakota spirituality, which I categorized above.

Black Elk as a Decoloniality-Agent

Such teachings and actions highlight Black Elk’s significance as a decoloniality-agent—a person who struggled in his own way against the colonial matrices of power—social, political, economic, religious—in providing a creative integration of aspects of Christian spirituality with traditional Lakota spiritual experience, attitudes, and tenets, in support of an extremely impoverished and oppressed people. Black Elk Speaks resists and transgresses the hold of the Christian colonizer and “challenges the reader to think with (and not simply about)” the colonized Lakota, to use the words that Catherine Walsh observes about effective decolonial praxis in general—which, I would say, gives Black Elk Speaks its tremendous power.⁶² This led to conflict with Jesuit missionaries, after Black Elk Speaks was published in 1932, because the book speaks so highly of Lakota spirituality.⁶³

Apparently, the dissension was so intense that Black Elk stopped serving as catechist or was removed; and the Jesuits stopped employing native catechists altogether by the 1940s.⁶⁴ Within the context of this acrimony, Black Elk signed a “Final Speech” in 1934 (January 26), which Jesuit priest Placidus Sialm hoped to be included in every future edition of Black Elk Speaks. It acknowledges that Black Elk Speaks does not mention his already well-established Roman Catholic context and summarizes Black Elk’s major Christian beliefs and activities, claiming that he now lives in “the true faith” of Roman Catholicism: “The Indian religion of long ago did not benefit mankind. The medicine man sought only glory and presents from their curing. … The Indian medicine man did not stop sin. … I want to go straight in the righteous way that the Catholics teach us so my soul will reach heaven.”⁶⁵

In an uncritical reading of this document, one would be led to think that Black Elk abandoned completely his Lakota heritage in embracing solely the European Catholicism of his Jesuit mentors—that he himself explicitly denies any sense of multiple religious belonging. In a postcolonial reading, however, we learn that this sweeping declaration seems to have been Black Elk’s half of a quid pro quo, so he could receive sacraments of the last rites, after he had seriously injured himself falling off a horse in 1933, which colors negatively its status and significance. The letter begins, “I called my priest to pray for me and so he gave me Extreme Unction and Holy Eucharist. Therefore I will tell you the truth.”⁶⁶ Joe Jackson suggests the statement was orchestrated by Lucy and dictated by Sialm, since it quotes directly writings in some of the priest’s publications that were critical of Lakota practices and beliefs. There is another declaration (September 24, 1934) that Black Elk did not sign, which Jackson suspects Sialm might also have authored, because of the idiom of that letter.⁶⁷

Clearly, even if it is evident from the signed declaration that Black Elk highly valued the Roman Catholic sacraments and that he might have been disappointed that Black Elk Speaks did not mention his Christian context, one cannot presume an absolute dismissiveness of all Lakota spirituality on the part of Black Elk (e.g., “The Indian religion of long ago did not benefit mankind”), given the very dubious setting of the 1934 declaration and the simple fact that Black Elk speaks so highly of many aspects of Lakota spirituality in Black Elk Speaks, The Sacred Pipe, and in other interview contexts after 1934, where he even criticizes the Christian colonizers in dialogue with Neihardt and Brown, and initiates and participates in the Duhamel pageant.⁶⁸ His words and actions from 1931 to 1950 clearly contradict aspects of the 1934 signed declaration. Rather, the tensions surrounding Black Elk’s orientation highlight the realities that a religious hybrid such as Black Elk needed to manage—what Homi Bhaba refers to as an “in-between position” that requires careful negotiation by the person who occupies a space different from both the colonizer and the colonized, where he or she controversially creatively reforms to some degree the authoritative context, according to her or his Native background and inspiration: “The incalculable colonized subject—half acquiescent, half oppositional, always untrustworthy—produces an unresolvable problem of cultural difference for the very address of colonial cultural authority.”⁶⁹ Catherine Keller writes,

Postcolonialism questions the basis on which “insiders” and “outsiders” are identified—“the rules of recognition.” … As a consequence, it threatens the practice of exclusion and subordination that are based on those distinctions. … So the hybrid must constantly negotiate her/his position between contrasting, often contradictory, realities. This in-between position can be painfully torn between conflicting loyalties and subject to the rejection of all groups . . .⁷⁰

To remain Catholic, Black Elk needed to appease Jesuit missionaries—which required the public downplaying of Lakota spirituality in relation to Christianity. By portraying Lakota spirituality and theology historically, via Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe, he was able to convey his native beliefs and practices in a compelling and—what turns out to be—an immensely influential manner, that allowed him to maintain his Catholicism, though not without some awkwardness and tensions, which included eventually the loss of his position as catechist and the criticisms towards him by some Jesuit missionaries and some of his traditional Lakota neighbors. But this is what makes Black Elk’s cause for Roman Catholic canonization so intriguing to me: if Black Elk is canonized, will not his books—Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe—be included within the same category of other “classics” of Roman Catholic spirituality, functioning like the written works of, or about, such Saints as Francis of Assisi, Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and Thérèse of Lisieux, despite the fact that they contain no explicit reference to Christian theology or spirituality and an immense amount of traditional Lakota spirituality (albeit colored by Christian elements)? How can that not happen, given Black Elk’s coauthorship and enduring commitment to the teachings in these texts? If Black Elk is to be canonized, surely the Roman Catholic Church would be supporting the four essential features of Lakota spirituality that I described earlier in this article: Intimacy with Nature; Visionary Mysticism; the Spirit World; and the Shaman.

Concluding Reflections

In closing, I raise some interrelated implications and hopes. First, as I mentioned, in canonizing Black Elk, the Roman Catholic Church would be supporting these four traditional Lakota foci of Black Elk’s Christian-Lakota spirituality in a significant fashion. This would seem to me a positive move in the very difficult process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples of North America, in response to the complicity of the Roman Catholic church in the cultural oppression of Indigenous peoples. As a Christian-Lakota hybrid, such canonization of Black Elk would perhaps mark a significant step in the Church’s movement towards authentic decoloniality—a genuine letting go of its colonial matrix of power—by acknowledging the legitimacy, value, and significance of certain non-Christian spiritualities and their positive influences on Christianity. It might be a powerful gesture of reconciliation. However, to claim a completion or fulfillment of Lakota spirituality in Christianity within the context of Nick Black Elk’s life and teachings—or some other form of Christian essentialism—would surely only frustrate movements towards effective decoloniality, suppressing and perhaps even poisoning efforts of reconciliation with Native peoples, unless one also claimed the complementary influence upon and fulfillment of Christian spirituality through Nick Black Elk’s Lakota spirituality.

The problem with claims of complementarity between different religious traditions is that they bring into question the independent value and verity of both traditions. Is there a way in which one can speak of the mutual complementary support of these two traditions, while at the same time maintaining their own “efficacy and truth”? This issue is complex and requires extensive discussion that would go well beyond the core questions of this article.⁷¹ However, it is important to point out that there does appear to be significant shifts in Christian theology and spirituality in general, along the lines of aspects of these major threads of Lakota spirituality given in Black Elk’s teachings, in the last sixty years or so. One wonders to what degree these Christian openings have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by the teachings of Black Elk Speaks and The Sacred Pipe, given their immense popularity. I suspect, for example, they have contributed in some positive way, however minor or major these might be, to: (1) the rise of Christian charismatic movements and greater openness in Christianity to more embodied forms of spiritual and mystical experience, since the 1960s; (2) the shifting orientations of the sacrament of the anointing of the sick, to emphasize healing in this-life; (3) more expansive approaches to certain themes in traditional Ignatian spirituality, such as the discernment of spirits and admonitions to find God in all things; and (4) increase in sensitivity by Christians to the significance of nonhuman creatures and the natural environment in general, and our potential intimate relation to it, emotionally and spiritually.⁷²

I cannot document specific and direct links of these influences of Black Elk’s Lakota spirituality on these Christian transformations in practice and attitudes, because Christian theologians have not traditionally cited their non-Christian sources and influences and I suspect they have for the most part been quite general. Still, it is evident, for example, that developments in Ignatian spirituality since the early 1990s are creatively paralleling this Lakota theme of spirit in nature. In 2011, the Task Force on Jesuit Mission and Ecology gave formal emphasis to reconciliation with creation and restorative ecological justice, including imperatives to “care for the environment” and to heal “our Mother” earth, and, most significantly, the acknowledgement of Indigenous “identities and knowledge” as exemplars in these shifting attitudes, though without mentioning Black Elk Speaks or any other specific influence.⁷³ Also, in 2015 Pope Francis writes passionately about this potential awareness of the intimate relation between people and nature: “The universe unfolds in God, who fills it completely. Hence, there is a mystical meaning to be found in a leaf, in a mountain trail, in a dewdrop, in a poor person’s face. The ideal is not only to pass from the exterior to the interior to discover the action of God in the soul, but also to discover God in all things.” Such admonitions are consistent with and support one of the four 2019–2029 universal apostolic preferences of the Society of Jesus, “Caring for our Common Home,” with an emphasis on collaboration.⁷⁴

Amanda Porterfield observes, Black Elk Speaks “has played a crucial role in the burgeoning interest in native religions in the United States, and this interest has altered the face of mainstream religions, contributing to their ‘greening’ with regard to concern for environmental issues, and to their respect for Native American people as authorities on the relationship between spiritual insight and attentiveness to the natural world.”⁷⁵ So we find this movement in Ignatian spirituality, advocating the healing of nature and emphasis upon our potential intimate relationship with it. In that regard, Black Elk teaches a compelling Lakota version of what some Andean Indigenous thinkers describe as decolonial vincularidad—which means a kind of relational bonding with things that have their own intrinsic value, in contrast to traditional colonial matrices of intentional and exploitive will and power over others and natural resources. Catherine Walsh describes vincularidad as “the awareness of the integral relation and interdependence amongst all living organisms (in which humans are only a part) with territory or land and the cosmos. It is a relation and interdependence in search of balance and harmony of life in the planet.”⁷⁶ Perhaps this essential Lakota teaching of Black Elk will serve to continue to inspire and assist in the deepening and expansion of recent imperatives of Christian institutions, to respond compassionately and re-constructively to the environmental crisis, in healing a deeply damaged and distorted relationship.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Versions of this article were presented at: the Inaugural 2019 Scarboro Missions Lecture in Interreligious Dialogue, at the Msgr. John Mary Fraser Centre for Practical Theology, Regis College; the 2019 meeting of the International Academy of Practical Theology, São Leopoldo, Brazil; the 2019 meeting of the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, the Canadian University Congress, University of British Columbia, Vancouver; the 2019 Australian Catholic University’s International Conference on Comparative Theology, Melbourne, Australia; and the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions, Toronto. I would like to thank the editorial reviewers of TS for their helpful comments.

ORCID iD

Michael Stoeber

Notes

Author Biography

Michael Stoeber is professor of spirituality and philosophy of religion at Regis College and cross-appointed to the Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto. He is also Scarboro Missions Chair of Interreligious Dialogue at the Msgr. John Mary Fraser Centre of Practical Theology. His current research explores topics on comparative mysticism, the intersection of spirituality and art, and issues in meditation, prayer, and yoga across religious traditions. Alongside three books and a co-edited volume, recent essays have appeared in: International Journal of Practical Theology (“Theopoetics as Response to Suffering: The Visual Art of Käthe Kollwitz in the Reformation of Practical Theodicy”); The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (“The Comparative Study of Mysticism”); Toronto Journal of Theology (“Mysticism in The Brothers Karamazov”); and Routledge Handbook of Yoga and Meditation Studies (“Christianity: classical, modern and postmodern forms of contemplation,” with JaeGil Lee, forthcoming).