Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Summer 1997

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 3/4, Summer/Fall 1997, pp. 261-62.

Comments

Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In 1931 fourteen year-old Hilda Neihardt accompanied her father and her sister Enid to the Pine Ridge Reservation for the interviews that became Black Elk Speaks. Now, sixty-four years later, she provides a "human-interest narrative" of previously unpublished anecdotes from that historically significant visit, as well as pointed revelations intended to correct "serious misunderstandings" of several unnamed but identifiable interpreters.

Some of the descriptions accurately reflect racial attitudes and stereotypes of 1931. One of the elderly witnesses to Black Elk's narrative, Chase-in-the-Morning, "was slim, hardened, and strongly built .... His aquiline face, twinkling eyes, and long hair completed for us the picture of the perfect Indian" (37). In context and in retrospect this description reflects outdated cultural perceptions that are more historically informative than detrimentally romantic. Similarly, Hilda Neihardt's candor illuminates cultural differences without selfserving apologies: "Black Elk often said that people should live together, or people and animals should live together, as Ben [Black Elk's son and the interpreter for Black Elk Speaks] pronounced it, 'like relateeves.' This tickled us because in our society relatives do not always demonstrate loving congeniality. Of course we did not let our Lakota friends see our amusement; our chuckling was done when we were alone in our tepee" (66).

Bridging the decades from a time of little or no cross-cultural understanding to the present plethora of translative writings, Neihardt's daughter addresses two issues: Black Elk's Catholicism and the significance of his final prayer at Harney Peak. In 1973 Michael F. Steltenkamp interviewed Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, to fulfill her wish that her father be remembered as a dedicated catechist who never went back to traditional belief or practice. In that interview Looks Twice tells Steltenkamp that Neihardt had exploited Black Elk by not revealing his fervent Christianity in Black Elk Speaks. Hilda Neihardt tells us that a year after her interview with Steltenkamp, Looks Twice read Black Elk Speaks for the first time. She did so because her Catholicism had not been sufficiently helpful in coping with her father's death. This reading changed her life and caused her to become a "pipe carrier" until her own death in 1978. After she had abandoned her Catholic faith she admitted to Hilda Neihardt that in 1950, just before his death, Black Elk said: "The only thing I really believe is the pipe religion" (119).

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