NATIVE AMERICAN HERITAGE
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK 1863 - 1950
Native American Evolutionist Black Elk, the great Lakota spiritual healer, was born into the Oglala Lakota tribe of the Great Sioux Nation in December 1863 near the Little Powder River, in what is now the state of Wyoming. His life as a spiritualist was foretold in a dream he had as a nine-year-old while he lay in a coma, gravely ill. In this vision he was taken by spirits into the clouds to meet with spiritual powers which he called grandfathers; these represented the six directions: North, South, East, West, earth and sky. These grandfathers gave him sacred objects representing each of the directions and the responsibility of maintaining their circle of life, which he called the "sacred hoop." In the dream he was taken to what is now known as Black Elk Peak, which he described as the Center of the World; and from this vantage, he viewed the entire world, the two-legged, the four-legged, the winged ones, and those that swim. Then he saw his people were all dying; but when he rode through them he took the bright red stick, and at the center of the nation's hoop, he thrust it into the earth, saving them all. The gifts he received from the spirits were the foundation for his teachings, which have been studied and praised by such intellectuals as Karl Jung and other philosophers, spiritualists, and mystics. In the course of his growing up, his tribe experienced the opening of the Bozeman Trail which cut across the heart of
12
2018 HONORS CEREMONY
their best hunting grounds and fomented the Red Cloud’s War – the Lakota’s greatest victory over the US military, which abandoned its forts along the Trail. This defeat forced the US to sue for peace leading to the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which established the Great Sioux Reservation to include most of western South Dakota, and vast tracts in eastern Montana, western Nebraska and eastern Wyoming. What followed were years of devastation in which the 1868 Treaty was repeatedly broken as White pioneers scattered from the Oregon/ California Trails and began settling on Indian lands. Then the bison herds were hunted to near extinction in order to fill the insatiable demand for leather belting to drive new machinery in America’s Industrial Revolution back East, to feed crews of railroad workers and miners, and, not least in importance, to destroy the Indians’ food source as a means of subjugating them.
