![]() ![]() While Neihardt felt great affection and respect for Black Elk, he did not really understand him, and he made the highly complex religious figure into a simplistic if sympathetic symbol of the defeat of the traditional Indian way of life. Neihardt omits forty years of Black Elk’s life because he feels that white readers would find Black Elk’s traditional religious experiences inauthentic if they knew he was relating them after he became a Catholic. Neihardt’s book is a truncated and somewhat elaborated account of a man who had a career as a Sioux shaman, and later converted to Christianity. ![]() While not an outright fraud like Little Tree, written by a white Alabamian with ties to the Ku Klux Klan 2, or Red Fox, in which someone posing as a Sioux invented a life for himself 3, it turns out that Black Elk Speaks is not true to the full life of its protagonist. Norman, University of Oklahoma Press, 1 (.)ĢStarting in the 1970s with the efforts of Sally McCluskey and Michael Castro, a group of scholars have raised questions about the authenticity of Black Elk Speaks 1. 4 See Michael Steltenkamp, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala.3 See Vine Deloria, God is Red, n° 4, Golden North American Press, 1992, 44. ![]()
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