Based on conversations with Black Elk's surviving friends and
relatives, especially his daughter Lucy Looks Twice: a reassessment
of the Lakota holy man's religious vocation. Although Black Elk
(1863-1950) is usually ranked as the most important Native American
religious figure of the past two centuries, almost nothing is known
of his life beyond the age of 28, the year that concludes his
classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks (1932; coauthored with John
Neihardt). Here, Steltenkamp (Anthropology/Bay Mills Community
College) fills in the blanks. Scholars have long been aware that
Black Elk converted to Catholicism in 1904 - an event often covered
up by radical Indian activists - but Steltenkamp makes it clear
that this turn to Christianity was neither halfhearted nor coerced
but, rather, the culmination of Black Elk's religious search.
Lakota religious expression, he finds, is more flexible than
previously believed; Black Elk's Catholicism was another way of
maintaining his Indian identity. Taking issue with Neihardt's
portrait of a pessimistic exwarrior, Steltenkamp paints the mature
Black Elk - whether reciting his rosary, building a chapel, or
exhorting other Indians to convert - as patient, kind,
hard-working, and happy. While interviewing Black Elk's associates,
Steltenkamp hears repeated complaints about how the holy man has
been misrepresented by the media, and a second issue emerges: the
right of Indians to choose their own way of life, be it Catholic or
otherwise, free from pressures by those who wish to freeze their
history in 1890, at the massacre at Wounded Knee. A real step
forward in American Indian religious studies. (Kirkus Reviews)
This biography of Black Elk is based on extensive interviews
with Lucy Looks Twice, the holy man's last surviving child, as well
as others who knew him personally. Michael F. Steltenkamp sheds new
light on the figure portrayed in Black Elk Speaks as a victim of
Western subjugation, doomed to live out his life as a relic of the
past. Instead, Steltenkamp reveals that in 1904 Black Elk was
baptized a Catholic and subsequently served as a devoted catechist
and missionary to his fellow American Indians until his death in
1950.
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