Black Elk

With relatively few verifiable sources available to reconstruct the life of the turn-of-the-century Lakota holy man Black Elk, the author Joe Jackson relies heavily on context; he builds a detailed historical framework to understand Black Elk's times. Philip Burnham's biography, Song of Dewey Beard (2014), on a contemporary of Black Elk about whom far less is known, offers a successful recent example of this approach. Unfortunately, the larger history Jackson constructs is highly flawed on multiple fronts. Running nearly five-hundred pages, the text uses considerable space narrating the familiar tale of late nineteenth-century Lakota history, which has already been told countless times and far better by recent scholars. Jackson adds nothing to that history while regurgitating tired tropes. Occasionally cringe-worthy contentions include: equating nineteenth-century Lakotas with “wandering Israelites” (p. 3); classifying them (and the Scots) as a “martial race” (p. 116); accepting a 1975 Reader's Digest pronouncement that the 1890 slaughter at Wounded Knee was “mostly a battle, partly a massacre” (p. 4); and claiming scholars understand Crazy Horse no better now than they did fifty years ago (p. 42). Jackson paints 1860s Lakota nomadism as “ancient” (p. 54) when it was maybe a hundred years old, postconquest Indian men as “tragic figures” (p. 349), and Indian wives of any era as wretched “workhorses” (p. 352). Nineteenth-century indigenous religious visionaries are cast as mentally ill schizophrenics, but Jackson offers no parallel analysis/denigration of “Western society,” which the author posits as Jungian, scientific, and medical, even as the current pope canonizes early twentieth-century European children who supposedly saw the Virgin Mary (p. 15). Some discussions of major epochs and ideas (Lakota expansion, intertribal violence, assimilation) are unattributed, oversimplified, or misinterpreted. And the prose, while very well written, is casually littered with colloquialisms bound to make scholars shudder (e.g., “long-hairs,” “Stone Age,” “shamans,” “the white man,” “peyote cult

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• New Light on Black Elk and The Sacred Pipe

  Open Access•Michael Fitzgerald•American Indian Culture and…•2017

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