Volume 2 Number 3
October 1962

The dictionary says that values are acts, customs, and so forth, regarded in a favorable way by a people. In a broad sense, everything educates, some things more than others. The learning process continues through life, I suppose, if we are normal mentally; but it is the use to which we put what we learn that determines whether we become educated or civilized.

Some values change; others don't. The latter are called lasting values. These are the ones we are most concerned with at this conference.

In this connection, I have been thinking of Black Elk, medicine man of the Oglala Sioux, who personified those values we have been thinking about here. His story can be found in a book by the poet, John G. Neihardt. Title of the book is Black Elk Speaks: The Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Black Elk was not only an outstanding Indian leader, along with Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, but a man of extraordinary gifts.

You will see, as we go along, what is meant by values, the things men live by, so there will be no need to point them out. Each of you will draw from Black Elk's story whatever meaning it has for you.

At the time John Neihardt went to see Black Elk, he had been doing some research into the great Messianic dream that came to the desperate Indians in the middle 80s of the past century. The last of the five narrative poems which comprise his Cycle of the West is called The Song of the Messiah, and it tells of the period which ended with the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on December 29, 1890.

His research may have given Neihardt the inspiration for one of his short poems, Let Me Live Out My Years:

Let me live out my years in heat of blood!

Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine!

Let me not see this soul-house built of mud

Go toppling to the dust - a vacant shrine!

Let me go quickly like a candle light

Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow!

Give me high noon - and let it then be night!

Thus would I go.

And grant me, when I face the grisly Thing,

One haughty cry to pierce the gray Perhaps!

0 let me be a tune-swept fiddlestring

That feels the Master Melody - and snaps!

This was not to be Black Elk's privilege, however. High noon for him was followed by a long twilight of anguish and sorrow, and instead of the great dream he had of liberating his people, he reproached himself for what he thought was his failure.

Black Elk was a Lakota of the Oglala band. He was born in December, 1863. As we have seen, he was a medicine man, and so was his father. It was Black Elk's father who had refused to go to Washington and see the Great Father there, saying, "My Father is with me, and there is no Great Father between me and the Great Spirit."

The tragedy that befell the Sioux had been prophesied many years before by a Lakota holy man named Drinks Water, who dreamed that the bison would be wiped out and that a strange race would weave a spider's web all around the Lakotas. He told them, "When this happens, you shall live in square, gray houses in a barren land, and beside those square gray houses, you shall starve." And so it came to pass.

Black Elk heard voices from his early childhood on. There was scarcely a time within his memory when he had not heard voices. When he was five years old, his grandfather made him a bow and some arrows. One day, as he was riding into the woods along a creek, he saw a kingbird sitting on a limb. He was about to shoot the bird when it spoke to him, saying, "Listen! A voice is calling you!"

The child looked up into the clouds and saw two men coming down, headfirst, Eke arrows slanting down, and as they came they sang a sacred song, and the thunder was like drumming. When the two came close, they wheeled and disappeared into the west, assuming the forms of geese.

He did not talk about this to anyone. He would hear voices occasionally after that, when he was out by himself, but he was not old enough to understand what they wanted.

When he was nine, he had a very serious illness for twelve days, and nearly died. His arms and legs were swollen badly and his face was all puffed up.

As he lay in the tepee, he saw through the opening the two men coming down from the sky again. This time they came clear down to the ground, stood a little way off, and said, "Hurry! Come! Your Grandfathers are calling you!"

As he rose to follow them his legs did not hurt any more. He felt very light. A little cloud stooped to pick him up and carry him away, and as he looked down he saw his parents and was sorry to be leaving them.

Then followed a series of most remarkable experiences, which I wish there were time to describe. This was his Great Vision, and it lasted for twelve days, while his body lay like dead in his tepee. He did not talk about his vision, although he did relate most of it to John Neihardt, so that it could be recorded. Some of it, he felt, should not be told. Indeed, there are some things that cannot be told, even if we wanted to, because there are no words to describe them.

It was a power vision, through which he was to save his people, and although he was only nine years old, he never forgot any detail of it. He saw the disasters that would come to the Sioux.

At this time, a song of power came to him. It went like this:

A good nation I will make live. This the nation above has said.

They have given me the power to make over. At the end of twelve days, during which he had no knowledge of time, the vision ended and he found himself on the ground some distance from his people's village, and he walked very fast toward it. Then he saw his own tepee, and inside saw his father and mother bending over a sick boy who was himself.

As he entered the tepee, some one was saying, "The boy is coming to; you had better give him some water." Then he found himself sitting up, and it made him sad because his father did not seem to know that he had been so far away.

Later, there came bad trouble, as gold-seekers swarmed into the Black Hills and pushed the Sioux aside. Wars followed. Black Elk said, "At the age of nine, we were warriors at a time when boys are now like girls." The young warriors took part in the Battle of the Little Big Horn ("Custer's Last Fight") and in other battles that followed.

In his vision, he had seen what he said was "the shape of all things in the spirit," and "the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being." He had seen the sacred hoop of his people, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and father. "And I saw that it was holy," he said.

He was given the day-break-star herb, the herb of understanding, and when he let it drop from the sky and strike the earth, it rooted and grew and flowered, and the rays from these many-colored blossoms streamed upward to the heavens so that all creatures saw it, and in no place was there darkness. He was told, "With this on earth, you shall undertake anything and do it."

His hero, Crazy Horse, through deceit and lies, was trapped and killed. The Lakotas believed the soldiers did this because they could not kill him in battle. Black Elk said of Crazy Horse, "He was brave and good and wise. He never wanted anything but to save his people. He was only thirty years old. I cried all night, and so did my father."

At daybreak, the parents of Crazy Horse obtained the body from the Fort and brought it over to Black Elk's camp in a wagon, transferred it there to a pony drag, and took it away. They never told where they had buried Crazy Horse, but Black Elk said, "It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be."

His visions continued, but he did not speak of them. One morning he was awakened by a voice which said, "Make haste; your people need you." Dawn was just breaking. He faced the young light and began to mourn again and to pray. Then the daybreak star came slowly, very beautiful and still, and all around it there were clouds of baby faces smiling at him, faces of the people not yet born.

After the Heyoka Ceremony, which I wish there were time to tell you about, Black Elk came to live near Manderson, which is about twenty miles east of the Pine Ridge Agency. He was very unhappy over the square, gray log houses, saying, "It is a bad way to live, for there can be no power in anything square. Everything an Indian does is in a circle because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything in Nature tries to be round."

Black Elk had heard that the world was round, and this made sense. Tepees were round like the nests of birds, and these were always set in a circle. "But the white man has put us in a square box," he said; "our power is gone and we are dying, for the power is not in us any more. When we were living by the power of the circle in the way we should, boys were men at twelve or thirteen, but now it takes them very much longer to mature."

In his first healing ceremony after the Heyoka, he was somewhat in doubt about what to do, but he had been asked to cure a little sick boy, so he went ahead. With the use of his ceremonial magic, he asked for power from the four quarters, and received it, but he decided later that this was unnecessary.

"You see," he said, "I had never done this before, and I know now that only one power would have been enough." But he was so eager to help the child that he called on every power he knew.

He had walked to the four directions, used the power he had summoned sang the songs over the boy, and the boy got well. When people heard about this, many came to him for help, and he was busy most of the time.

Black Elk commented, "It is in understanding that power comes; and the power in the ceremony was in understanding what it meant; for nothing can live well except in a manner that is suited to the way the Sacred Power of the World lives and moves."

The account of the massacre at Wounded Knee is one of the most shocking passages in recorded history, so we shall pass over the horrible details. But I should like to mention an incident which involved Black Elk. Soldiers were shooting down defenseless men, women and children, even charging after those who had no guns and were trying to escape, and killing them. The Lakotas tried to draw the soldiers away, so the women and children, at least, might escape.

"I had no gun," Black Elk said, "and when we were charging, I just held the sacred bow in front of me with my right hand. The bullets did not hit us at all. . . . The soldiers had run eastward over the hills where there were some more soldiers, and they were off their horses and lying down. I told the others to stay back, and I charged upon them, holding the sacred bow out toward them with my right hand. They all shot at me, and I could hear bullets all around me, but I ran my horse right close to them, and then swung around. Some soldiers across the gulch began shooting at me too, but I got back to the others and was not hurt at all." That must have been something to see!

In the fighting that followed, when a war party went out for revenge, Black Elk had a gun. He got on his horse and charged down into the mass of soldiers who were firing as fast as they could.

He remembered his Great Vision, the part where the Geese of the North appeared He said, "I depended upon their power. Stretching out my arms with my gun in the right hand, like a goose soaring when it flies low to turn in a change of weather, I made the sound the geese made, and doing this, I charged.

"The soldiers saw and began shooting fast at me. I kept right on, shot in their faces when I was near, then swung wide and rode back up the hill. All this time the bullets were buzzing around me, but I was not touched. I was not even afraid.

"But just as I reached the very top of the hill, suddenly it was like waking up, and I was afraid. I dropped my arms and quit making the goose cry. Just as I did this I felt something strike my belt as though some one had hit me there with the back of an ax. I nearly fell out of my saddle, but managed to hold on, and rode over the hill." (Black Elk had learned the hard way, as so many of us do, that when we let our guard down, we are in trouble.)

His insides were coming out, so one of his friends tore up a blanket in strips and bound it around him to keep them in. He wanted to get back into the fight, but he was restrained, his friends saying, "You must not die today. Your people need you. There may be a better day to die."

In relating this experience to John Neihardt, Black Elk said, "A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth . . . you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead."

Was Black Elk a failure, as he believed? What is failure? What constitutes a successful life? He was given a great vision and great power, but he felt that he had accomplished nothing, possibly because he had not achieved his great aim. Do you think this was true? How could he have managed, against such great odds, to save his people? What is power?

In the postscript to Neidhardt's book, Black Elk makes his final appeal to the Great Spirit and the Six Powers. He had asked to be taken to Harney Peak where he had had the Great Vision and where he wanted to make a final appeal before he died. His request was granted, and at last he stood where he had been instructed as a boy of nine, and he made his last appeal.

"With tears running, 0 Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, with running tears I must say now that the tree has never bloomed. I have fallen away and have done nothing. Here at the center of the world, where you took me when I was young and taught me, here, old, I stand, and the tree is withered, Grandfather, my Grandfather!

"I recall the great vision you sent me. It may be that some little root of the sacred tree still lives. Nourish it then, that it may leaf and bloom and fill with singing birds. Hear me, not for myself but for my people."

With tears running down his cheeks, the old man raised his voice to a thin high wail, and chanted, "In sorrow I am sending a feeble voice, O Six Powers of the World. Hear me in my sorrow, for I may never call again. . . O make my people live."

They stiff live. Is there a leader like Black Elk working among them today but in a different way, in response to the demands of today? If so, would he have the power that was given to Black Elk, power to meet a different kind of challenge? Could he nourish the root of the sacred tree?

It was a beautiful dream. Why did it die? Or did it die? Or does it still live in the hearts and minds of Indian youth? And will it help them through college and through other trials? Help them to live honorable lives and be a credit to their people?

Black Elk could say, with a man named Paul, who had suffered countless adversities for his Cause, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith."

Black Elk has gone now to that place where he wanted to go. And we know that "It does not matter where his body lies, for it is grass; but where his spirit is, it will be good to be."