Zachary Davis: Welcome to Writ Large, a podcast about how books change the world. It is the single book that has determined the ways that many, many people think about, about Native folks. So for some people, it may not be a sort of bestselling popular book, but in fact, it is a bestselling popular book. So it's a book that's sort of haunted me for a really long time and has gone through different sorts of manifestations, right, in my different readings.Īnd what has been really interesting, I think, about the book, is the ways that its resurgence in the late 60s and 70s has really made it-this is the best selling book of all books authored by a Native person, and probably all books about Native people. And then I found myself coming full circle and writing a new introduction for the latest edition a couple years ago. Then I read it as a teacher-I've taught it several times-and found myself engaged with other kinds of questions about its spiritual meaning and its significance for Native people and for non-Native people. And so this was a kind of intellectual problem or puzzle that I found kind of interesting. Did John Neihardt really sort of take over Black Elk and kind of craft his own book? There's passages in here which Black Elk never said, but Neihardt said. Philip Deloria: And I focused in a lot more on the question of who wrote the book. Zachary Davis: He found the book again when he was in college, in a Native American religions class. For these are children of one mother, and their father is one spirit.” It is the story of all life that is holy and is good to tell and of us two-leggeds sharing it with the four-leggeds and the wings of the air and all green things. For what is one man that he should make much of his winters, even when they bend him like a heavy snow? So many other men have lived and shall live that story to be grass upon the hills. And if it were only the story of my life, I think I would not tell it. Philip Deloria: “My friend, I'm going to tell you the story of my life, as you wish. ![]() Zachary Davis: Here’s Professor Deloria reading a bit of the text. But there's a kind of directness to it and a kind of a simplicity to it and a power in the story that really caught me as a young person. And so some of the language is Neihardt's language, translational language of Black Elk, and sometimes it can be, you know, a little overly literary, perhaps. Philip Deloria: So the book was dictated by Black Elk, who was an Oglala holy man, to John Neihardt, who was a lyric poet-the poet laureate of Nebraska, actually. Zachary Davis: Professor Deloria first read the book as an adolescent, and he was struck by the language and the imagery. He said, “This is a Bible of all Native tribes.” Philip Deloria: In 1972, my father wrote a new introduction to this book, which is sort of famous among the people who study this book. Zachary Davis: Black Elk Speaks was published in 1932 but remained in relative obscurity until the late 1960s. Philip Deloria: This book is a family book in a way. ![]() Zachary Davis: Professor Philip Deloria teaches Black Elk Speaks in his classes at Harvard, but his relationship with the work goes back much farther. And I teach courses in Native American history and Native American studies. I'm a professor in the history department and the chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature. And they are calling medicine people to come and resuscitate him, to bring him back, while he is off in the world of the vision. And his family thinks that he's not going to survive. And as oftentimes happens in these visions, he sort of falls over as if dead and lays there for several days. ![]() And he saw these men a number of times, sort of coming, and then at one point, the vision actually commenced. Philip Deloria: So when he's a young boy, he's playing outside of his lodge and he sees, as he says, “two men slanting down from the clouds like arrows,” travelling down to see him. But long before any of that, when he was still a child, Black Elk had a powerful vision. He was a member of the Oglala Lakota Native American tribe, and he would go on to become one of the best-known figures in Native American history, a celebrated holy man, and the co-author of the 1932 book Black Elk Speaks. Zachary Davis: Sometime in the 1860s, by the Little Powder River, in what is today the state of Wyoming or Montana, Black Elk was born.
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