Making of a Painting IV: Nicholas Black Elk (1 of 2)

Introduction

Accepting the commission to depict Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk has been among the most humbling experiences of my professional career. This is not because the project was artistically challenging, though the composition was certainly complex, nor because it was daunting to research from a historical perspective, though the scholarly literature on Black Elk is vast. Depicting Black Elk was humbling because it constantly forced me to face the limitations of my worldview in my ability to understand and then portray another human being.

Black Elk as a young man, ca. 1888

Despite the foothold afforded by our shared Christian beliefs, I knew that I could never fully transcend the constraints of my cultural categories and do justice to the thoroughly non-Western way of thinking and being that Black Elk epitomized. And yet, in order to fulfill the commission’s mandate to create a spiritual portrait of the revered holy man, I would need to do exactly that: pay tribute with respectful fidelity to a cosmology I could only partially understand, through a medium of artistic expression unavoidably rooted in my own civilizational background—all in the context of an on-going controversy characterized by heated passions and tremendous sensitivity to issues of identity, exploitation, and appropriation. As I began my background research in preparation for the project, I felt like I was stepping into a minefield!

Having said that, depicting Black Elk has also been among the most rewarding experiences of my professional career. The departure from the familiar iconographic motifs of our typical commissions has been refreshing, the facts learned in the research process eye-opening, and the visual energy of the subject matter invigorating.

Given the spectrum of differing perspectives, I am sure that not everyone will be pleased with the resulting painting. Nevertheless, I hope that the foregoing posts will at least help to clarify how we approached the contentious issues that Black Elk’s story raises. In order to understand the compositional choices we made, it is essential to know something of that story—his life, his thought, and his legacy. To that end, I will devote this post to a brief survey of Black Elk’s biography, and in the following I will explain how we brought that information to bear in our artistic portrayal.

Biography

Although largely unknown to the wider world during his lifetime, Black Elk today is the most famous Native American of the twentieth century. His life had its share of tragedy: he buried two wives and five children and suffered from tuberculosis and progressive blindness for much of his life, not to mention the traumatic effects of what is now called “cultural genocide.” But his life was also eventful, and its meandering thread is woven through key moments in the history of the larger region. His biography, therefore, serves as a microcosm of the wrenching changes and gross injustices that Indigenous communities throughout the western U.S. endured during the early reservation era, while at the same time it epitomizes the adaptability and quiet resilience that saw them through these difficult times.

Born into the nomadic hunter-gatherer world of the Oglala Lakota (the largest band of the Teton Sioux) in around 1863, Black Elk hailed from a line of medicine men. A melancholic and spiritually sensitive boy, he was socially withdrawn from a young age and given to hearing voices and experiencing otherworldly flashes of intuition. When he was about nine years old, he fell critically ill with what was probably meningitis and slipped into a coma, during which he had a dramatic near-death experience. The wide-ranging, out-of-body odyssey that resulted is known today as the “Great Vision.” Through it, Black Elk understood himself to have been given responsibility for the welfare of his people and even the whole world, a commission that profoundly influenced his outlook for the rest of his life.

As he grew into adolescence, other tribal leaders recognized in him the makings of a wicasa wakan (Lakota holy man) and began to mentor him in honing his spiritual gifts. Meanwhile, Black Elk was drawn into the larger geopolitical events that swept his homeland in the 1870s. He participated as a teenager in the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn and was present for the killing of his cousin Crazy Horse in 1877.

Black Elk witnessed both the Battle of the Little Bighorn (left) and the fatal stabbing of Crazy Horse (right), two seminal events of the Great Sioux War.

Then, to escape the dismal conditions on the reservation to which the Oglala were confined following their defeat by the U.S. military, he joined many young men in signing up with Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show in 1886.

With dance performances, displays of horsemanship, and set-piece battle scenes, the Wild West was a major attraction on both sides of the Atlantic.

In what is likely his earliest surviving portrait, Black Elk poses in his Wild West costume with Sgt. Gilbert Bates shortly after his arrival in New York.

After performing in New York, Black Elk continued with the show’s inaugural trans-Atlantic tour, where from 1887 to 1889 he was thrown into a whirlwind and at times chaotic adventure in England, France, Belgium, and Italy. During this time, he met Queen Victoria, was mixed up in the investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders, peered over the rim of an active volcano, narrowly escaped death by conflagration, was trampled by a horse, and pursued a passionate love affair with an upper-class Parisian girl.

In May 1887, Queen Victoria attended the Wild West show in London and afterwards spoke with members of the cast, including Black Elk.

Black Elk's time in London coincided with the celebration of Queen Victoria's golden jubilee, and he witnessed this public procession on June 21, 1887.

Black Elk returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1889 to find that social and economic conditions had deteriorated further during his absence. Desperate for a way to fulfill his childhood mandate to help his people flourish, he was swept up in the Ghost Dance movement, an apocalyptic cult that anticipated an imminent Second Coming in which the wrongs of U.S. colonial policy would be righted, the White race wiped off the face of the earth, and the land returned to its original inhabitants.

A zealous apostle of the Ghost Dance, Kicking Bear initiated Black Elk into the movement.

Black Elk created the sacred shirts used in the cult’s rituals and was one of many adherents of the new creed who experienced a vision of the expected messiah (the so-called “Red Christ”) during a dance-induced trance.

Frederic Remington created this depiction of Oglala Ghost Dancers in 1890.

The Ghost Dance climaxed in tragedy with the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890, an event that is considered the closing chapter of the long and sordid history of the North American Indian Wars. Black Elk was camped close enough to hear the gunshots and was involved in the skirmishing that followed. Although he was not a warrior at heart, he thus had the distinction of participating in two of the most historically significant military engagements of the Plains wars: the largest (Little Bighorn) and the last (Wounded Knee).

The years that followed were a dark time on the reservation. The practice of traditional Lakota religion was effectively outlawed, and tremendous pressure was brought to bear by well-intentioned but misled “progressives” in the U.S. Government to assimilate the western Indians into the American economic system by systematically erasing their cultural identity. Black Elk continued his traditional healing ceremonies in semi-secrecy, but he became increasingly discouraged as his efforts failed to change the trajectory of his people’s downward spiral. Self-doubt crept in, and in 1904, after a humiliating confrontation with a Jesuit priest at the bedside of a dying boy, his confidence hit rock-bottom. Many of his friends and family members had already converted to Catholicism, and Black Elk finally acquiesced to the pressure to follow suit. He was baptized Nicholas William on December 6 of that year.

Black Elk was close to all three of the priests in this 1914 photograph, including Fr. Joseph Lindebner (right), who baptized him.

Though Black Elk’s acceptance of Christianity seems to have come only after a period of resistance, it was apparently sincere. Over the next few years, he became increasingly invested in the new approach, perhaps seeing in it the potential for a more effective means of bringing about the cosmic healing called for by his vision. During the 1910s and 1920s, he served as a catechist and itinerant lay preacher who officiated at Catholic prayer services when priests were absent. He learned to read the Bible in his own language and quoted it from memory with great facility in his exhortations. He even undertook a series of missionary excursions to the reservations of other tribes and was credited with hundreds of conversions, efforts which earned him the moniker “a second St. Paul.”

Black Elk, wearing his catechist's suit, teaches the rosary to his daughter Lucy in ca. 1910.

Now a family man, Black Elk poses with his second wife Anna and their daughter Lucy in this 1911 photograph.

Due to poor eyesight and declining health, Black Elk retired from active church work in 1929 but remained a practicing Catholic until his death in 1950. He continued to pose for promotional photographs for the Indian Missions, attended Mass regularly, and was often seen in his old age walking the long road to the village church with his rosary in hand.

The unfulfilled promise of his childhood vision still haunted him, however, and, even as he accepted the teachings of Jesus, he quietly dissented from the priests’ characterization of Lakota spirituality as devil-worship. Moreover, he was aware of the harm being done to Oglala social fabric by the effort—in some cases actively endorsed by the Christian churches—to destroy Lakota cultural identity. For the most part, he considered Lakota ways of relating to the supernatural to be compatible with the essentials of Christianity, and he became increasingly convinced that in order truly to thrive his people would need to reclaim their heritage through the restoration of traditional rites.

Accordingly, Black Elk attended at least one Sun Dance in the 1920s and mentored Frank Fools Crow, who emerged as the leading guardian of Lakota spirituality following Black Elk’s death. Drawing on his experience as a showman, he organized cultural performances for tourists flocking to the newly carved Mount Rushmore, which provided not only income but also an opportunity to teach younger Oglala about traditional life without running afoul of the authorities. Finally, in the late 1940s, he defied the missionaries’ objections by working with a young academic named Joseph Brown to create a written account of Lakota religion as he had come to understand it, systematized in an innovative way that showed the influence of his Catholic background.

Brown was a disciple of Perennialist philosopher Frithjof Schuon (shown here in 1929), who was interested in the spiritual wisdom of Indigenous peoples. Schuon's brother, Fr. Gall (a Catholic convert and Trappist monk), corresponded with Black Elk in his later years and encouraged his efforts to preserve traditional culture.

Black Elk Speaks

Ultimately the most consequential turning point in his effort to promote traditional ways of being, however, came in 1931, when he was visited by John Neihardt, a Nebraskan poet seeking material for an epic cycle about Crazy Horse and Wounded Knee.

John Neihardt as a young man, ca. 1905

Black Elk granted Neihardt’s request for an interview but, instead of limiting himself to the poet’s topics, decided to use the opportunity to create a record of his Great Vision and other mystical experiences as a sort of spiritual autobiography of his early life.

The 1932 publication of the resulting book, Black Elk Speaks, provoked a defensive response from the Jesuits on Pine Ridge, who felt that the old catechist had caused scandal by giving Neihardt (and, through him, the reading public) the impression that he was still a “pagan.” In the wake of the controversy, Black Elk consented to sign a profession of Christian faith, but he seems to have been disheartened by the dismissive reaction to core aspects of his identity from men he respected. Fortunately, the furor eventually subsided—indeed, outside of the local Jesuits (and a few academic circles in Europe) the world took little notice of Black Elk Speaks during the holy man’s lifetime.

Among the few who took note of Black Elk Speaks in the decades following its initial publication was Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

This changed dramatically following Black Elk’s death. The World Wars of the twentieth century shattered Western Civilization’s confidence in itself, and many responded by seeking wisdom in the spiritual traditions of Indigenous cultures. With its cryptic symbolism and exotic imagery, Black Elk Speaks was tailor-made for the hippie generation and was soon being marketed to seekers of the 1960s counterculture—the dust jacket of one reprint even boasted that the book “makes an LSD trip pale by comparison!”

Beginning with a 1961 edition, the book exploded in popularity and soon became the best-selling publication about Native Americans ever written. Among Whites, it helped to fuel the New Age movement, while among Indians it came to be regarded as a sort of “bible” of the Indigenous religion that many were trying to recover after generations of suppression on the reservations. Today, largely due to the enduring influence of Neihardt’s book, Black Elk is considered one of the twentieth century’s most important religious thinkers of any tradition, and his innovative, universalizing approach to understanding his tribal worldview has profoundly impacted subsequent conceptions of Native American spirituality.

Sanctity

In the 1970s, some of the elders in the Pine Ridge Catholic community who knew of Black Elk’s career as a catechist sought to balance out the public image created by Black Elk Speaks by relating their own memories of him, emphasizing his piety, active involvement in the church, and devotion to his faith. This testimony paints a picture of a man of mature wisdom, deep prayer, boundless patience, and good-natured humility that complements and at times corrects Neihardt’s portrayal of a mystical guru consumed with the past.

Black Elk’s spiritual sensitivity and profound sense of the sacred had set him apart even as a youth, and in his old age the aura of what many considered to be true holiness inspired a reverential respect from Christians and non-Christians alike. The Lakota were not surprised, therefore, when a spectacular aurora borealis lit the South Dakota sky on the night of his funeral wake. In the words of his close friend and fellow catechist John Lone Goose, “God [was] sending lights to shine on that beautiful man.”

The remarkable celestial display that followed Black Elk's death was taken to mean that the old man had, as one witness put it, "gone to his reward and left some sort of sign to the rest of us."

Cause for Canonization

In 1885, long before becoming Catholic, Black Elk was visiting the Standing Rock Reservation for some traditional dances when he encountered a circulating petition calling for the canonization of Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Christian Mohawk. The young Black Elk joined other dancers in signing the document. Over 125 years later, the petition finally bore fruit when Pope Benedict XVI officially declared the “Lily of the Mohawk” the first North American Indian saint of the Catholic Church.

When he placed his mark on the paper, Black Elk could not have guessed what he was helping to set in motion, for it was at Tekakwitha’s 2012 ceremony in Rome that a chance encounter between his grandson and a Marquette University archivist jumpstarted Black Elk’s own cause for canonization. Over the coming years, the effort gained momentum, and, after signatures were gathered for a similar petition, his cause was officially opened by the Diocese of Rapid City in 2017. In 2019, the diocesan phase was completed and the cause transferred to the Vatican, where it is currently before the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints. At this point in the process, Black Elk is known to Catholics as a “Servant of God.”

Legacy

Since his rise to fame in the 1960s, Black Elk’s memory has been the subject of a bitter tug of war among groups with competing agendas, with the American Indian Movement, environmental activists, Lakota traditionalists, the Catholic Church, New Age spiritualists, and Perennialists all claiming the mantle of his legacy. It is in this light that many see the recent initiation of his cause for canonization as merely another attempt by an outside interest group to exploit Black Elk’s memory for its own purposes.

Others, however, view the development as an overdue acknowledgement on the part of the Church of the value of Indigenous religious traditions and as an encouraging signal to people of Native descent that they can be authentic followers of Christ without sacrificing their Indian identity. In addition, it bears noting that the original impetus for the cause came not from Vatican bureaucrats but from Black Elk’s descendants on Pine Ridge, many of whom are still active in the local Catholic community.

Meanwhile, with all the interest in his life and thought, “Black Elk Studies” has effectively become its own subdiscipline of religious scholarship. A tremendous amount of ink has been spilt in an attempt to comprehend Black Elk’s metaphysical insights and to dissect the complexities of his spiritual identity, and this effort is now turbo-charged by the questions surrounding his canonization. While I cannot do justice to all the subtleties here, in the following section I shall do my best to outline the broad contours of the debate that are most relevant from this perspective.

Controversy

The first major fault line dividing Black Elk scholars breaks down along the question of whether his conversion to Catholicism was sincere. Some maintain that it was not, being either a pragmatic concession to circumstance or else a clever stratagem to put the authorities off the scent of his efforts to restore traditional culture. Those inclined to believe this can point to several pieces of supporting evidence, and the view is still widely held by Indigenous essentialists and political activists (including Black Elk’s most prominent living descendant). Given important data that have emerged into public view since 1980, however, most serious scholars today reject it. Despite the various pressures that would have limited his freedom of conscience, the preponderance of evidence suggests that Black Elk embraced his identity as a Christian at least between 1904 and the mid-1920s.

The next fault line turns on the question of whether Black Elk privately rejected Christianity in the 1930s and 1940s as he increasingly turned to old ways. Some believe that he genuinely transferred his allegiance to Catholic spirituality at his baptism but that by the late 1920s he had lost interest and quietly reverted to traditional religion (albeit going through the motions of Christian practice thereafter to avoid confrontations with friends and relatives). While this position is likewise supported by isolated data points, these must be weighed against the considerable body of evidence indicating that Black Elk continued both public worship and private Catholic devotionals up to the time of his death—to an extent much greater than would be expected if he were only “going through the motions.”

Thus, others maintain that Black Elk’s fundamental religious identity after 1904 was as a Catholic, that his Christianity (though rooted in a Lakota worldview) superseded all prior ways of relating to the supernatural, and that this primary allegiance to the Church remained unshaken to the grave. Those who hold this view can point to the testimony of Black Elk’s daughter Lucy and some of his fellow catechists but have difficulty explaining other statements by close relatives or Black Elk’s documented willingness to defy Church authorities in his efforts to preserve traditional culture.

Though Black Elk enjoyed warm relationships with many of the Pine Ridge missionaries, he occasionally clashed with Fr. Placidus Sialm (left) and Fr. Joseph Zimmerman (right) over his efforts to record traditional Lakota religious beliefs in the 1930s and 1940s.

A growing consensus among scholars, therefore, holds that Black Elk maintained some kind of dual participation in Catholic worship and Lakota religion after 1904. “He was comfortable praying with his pipe and his rosary,” testified his grandson, George Looks Twice, and Black Elk’s son Ben summarized his father’s legacy by stating, “My father was a Christian. He died a Catholic; he is buried in a Catholic cemetery. But he still believed the Indian religion.” Black Elk’s nephew Fools Crow said much the same.

If this is the case, then the next question is whether Black Elk’s putative dual participation entailed cognitive dissonance. Some of the missionaries certainly considered it an unacceptable contradiction, but it would not necessarily have seemed this way to many Indians. Fools Crow, for example, stated that “we find few problems with the differences between” Christian and Lakota religion. The part of the priests’ teaching that he found difficult, he explained, was “their belief that we did not know the true God and that Sioux medicine and ceremonies were things of the Devil. So we rejected these views until their positions began to change.”

While some of the more hardline missionaries dismissed Lakota ritual practice as devil-worship, Fr. Eugene Buechel took a more broad-minded view and encouraged Black Elk to think of his traditional religion as God's way of preparing the Lakota for Christianity.

If we can assume that this at least approximates Black Elk’s position, then the final question is whether he managed to synthesize Christian teachings and Lakota spirituality into a single, self-consistent worldview or considered them two non-overlapping but equally valid paths to human flourishing…or something in between. The debate continues among experts and, given the confusing and often contradictory nature of the primary sources, may never be definitively resolved.

Regardless, the irony is that Black Elk’s apparent commitment to both his Catholic faith and his Lakota heritage, while it brought him much grief from the Church during his lifetime, would have caused no friction just a generation later. By the 1970s, the priests on Pine Ridge were openly supportive of efforts to rediscover authentic Lakota spirituality and readily incorporated traditional Lakota practices into Christian rites—at the invitation of Fools Crow one Jesuit even participated in public Sun Dance ceremonies conducted after the Government’s ban had been lifted. Black Elk may justly be considered a forerunner of this rapprochement between the two traditions, and, while much about his private convictions remains speculative, we can say with confidence that he would have welcomed the developments.

Conclusion

I hope that this abbreviated account helps to shed light on Black Elk’s story, his on-going relevance, and the context for the commission we received. In the following post, I will turn our attention to our own portrait of Black Elk and to the compositional choices we made.

Further Reading

As mentioned above, the scholarly literature on Black Elk is vast and ever growing. Some of the most important primary and secondary sources that I consulted while working on this project include the following:

• Costello, Damian. Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2005.

• Costello, Damian, and Jon M. Sweeney. “Black Elk, the Lakota Medicine Man Turned Catholic Teacher, is Promoted for Sainthood.” America 27, no. 8 (Oct 2017). <link>

• DeMallie, Raymond J. The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk’s Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

• DeSersa, Esther Black Elk, Olivia Black Elk Pourier, Aaron DeSersa, Jr., and Clifton DeSersa. Black Elk Lives: Conversations with the Black Elk Family. Edited by Hilda Neihardt and Lori Utecht. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000.

• Fitzgerald, Michael. “New Light on Black Elk and the Sacred Pipe.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 41, no. 4 (2017): 71-91. <link>

• Holler, Clyde. Black Elk’s Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995.

• —, ed. The Black Elk Reader. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000.

• Howard, Scott J. “Incommensurability and Nicholas Black Elk: An Exploration.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 23, no. 1 (1999): 111-136. <link>

• Jackson, Joe. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016.

• Mails, Thomas E., and Dallas Chief Eagle. Fools Crow. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

• Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks: The Complete Edition. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

• Oldmeadow, Harry. Black Elk: Lakota Visionary; The Oglala Holy Man & Sioux Tradition. Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2018.

• Steltenkamp, Michael F. Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993.

• —. Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009.

• Sweeney, Jon M. Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Catechist, Saint. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2021.