Black Elk
Oglala Lakota wičháša wakȟáŋ (holy man), Heyoka, second cousin of Crazy Horse, and witness to the central tragedies of nineteenth-century Plains Indian history — the Battle of the Little Bighorn (which he witnessed at age twelve), the imprisonment of Sitting Bull, the Ghost Dance movement, and the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890. Born around 1863 on the Little Powder River, Black Elk received as a child the great vision that became the spiritual core of his life and that John G. Neihardt rendered into the 1932 book Black Elk Speaks — one of the foundational texts of the global engagement with indigenous spirituality, in print continuously for nearly a century and recognized today as among the great religious autobiographies of any tradition. The Sacred Pipe, written with Joseph Epes Brown in 1953, gives Black Elk's account of the seven sacred rites of the Lakota. He also became, late in life, a Catholic catechist named Nicholas Black Elk, holding both traditions without contradiction. He died on Pine Ridge Reservation in 1950.
quotes in library
Quotes by Black Elk
108 quotes“The moon does the same, and both are round.”
“Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing.”
“And always come back again to where they were.”
“The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood.”
“And so it is in everything where power moves.”
“Our tepees were round like the nests of birds.”
“And these were always set in a circle, the nation's hoop.”
“A nest of many nests, where the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children.”
“But the Wasichus have put us in these square boxes.”
“And our power is gone.”
“There can be no power in a square.”
“Long ago, when I was a boy, I had a great vision.”
“In that vision I was taken to the high mountain at the center of the earth.”
“And I saw the sacred hoop of my people, which was one of many hoops that made one circle.”
“Wide as daylight and as starlight.”
“And in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.”
“And I saw that it was holy.”
“In the vision, the six grandfathers gave me their gifts.”
“I am blind and do not see the things of this world; but when the Light comes from Above, it enlightens my heart.”
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