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IV

  

  

  


Autobiography of Black Elk; the full title—Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux as Told to John G. Neihardt (Flaming Rainbow) He tells of his boyhood participation in battles with the U.S. Army, of becoming a medicine man, and of joining Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1886. On his return from a European tour, he found his tribe living on the bleak Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, starving, diseased and hopeless, and joined the Ghost Dance movement; the book concludes with a description of the infamous Wounded Knee massacre. His son Ben Black Elk interpreted his words for Neihardt, who published the autobiography in 1932. It became a major source of information about 19th-century Plains Indian culture. the frontier virtues of inner strength and spirit.

Websites about the work
University of Nebraska Press, Black Elk's World
Black Elk—The Family Speaks Site
About.com-Black Elk Site
Native American Spirituality, Religion, and Medicine

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