Black Elk Speaks

August 19, 2008 - 2:11am

Black Elk Speaks ends with this description of defeat:

   Our

party wanted to go out and fight anyway, but Red Cloud made a speech to

us something like this:     "Brothers, this is a very hard winter. The

women and children are starving and freezing. If this were summer, I

would say to keep on fighting to the end. But we cannot do this. We

must think of the women and children and that it is very bad for them.

So we must make peace, and I will see that nobody is hurt by the

soldiers."
    The people agreed to this, for it was true. So we broke camp next day and went down from the O-ona-gazhee to Pine

Ridge, and many, many Lakotas were already there. Also, there were

many, many soldiers. They stood in two lines with their guns held in

front of them as we went through to where we camped.
    And so it was all over.


I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this

high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and

children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as

plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that

something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the

blizzard. 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.

This

signals the end of the book; the end of the trail; the end of the

vision; the end of a way of life. "The sacred tree is dead." This

lament marks the end of the story of this holy man and warrior who

lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and who saw

in his lifetime the destruction of the bison herds that sustained the

Plains Indians as well as the end of the nomadic way of life that

nurtured their rituals and visions. I spent much of my youth in

North-eastern Colorado on a family farm and was intrigued by the Plains

Indians and their stories and battles with the White Men who are my

ancestors. Every year we went to Beecher Island for a picnic and the

Battle of Beecher Island was one of the foundational stories of my

life. It wasn't until I was an adult that I noticed the ethnocentric

manner of the telling of that and other battle stories. The US Army

casualties had names while the Indians were numbers, as in"67 savages

were killed." There were battles with the Indians in that area well

into the 1890s.

Elk's

early childhood was spent following the buffalo herds across the

plains, learning to hunt, and practicing the art of war. As a young man

he dreams of helping his people to live happily and prosperously in the

rolling plains of the western United States. But as gold is discovered

the white men have a strong desire to take the land and they do. More

and more of them flood across the land and the Indians are unable to

cooperate to stop them. Treaties are made and broken. Promises are made

to be broken.