Black Elk Speaks

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.

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