Hope for the Sacred Hoop.docx

Jen McClellan Scott Andrews ENGL 314 1 Nov 2016 Hope for the Sacred Hoop “Lonliness is the fiercest producer of self-doubt.” This is what one would say to Black Elk if one could go back and be John G. Neihardt, to hear Black Elk dictate what would become Black Elk Speaks. In retrospective reflection of his life, Black Elk says, “now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it” (Neihardt 2). Reading Black Elk’s story, one gets a sense of his self-doubt and disappointment. However, Black Elk misunderstands his purpose because he is limited to his own perspective. As time has progressed human beings have experienced increasing capacity to connect, communicate, and understand one another. People now know that the abundance of perspectives available to them (with their ever developing use of the internet) suppose that no person need ever to feel Black Elk’s sense of failure. Western thinkers, Amanda Porterield and Dale Stover, put Black Elk’s vision into context for modern American students of religious transculturation, to reveal that while clouded with self-doubt, Black Elk considered himself to have failed his vision. However, a person outfitted with the world wide web can now argue that because Black Elk’s actions functioned to serve his vision’s purpose as best as they possibly could in the face of the Lakota’s dire circumstances, one cannot concede that Black Elk failed. Sixty-two years after Black Elk Speaks is published, comes Amanda Porterfield’s Western perspective of the significance of Black Elk’s life and actions for American culture. This researcher of American Religion, Politics and Law, American Protestant Thought, and Native American Religious History approaches Black Elk’s story with the anthropological consideration of culture. She unpacks Neihardt’s interpretation by explaining that Neihardt’s thought process and study of Black Elk would have been functioning according to German American Franz Boas’ approach, which views “Native American societies as internally coherent cultural systems in which religion played a central role” (Porterfield 41). From 2016, one can see that in the way that Black Elk’s perspective was limited to his experience with his people, and their conflicts with colonialists, so Porterfield’s perspective is limited by the need to describe only how a latter colonialist’s perspective is that these two cultures have found ability to relate through religion. She claims, “Black Elk identified points of commonality between Christianity and Lakota religion and showed how Christianity could be embraced without sacrificing Lakota identity” (39). Porterfield’s viewpoint seems bound by devotion to the furtherance of her own specific area of study; theology. Hence, while this portion of Porterfield’s observations may be of some help to students of American Religion, a contemporary and conscious agnostic is deeming some of her findings still seriously limited. On another hand, Porterfield draws useful lines of connection between transcendentalists and Black Elk. She points out that “Black Elk hears the Grandfathers talking to him through birds and clouds, and is often prompted by these natural signs to recall his vision of the spirit world and its continuing importance” (Porterfield 49). Black Elk having been in communication with a dimension of being beyond most people’s awareness is likened to how “Emerson’s observation of snow puddles at twilight catapults him into to the presence of God” (49). Black Elk served his people as their bridge to nature and in a similar sense Emerson reminded some literate city people of an industrializing nation of the nature they were squatting on. So Porterfield the theologist recognized similarities between Lakota spiritual practice and Christianity and saw Emerson as tangential to Black Elk. Let people move forward with the notion that several prophetic, leading, distinguished people have dedicated years of their lives, if not their whole lives, to in so many words declaring, publishing, and shouting to future reader that people on this planet need to live in mindful symbiosis with the earth and honor the spiritual connection it makes available. Distinct from Porterfield’s perspective, exists Dale Stover’s Postcolonial Reading of Black Elk which is informed by a technologically advanced and wide global online collective in which an abundance of experiences and theories are shared. Opinions formed from many people throughout time exponentially outweigh Black Elk’s opinion of himself. Stover makes an incredible leap towards understanding how Black Elk’s efforts to enact his vision were not a failure, simply by using the term “postcolonial.” The term “postcolonial” connotes that a state of colonialism has ended. When Stover refers to Joseph Brown’s The Sacred Pipe he notes that in the 1960s Americans were still colonists in their conviction of their superiority which would ultimately see Indians completely assimilate (136). The crossing to postcolonialism goes into preconception around 1974 when Brown writes in his introduction: “We are still very far from being aware of the dimensions and ramifications of our ethnocentric illusions… we are now forced to undergo a process of intense self-examination” (136). As Stover iterates, this statement is “a profound admission about the dominant culture’s moment of self-doubt” (136). It is that moment, in fact, every moment a person has that causes them to pause, step outside of themselves, and reflect on who they are, the task at hand, the environment they’re in, and the relation of all of this to the rest of time and space, in which mindfulness occurs. This mindfulness opens one up to seeing, hearing, communicating with other living things of every size, form, and dimension, in a way that a person cannot perceive when driven blindly by nationalism, westward destiny, superiority, or the fleeting rush of excitement that firing guns and claiming ownership brings. But human beings are imperfect. People are subject to emotions and can sometimes forget the larger scheme of things—as colonialists forgot that they too were driven out by someone who thought themselves superior—as Black Elk forgets that the sufferings and deaths of his people, realistically melancholic as it is, does not equate failure. Black Elk Speaks makes available Black Elk’s frame of mind, which is constrained by his knowledge and experiences from his time. Black Elk’s vision gave him six powers: “And the first was the Power of the West; the second, of the North; the third, of the East; the fourth, of the South; the fifth of the Sky; the sixth, of the Earth” (25). He uses these along with the wooden cup, which “the power to make live,” the bow, which is “the power to destroy,” the “herb of power” to heal the sick, “the power of the white giant’s wing” which is courage, and the pipe which Grandfather handed him saying, “you shall walk upon the earth, and whatever sickens there you shall make well” (26-28). Each time he uses one of these, that is a victory towards his vision being fulfilled. Whenever he is about to carry out some part of his vision—and he does this numerous times—Black Elk says, “I felt queer;” as he did just as white soldiers were coming to attack from the East across the Greasy Grass (108). He fights without courage and survives direct and violent encounters whenever the “Wasichus” instigate a conflict. Even beyond his vision, Black Elk proves his ability to live in awareness of an indispensable interdependence with nature and only the invasive force of soldiers works to deteriorate his confidence. For example, he, his relatives, and all in camp on Clay Creek face starvation: “…a coyote began to howl not far off, and suddenly I knew it was saying something… By this time my father had noticed that I had some kind of queer power, and he believed me [that the coyote said there were bison on the ridge to the west]” (151-152). That he is able to interpret the coyote’s cry to the effect that it leads he and his camp to the meat that sustains them connotes his acute mindfulness of the environment he lives in and with. It is only because of the colonialists that Black Elk sees the nation’s hoop as broken. He says, “They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother” (217). As powerful as Black Elk’s connection with nature is, the white people’s disregard of it is overwhelming. Anyone can see there is a great amount of evidence that Black Elk did everything he possibly could to resist colonization and to demonstrate that he understood the Grandfathers wanted the people who respected and communicated with their ecosystems to continue to flourish. The fact that doubt clouds Black Elk’s mind, giving him the idea that he fails his vision, is unfortunate, but Black Elk lacked other perspectives outside of his own that argue self-doubt is actually a characteristic of an honest, principled, and spiritually wise person. Even though Black Elk has done much in the way of responding to the precepts from his vision by the time he is sixteen, he yet harbors the uncertainty natural to youth. He challenges himself, saying, “I had not yet done anything the Grandfathers wanted me to do,” despite his aforementioned actions which suggest otherwise (159). However, this questioning of himself, this asking himself, “‘Am I wrong’ can usefully initiate and extend moral inquiry. In doing so, it opens up important possibilities: it highlights the need to explore one’s human epistemic fallibility in moral understandings and judgments; and it can connect the moral inquirer to the virtue of humility” (Verducci). Thus, while Black Elk does not allow himself to feel fulfillment, he did everything he could and his self-doubt proves his humility rather than his failure. At this very moment in time, a person equipped with all the shared knowledge of the internet has access to such a widely ranging selection of perspectives that one must weigh the fact that Black Elk’s actions functioned to serve the vision’s purpose as best as they possibly could against the Lakota’s dire circumstances. The point of discerning Black Elk’s failure lies between his subjective thoughts and his objective actions. Black Elk senses failure as when he is eighteen at “the Place Where Everything Is Disputed” (179). He expresses how he feels about the hard winter of 1881, saying, “I could feel them like a great burden upon me… And now when I look upon my people in despair, I feel like crying and I wish and wish my vision could have been given to a man more worthy” (180). However, Black Elk knows his perspective, even his actions, alone aren’t enough. He admits it when he says, “Maybe I was not meant to do this myself, but if I helped with the power that was given me, the tree might bloom again and the people prosper” (234). It’s just that at the end of Neihardt’s recording of his story, when he sees so many of his people dead, of course he feels like he failed; in that moment. Nonetheless, the Grandfathers, the vision, came to him from something much larger than a single moment in time. Black Elk feels in that moment that “A people’s dream died there” (270). But it didn’t, because a dream is an idea and it can be carried on as long as there exist people that can conceive of it. He says “the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead” (270). This isn’t necessarily so. Eighty-four years after Black Elk Speaks is published, some three hundred people, “water protectors” as they call themselves, with the Standing Rock Sioux in North Dakota are still confronting the environmental abuse that has progressed like a disease from colonialism. People from Ecuador, Africa, New Guinea, Australia, Chile, and a number of American Indian tribes are still fighting (Piguaje). This challenges the notion that “there is no center any longer” (Neihardt 270). The sacred tree is alive so long as its continuity is preserved conceptually. The tree is sacred because it’s beyond people’s realm of understanding—humans are confined by time, the sacred tree is not. It is so crucial, with as rapidly as the human species is advancing, technologically, coming up against how quickly global warming and exponentially increasing resource scarcity is merging vastly diverse peoples together into restricted spaces, that people give highest priority to a perspective that encourages all life to thrive in a sustainable existence. A majority of Americans need to demonstrate that they understand that enough to see to the dissolvement of capitalist economic practice by those like Dakota Access LLC and companies involved in or seeking profit from its construction. Then and only then can we call ourselves postcolonial. Entertaining the perspective that Black Elk failed to carry out his vision suggests life itself as we know it is abandoned. As an agnostic, as a person living today and hoping to live for many years to come—who has searched as many religious and spiritual perspectives as do exist in this entire world so far as twenty eight years of living has granted me study of—I must conclude that Black Elk was wrong about himself. He didn’t fail his vision, and neither can we. Works Cited Neihardt, John G. Black Elk Speaks. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Print. Piguaje, Humberto. “Ecuadorian Indigenous Leader Joins Dakota Pipeline Protests.” Facebook.com. 29 Oct 2016. Web. 31 Oct 2016. Porterfield, Amanda. “Black Elk’s Significance in American Culture.” The Black Elk Reader. Ed Clyde Holler. 41-59. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Print. Stover, Dale. “A Postcolonial Reading of Black Elk.” The Black Elk Reader. Ed Clyde Holler. 127-146. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000. Print. Verducci, Susan. “Self-doubt: One Moral of the Story.” Studies in Philosophy and Education, vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 609-620. Nov 2014. Web. 31 Oct 2016. McClellan 11