Reading and Language Commons^™

Black Elk Speaks As Epic And Ritual Attempt To Reverse History, Paul Olson

Department of English: Faculty Publications

Modern Siouan storytellers make a distinction in speaking of the difference between bedtime and sacred stories. Moreover, Lakota masters of the sacred arts are inveterate constructors of figural or allegorical systems. They interpret, apply, and reapply the iconological resources of their culture through ritual, myth, storytelling, symbolic action, and clothing. This Sioux symbolic tradition is one context in which John G. Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks (1932) must be understood. Conceptualizing it as an epic may assist both Western and non-Western readers to clarify the uses to which a culture's symbol system may be put in mediating conflicting values, especially those …