[TradicalRC]

Very Interesting. Special ping to FR's very own Black Elk.

[Darksheare]

??? thread ping.

[CondorFlight]

That Black Elk later became a Christian catechist is largely unknown to those who prefer to focus only on his pre-Christian paganism.

He spent more years as a Christian than he did as a pagan.

And was none the less Sioux for it.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Beautiful. May all the indigenous American saints, both known and unknown, rejoice in the glory with which the Savior has endowed them, and may they pray for us.

[silverleaf]

Good post
Thanks

[BlackElk]

This is why I chose the screen name. Black Elk (the real one) had been a young warrior at the massacre of George Armstrong Custer and his command at Little Big Horn (1876). The battlefield commander of the Lakota that day was his more famous cousin Crazy Horse. There is a generally untold Lakota/Cheyenne/Arapaho side to that story which is included in Evan Connell's remarkable history: Son of the Morning Star (Promontory Books).

For many years after Little Big Horn, Black Elk was a shaman, a pagan "medicine man" and cleric. When Black Elk was in his forties, he was called to the bedside of an apparently dying elderly Lakota warrior and tried to revive him to no avail. At that point, a Roman Catholic missionary priest arrived, baptized the old man, administered the sacraments to him and the man revived. This occurred in around 1905. Black Elk was devastated and, perhaps, humiliated. Nonetheless, he then asked the priest to baptize him and Black Elk spent the rest of his very long life as a Roman Catholic lay missionary to the Lakota, dying in about 1950 at an age estimated to be 87.

I have heard but cannot confirm that he died trying to walk to Mass in a blizzard.

Nienstadt deserves maximum skepticism as an historian. He apparently went into his work with the old noble savage stereotype of Black Elk and would pay no heed to (Nicholas) Black Elk's Catholicism.

[junta]

I like Frank Fool Crow’s story better, but I have to admit to being in awe of Black Elk.

[Eagles6]

Remember reading it when I was young. Will have to give it another look.