![]() ![]() There had been two wars for them: the military campaigns emblazoned in the history books, and a lesser-known but more far-reaching crusade waged by the government and church to eradicate the medicine man and all traces of traditional religion. Where warriors liked to retell their deeds in all their glory, holy men considered their knowledge sacrosanct. He embraced Catholicism with the the same kind of facile hypocrisy that saw him through most of his life, and Jackson recounts it all with enthusiasm and a consistent awareness of the larger picture, especially Black Elk's place in it: Black Elk told stories about how he was present at the Battle of Little Bighorn, told stories about how he was present at the death of his cousin Crazy Horse, told stories about how he was present at Wounded Knee, and in 1887 he toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West extravaganza. That cure took a curiously roundabout route. ![]() The Grandfathers had given him the sacred gifts of life, and with them, “I was going to cure these people.” Somehow, in a way he did not yet understand, the sacred tree and the daybreak herb would restore a lost balance. This was the reason for his birth and the meaning of his name. As Jackson puts it about some later moment of clap-trap: Black Elk was born 1863 in what's now Wyoming, and according to his own deeply, sloppily mendacious oral accounts, he began seeing visions when he was only a child and began receiving visitations from fantasy beings who sympathized with both his sketchy tribal loyalty and his already-overweening egomania. Jackson's Black Elk is as starry-eyed and credulous as a high school yearbook, but it's also a masterpiece of American biographical reconstruction.Maybe more re-imagination than reconstruction. The stuff that Black Elk speaks in Black Elk Speaks is premium hooey from start to finish, and the truly amazing thing about Jackson's big biography of the man is that he can serve up the hooey for 600 pages with all the conviction of an earnest Iowa undergrad and yet balance it throughout with the most extensive and impressive research anybody's ever brought to bear on the matter. Neihardt's book was largely ignored when it first appeared, but it's since taken on the kind of immortality that only college Cultural Studies reading lists can impart, filling the biddable imaginations of countless undergraduates with exactly the kind of Grade-A sheep dip Black Elk made an eighty-year career of producing. Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary by Joe JacksonFarrar, Straus & Giroux, 2016The subject of veteran nonfiction writer Joe Jackson's terrific new book is Black Elk, the Oglala Sioux medicine man who stars in John Neihardt's 1932 book Black Elk Speaks. ![]()
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