Black elk speaks sparknotes1/23/2024 ![]() ![]() Like other members of his tribe, he endures great privation with courage during the transition to reservation life. Empowered by his vision, he is fearless in battle with the cavalry. He takes his first scalp at the Battle of Little Bighorn, when he was thirteen. He hunts with his father, using a bow his grandfather made for him when he was five. As a young boy, he participates wholeheartedly in the games that test and challenge his manhood. ![]() Black Elk also exhibits the bravery for which the Sioux were known. Black Elk is also shown being respectful of Queen Victoria, for whose jubilee celebration he participated in a command performance as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. ![]() Indeed, this respect for authority might have contributed to the vulnerability of the Indians, some of whom initially had some trust in "the grandfather at Washington" (the U.S. His characteristic regard for those older than himself reflects the values of his culture, which greatly esteemed the wisdom that comes from age and experience. Respectful of his elders, his parents, the various medicine men who support him in becoming a holy man and healer, and the Sioux chiefs, Black Elk consults with medicine men, listens to his elders' stories, obeys his father, and makes his mother happy. He performs individual healings, but the circumstances of Sioux life at the time of American westward expansion prevent him, he laments, from preserving his tribal culture. Despite some misgivings, he develops a confident-but-modest sense of himself and in his late teen years, enacts his great vision within a public ritual in order to validate his tribal role. Black Elk typically feels somewhat daunted, rather than overly proud, at having been singled out: He is often worried that he may be unworthy of the power given to him in any case, he specifies that the power is not his own he is only an instrument of something much greater working through him. In the immediate aftermath of the vision, he repeatedly felt "queer" because he had been so marked for a special destiny he feels separated from other members of the tribe. Black Elk's growing anxiety about carrying out the promise of the vision is evident throughout the narrative. This is a mandate that he now says he has failed to enact. He is a holy man, and his spirituality comes through in the story he tells.īlack Elk's character is developed in two main ways: in the process of claiming his privileged place as a holy man and healer, and as a member of the Oglala Sioux, in the course of the tribe's increasingly adverse relationship with American whites (whom he calls Wasichus).Ī vision granted to him at the age of nine empowers Black Elk to lead and minister to his people, and especially to maintain their "sacred hoop" - their cultural identity and coherence as a tribe. He sometimes shows a gentle sense of humor or irony, and he does not sound angry or vengeful as he narrates the story of the extreme difficulties his tribe has endured on the other hand, he is proud and dignified and does not dismiss the wrong done to him, either. Black Elk wins the reader's faith by using friends to corroborate his narration when his own memory is questionable. He is the first-person narrator of the story, and part of what readers know about him is conveyed by the voice he uses in the narrative, which is modest and generous in deflecting the reader's attention from his personal story to the story of his tribe. Black Elk is the only person represented in any complete way in the narrative other characters might be mentioned at most, a handful of times, but readers have no true sense of the details of their lives or personalities.īlack Elk is the protagonist of Black Elk Speaks, the only character readers see close up, from the inside out. Its plot traces Black Elk's life through a historical chronology, and its characters are actual figures from the history of the American West. As a personal narrative and an autobiography, Black Elk Speaks is not concerned with developing fictional characters.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |