Black Elk Speaks

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For the song "Black Elk Speaks" by Hawkwind, see Space Bandits.

Black Elk Speaks is a 1932 autobiography of an Oglala Sioux medicine man as told to John Neihardt.

In the summer of 1930, as part of his research into the Native American perspective on the Ghost Dance movement, Neihardt contacted an Oglala holy man named Black Elk, who had been present as a young man at the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn and the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre. As Neihardt tells the story, Black Elk gave him the gift of his life's narrative, including the visions he had had and some of the Oglala rituals he had performed. The two men developed a close friendship. The book Black Elk Speaks, grew from their conversations continuing in the spring of 1931, and is now Neihardt's most familiar work.

[edit] Publication data

Black Elk Speaks, 1932, William Morrow & Company; 1961 University of Nebraska Press edition with new preface by author, 1979 edition with introduction by Vine Deloria, Jr., 1988 edition: ISBN 0-8032-8359-8, 2000 edition with index: ISBN 0-8032-6170-5.