Black Elk: Colonialism And Lakota Catholicism (Faith and Culture Series) [Paperback]

Damian Costello (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 193 pages
• Publisher: Orbis Books (March 2, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1570755809
• ISBN-13: 978-1570755804
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,587,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Costello's Work is Profound!!!, June 11, 2005

By 

Jeffrey L. Morrow (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Elk: Colonialism And Lakota Catholicism (Faith and Culture Series) (Paperback)

Damian Costello has taken post-colonial studies to new and exciting heights with his book, Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism. Costello's work examines the life and thought of Black Elk situating this great American Indian figure within his complex cultural, religious, and historical context. Many previous studies on Black Elk see him simply as a paradigmatic American Indian religious leader. Unlike these one-sided studies, Costello takes a more nuanced look at Black Elk's life, employing a much broader view based on cutting edge historical and sociological research. Costello demonstrates that Catholicism was essential to Black Elk, permeating every aspect of his life. When scholars ignore or dismiss Black Elk's Catholicism, they are ignoring or dismissing what Black Elk considered to be most important in his life. Costello further shows how the Lakota people embraced Catholicism both as in continuity with their past traditions, as well as using their Catholic Christian faith as a means of resisting the colonial project of the United States. Costello provides a very detailed look into the life of Black Elk and the Lakota, as well as at the point where Christianity meets American Indian cultures. This book has far-reaching implications for understanding the role of Christianity in colonized regions of the world. Costello lucidly demonstrates how colonized peoples have appropriated Christianity, living their new-found Christian faith as a way of life, and thereby utilizing the tools with which Christianity has provided them to resist economically and politically driven colonial projects. In the case of the Lakota, Catholic missionaries played a complex role, at once a part of the colonial project, and at the same time peaceful combatants against colonial subjugation. By learning Lakota language and traditions as well as translating the Bible into Lakota, these missionaries imparted a powerful means of resisting colonial power to the Lakota. As the equivalent of a Catholic deacon, Black Elk the Catholic missionary exemplifies Costello's post-colonial thesis. Costello has shown how, contrary to previous wisdom, some of the colonized become complicit with colonial projects, and at the same time how some of the colonizers empower the colonized to resist colonial pressures. Costello has written a very important work. Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism is extremely well-written; it is entertaining, informative, and provocative. In a field where so much that is written is either banal or so prohibitively academic that non-specialists can find no benefit in reading the books, Costello's book is an oasis in a desert of dry texts. I highly recommend his work to anyone interested in U.S. history, colonialism, American Indian culture and spirituality, Catholicism (especially in the U.S.), post-colonial studies, and of course Black Elk. You will not be disappointed by Costello's work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Power & Oppression: Native Americans, Bob Marley, and Jesus, January 22, 2006

By 

Bufalito Americano (Naperville, Illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Black Elk: Colonialism And Lakota Catholicism (Faith and Culture Series) (Paperback)

On many a university campus, at many an after hours party, you can usually find a small circle of students - lets call them young intellectuals - discussing Bob Marley, Native Americans, and Western oppression amidst a haze of smoke as they pass a joint - the smoking of which is supposed to signify their solidarity with the oppressed. Within this conversation the subject of Christianity will often appear, and it is usually associated with the West's - or the "white man's"- oppression over minorities. While there are perhaps reasons for unlearned students to assume that the power of Christianity and the power of the West always coincide, Costello argues otherwise.
Costello's book primarily addresses the Lakota holy man Black Elk's Catholicism, but the author's subsection on Rastafarianism is in itself worth the purchase. For it is in this section that he explains the distinction between the power of Christianity versus the power of Western colonialism, as experienced by the Jamaicans. Rastafarians, Costello argues, used the gospel message of Jesus to combat oppression and Black Elk did the same. This is all very intriguing and at first strange, but as Costello puts it, quite simply, in his final chapter: "Christianity provides a moral story that is greater than the West." (168) Contrary to our contemporary assumptions, then, it seems that there are multiple forms of Christianity. That being the case, according to Costello, it is entirely possible for Christianity to remain a liberating force, depending on who is reading the gospel. Western Colonial powers may have brought the gospel message with them when they conquered the natives, but Black Elk, just like Ras Tafari, took the gospel of Jesus away from his oppressors, internalized it, and then used the power of the gospel to fight off oppression.
If Costello is only a doctoral student, as the back of his book states, then I anxiously await the publication of his dissertation.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Religious and Ethnic Identity in a World of Change, January 17, 2006

By 

Joseph Weber - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Black Elk: Colonialism And Lakota Catholicism (Faith and Culture Series) (Paperback)

Most of us, whether Native American or African American or Catholic or Jewish are trying to understand who we are in a world where the rug is constantly being pulled out from under our sense of identity, be it religious, ethnic, or both.

This story of Black Elk not only re-explores how this great man faced these questions, but also details the story of this historical figure's jourey through academic interpretation. It shows how he has been used by others as they, too, sort out their own identities.

I read this book while reading John Steinbeck's "The Winter of our Discontent." I love how Steinbeck describes our relationships with religion as something we both cling to and avoid. "I guess we're all, or most of us, the wards of that nineteenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn't explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn't explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics who were more interested in what is than why it is. So many old and lovely things are stored in the world's attic, because we don't want them around us and we don't dare throw them out." (pg 89)

The questions of identity, at once religious and ethnic, are restlessly collecting dust in everyone's attics. Black Elk's journey through life and academic discourse, as documented by Cotello, won't answer these questions. To the discerning eye, however, it certainly helps to shed some much needed light on them.