From Publishers Weekly
In Black Elk Speaks (1932) and The Sacred Pipe (1953), John Neihardt portrayed the Lakota Sioux elder Black Elk as a 19th-century figure, steeped in memories of pre-reservation life. In this scholarly study, Steltenkamp revises these nostalgic portraits of the Sioux spiritual leader as a victim of Western subjugation, showing that he preached Christianity to his people in his later life and used this consciousness to push them to renewal. The author, professor of anthropology at Bay Mills Community College in Mich., bases much of his study on the recollections of Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, whom he met while teaching on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. "After he became a convert to Catholicism, in 1904 and started working for the missionaries," Lucy, who died in 1978, remembers, "he put all his medicine practice away. He never took it up again." Steltenkamp's prose is pedestrian ("Here was an amazing story and a humorous tale being told . . . "), but his book should spur re-evaluation of views "concerning the adaptation of Lakota people to changing times." Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Based on conversations with Black Elk's surviving friends and relatives, especially his daughter Lucy Looks Twice: a reassessment of the Lakota holy man's religious vocation. Although Black Elk (1863-1950) is usually ranked as the most important Native American religious figure of the past two centuries, almost nothing is known of his life beyond the age of 28, the year that concludes his classic autobiography, Black Elk Speaks (1932; coauthored with John Neihardt). Here, Steltenkamp (Anthropology/Bay Mills Community College) fills in the blanks. Scholars have long been aware that Black Elk converted to Catholicism in 1904--an event often covered up by radical Indian activists--but Steltenkamp makes it clear that this turn to Christianity was neither halfhearted nor coerced but, rather, the culmination of Black Elk's religious search. Lakota religious expression, he finds, is more flexible than previously believed; Black Elk's Catholicism was another way of maintaining his Indian identity. Taking issue with Neihardt's portrait of a pessimistic ex-warrior, Steltenkamp paints the mature Black Elk--whether reciting his rosary, building a chapel, or exhorting other Indians to convert--as patient, kind, hard-working, and happy. While interviewing Black Elk's associates, Steltenkamp hears repeated complaints about how the holy man has been misrepresented by the media, and a second issue emerges: the right of Indians to choose their own way of life, be it Catholic or otherwise, free from pressures by those who wish to freeze their history in 1890, at the massacre at Wounded Knee. A real step forward in American Indian religious studies. --
Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
