Skip to main content

Black Elk Speaks

By


The history note on Wounded Knee brought to mind that great book, Black Elk Speaks, edited by John G. Neihardt.  It made such a big impact on me when I read it in college.  Great example of oral history being transcibed.  Interesting to see there was a play based on the memoir.

Comments

  1. avrdsDecember 29, 2009 at 3:30 PM

    There's a great quote from Black Elk on the Little Big Horn interpretive center:

    Know the power that is peace.

    I've always loved that.

    Unfortunately, I think Neihardt may have been more of the author than the editor of Black Elk's story. Same with a lot of what we consider the great Native American speeches -- a white interpreter may have taken great liberties in translating them for white audiences.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TripplerDecember 30, 2009 at 8:03 PM

    ''a white interpreter may have taken great liberties ''


    That's something I hadn't considered when reading that book all those years ago. Back in the 60s and 70s it was held to be a great book though it is largely forgotten nowadays. But to me it remains timeless.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsDecember 30, 2009 at 8:20 PM

    Apparently that was pretty common practice. The "I Will Fight No More Forever" speech is also suspect. Great speech, and entirely memorable, but probably not what was said, if Joseph said anything at all when he surrendered.

    The interpreter was a military man and frustrated poet who admired Joseph and went on to befriend him. He insisted they were Joseph's words, but there are no records to support that.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

The Age of Roosevelt: The Crisis of the Old Order

By
A quarter of a century, however, is time enough to dispel some of the myths that have accumulated around the crisis of the early Thirties and the emergence of the New Deal. There is, for example, the myth that world conditions rather than domestic errors and extravagances were entirely responsible for the depression. There is the myth that the depression was already over, as a consequence of the ministrations of the Hoover Administration, and that it was the loss of confidence resulting from the election of Roosevelt that gave it new life. There is the myth that the roots of what was good in the New Deal were in the Hoover Administration - that Hoover had actually inaugurated the era of government responsibility for the health of the economy and the society. There is the contrasting myth (for myths do not require inner consistency) that the New Deal was alien in origins and in philosophy; that - as Mr. Hoover put it - its philosophy was "the same philosophy of government which...
170 comments
Read more