The book Black Elk Speaks was based on a series of conversations that the author, John G. Neihardt, had with an Oglala Lakota medicine man named Black Elk, that took place in the presence of Black Elk's son, Ben Black Elk, as he was acting as translator for his father who spoke only in Lakota; the language was spoken by people of the Sioux tribes and is one of the three major tongues spoken by the Sioux.
Black Elk's second cousin, Crazy Horse, was well known as a war leader. As a young boy, at the tender age of thirteen, Black Elk also participated in the Battle of Wounded Knee and the Battle of Little Big Horn, but wanted to carve out a more peaceful role for himself within his tribe, his perspective changed by only narrowly surviving the Wounded Knee Massacre. He became a respected medicine man. In the tribe but it was not about his participation in battle, or his life as the tribal medicine man that Neihardt wanted to talk to him; the poet was focused on writing about the Ghost Dance, and wanted to speak to someone who had participated in one.
In the 1930s, when Neihardt wanted to talk to Black Elk, it was not possible to just wander onto tribal land and ask for an interview; his request needed to be made through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and when it was approved, Neihardt was able to go to the Pine Ridge Reservation with his two daughters in tow, where he met with the Holy Man. Black Elk told Neihardt about the visions that he had and some of the rituals that he had performed for his tribe. The men developed a friendship despite not understanding each other's language.
When the book was published it was a commercial success but its success did not extend to the Lakota people, who disliked the fact it was written by someone who was not a Native American, or a Sioux, and therefore did not really understand what he was writing about. They believed he had exaggerated or changed some of the things that Black Elk had told him to fit a marketing template that he already had in his mind. To the tribe, a book about the Lakota that was not written by a Lakota was unreliable and therefore not representative of who they really were.
Black Elk Speaks is Neihardt's most well-known work, printed first in the 1930s and reprinted in the 1960s when it was considered to be a New Age book. Another edition appeared in 2008.
Passing away in 1979, Neihardt had the honor of having a dormitory at the University of Lincoln-Nebraska named after him; students maintain that the residence is haunted.
