1. Black Elk 1863-1950

2. Author presentation Black Elk When Black Elk was born in 1863, the Oglala Sioux still roamed free on the plains. They had little idea of how much or how soon their way of life would be changed forever. His father and his fathers father were medicine men. At age 19 he also became a medicine man.

3. Black Elk Black Elk was a second cousin to Chief Crazy Horse. As a young man he witnessed the defeat of Custer at the Little Big Horn and the tragedy of Wounded Knee

4. Black Elk At age nine, he experienced a great vision which influenced him for the rest of his life. He felt that he had been chosen for some special purpose, and struggled to understand what this could mean.

5. Black Elk In 1868 the Great Sioux Reservation was established which included the Black Hills.

6. Author presentation Black Elk In 1876 two days before the battle of Little Big Horn he had a premonition something terrible was going to happen.

7. Black Elk Black Elk married twice. In 1892 he married his first wife Katie War Bonnet they had three sons. In 1906 he married Anna Briggs White a widow with two daughters. They has one daughter and two sons.

8. Black Elk He became a Catholic in 1904 after the death of his first wife when he was called to help a sick boy when he arrived he saw a “black robe” priest. At that time he felt there was a higher power. When he converted to Catholicism he took the name Nicholas Black Elk.

9. Black Elk The evolution of a new religion, the Ghost Dance, was a reaction to the Indians being forced to submit to government authority and reservation life. The Ghost Dance religion promised an apocalypse in the coming years during which time the earth would be destroyed, only to be recreated with the Indians as the inheritors of the new earth.

10. Black Elk Jon Neihardt was a American author of poetry and prose, a amateur historian, and philosopher of the great plains.

11. Black Elk In the summer of 1930, as part of his research into the American Indian 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 Battle of the Little Big Horn and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

12. Black Elk By the time he met John Neihardt in 1930, Nicholas Black Elk was nearly blind. He was also illiterate, and spoke no English. He and Neihardt communicated through an interpreter.

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