The Black Elk Speaks Summary

“The Black Elk Speaks” is a book on the life of Black Elk. The narrator John Neihardt, tells the story of Black Elk’s life, which is translated by Black Elk’s son Ben. Neihardt shares the journey of Black Elk, which includes his early life as an autobiography, spiritual revelation, and about the history of his tribal life and religious believes and customs. In the beginning chapters Black Elk as he is saying his story, he tells the audience that this is not his story alone, this story is about his people and it would not be worth it if it wasn’t about his people. He explains to the people before he begins his story that he is not a hero nor he has done anything different than others, he says everyone goes through what I have gone through. This showed the …show more content…
Reading about his visions and the experience he had to be able to take on the role he was given. It gave me the curiosity and more importantly an interest in his character and what the end was to this role in his life. His comments that he received while he was going through the visionary showed me a real life image of what he was going through. This concept of being able to see something others cannot, really arose to a different level to me and made me think more critically about what was going to happen. The experience and the journey that Black Elk describes in the book made me realize how great of a leader he is. His situations made me realize and imagine what he went through to do something he has never been exposed to, at such a young age. For example, He says as he is describing the visionary “now and then voices would come back when I was out alone, like someone calling me, but what they wanted me to do I did not know” (Neihardt, 17). It was situations like these that stood out to me the most and made the reading come to