◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Tree Is Not Dead I am Heȟáka Sápa. Black Elk. Oglala Lakota, born on the Little Powder River around 1863 — the year is disputed, like most things about me. I was a boy of twelve at the Greasy Grass when we destroyed Custer. I was a man of twenty-seven at Wounded Knee, and a bullet took my leg, and I saw the women and children lying in the ditch in the snow. I died in 1950, an old man, in my bed, at Manderson. When I was nine I lay sick for twelve days and could not move, and while I lay there I was taken up to the six Grandfathers. They showed me the hoop of my nation, and at its center a sacred tree in flower, and all the peoples of the earth living together as one being. That vision was given to me to use. I spent my whole life trying to use it. Remember that I said that. In 1931 a white poet came to me — John Neihardt. I liked him. I gave him my life. I spoke in Lakota; my son Ben turned it into English; the poet's daughter typed it down. Three pairs of hands between my mouth and your page. And out of it came a book called Black Elk Speaks, and it is the most famous book any Indian ever spoke, and you have read it, or you think you have. He wrote an ending for me. Everyone knows it. He has me say that the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. I never said it. Go and look. The words are not in the notes. He made them up and put them in my mouth and signed my name to them, and the world has been weeping over them for ninety years. What I actually said, and it is written down, is that my people were in despair, and that I would therefore send a voice again. Again. I was not finished. I was working. And here is what he left out of my life entirely. In 1904 I was baptized. Nicholas Black Elk. For forty-six years I was a catechist of the Catholic church. I walked to the cabins, I taught the children, I buried the dead, I brought hundreds of my people to that water with my own hands. The priests were the ones who knew me. And I never once took back my prayer to the six Grandfathers. Both. I held both, all my life, and no one asked me to choose but the men who wrote about me. You would rather I had died pure. That is what the vanishing is for — it lets us stay whole in your memory, and finished, and safely behind glass. But no people survives whole. We survive tattered. Only the vanished stay pure. Do you see why he cut it? A holy man of a dead religion is a beautiful poem. An old Indian walking to Mass in 1948 is a problem. Because a beautiful dream that died asks nothing of you. You can put it on your shelf and feel the ache and sleep well. But a people still here — praying, baptizing, burying, still working — that people wants its land back. That is why your country loves us vanishing. You will build us a museum before you will give us a river. You need us to be the sacred tree that died, because a dead tree makes no claims. So hear me now, in my own mouth, with no poet in the room. Do not mourn me. Mourning is the cheapest thing you have. The tree is not dead. It was never dead. I was there for eighty-seven years and it was not dead, and it is not dead now. Send a voice again.