Damian Costello, Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2005).

December 6^th, 1904—120 years ago today—Black Elk was baptized at Pine Ridge and took the name of the feast-day saint, Nicholas. This event and the decades that followed it until Black Elk’s mid-century death have been the subject of considerable debate, both of the academic kind and of a sort that affects how we interpret the life of a human being and our relationships with Indigenous people and peoples.

Damian Costello’s book is the distillation of a doctoral dissertation on the subject. Himself of white settler background, the author, a Catholic, became deeply interested in the question of Black Elk’s Catholicism quite a bit before his cause for beatification was opened—and indeed, one might say, without his thorough research, that cause might have struggled to appear even more. Costello’s central thesis navigates two competing narratives:

The primary question pursued in this study is the question of the historical Black Elk. On the one hand, there is Neihardt’s essentialist Black Elk: a proud, defiant, yet vanquished warrior protecting a pure Lakota tradition. On the other hand, there is the Black Elk described by the Lakota community and the historical record: a Catholic agent actively and successfully participating in the new reservation economy. (p. 133)

The former depiction of Black Elk is to a large extent rooted in John Neihardt’s 1932 interview-book Black Elk Speaks. The latter interpretation, as Costello indicates, comes through Lakota Catholic voices themselves, including Black Elk’s own daughter, Lucy Speaks Twice, and prominent reviver of Lakota culture, and Black Elk’s nephew, Fools Crow.

What hangs in the balance is two different worldviews. One is secular and modern—Neihardt’s. The other comes from within the Lakota community itself, with all its familiarity with place, economy, history, politics, culture, and language—that represented by Native American, especially close familial, testimony.

Costello provides a bridge and an open window for outsider-Westerners through the use of postcolonial studies. This approach allows us to figure out where exactly Neihardt’s interviewing, interpreting, and editing went wrong, without ascribing ill intent or dishonesty to him in any way. It is simply, as Costello shows at every turn, that the Euro-American ears were unable to understand the forces acting on both himself and Black Elk at the time, as well as having motivations of his own which were limited to certain events of the previous century, rather than pursuing with genuine interest questioning about Black Elk and the Lakota in the Depression era of the interview.

What emerges is a picture of Black Elk that justly inspires a canonization cause. He was among those defeated at Wounded Knee, as Neihardt was fascinated with. But in the previous century, other events planted seeds, too. Black Elk travelled across North America and Western Europe with Wild West–style shows (a form of cultural tourism which forms part of the field of postcolonial inspection, to be sure), and this opportunity (mixed with forces of economic compulsion) both showed him the good of Christianity and made patent to him the lived failures of Christians, particularly the Christian forms of civilization on display. This was 15 years before his baptism.

Eventually, Black Elk did become baptized, but his Christianity was always something of a “post-Western Christianity.” He did not buy into the civilizational model. Yet his belief and practice were not, as Neihardt and many other Euro-American writers would have it, feigned. For example, Black Elk’s motivation for becoming a Catholic wasn’t purely economic. Indeed, Black Elk held out for some time. When he did convert, he gave up his traditional “medicine man” (yuwipi) role, and only some years later became a catechist, the scope of which was rather closer to our idea of a permanent deacon today. Nick, as he was known, functioned effectively in that role. He was the godfather to over a hundred people, and he knew large amounts of the Bible, not from English, which he did not speak much of, but in the Dakota translation.

Indeed, Black Elk went very far along the road of inculturation. His famous vision is actually, as Costello reads it, a substantial reformulation of Lakota culture, from within, based on Christian worldview. Many of the elements have direct parallels, either linguistic or symbolic, in the Bible, especially the apocalyptic prophets and the Book of Revelation. Approximately 30 pages of the book go over this in excruciating detail. While one indication or another might be brought into question, it would be extremely hard to deny the overall argument. Black Elk’s vision is a Christian one. He is not running away from Christianity, despite his interest in many Lakota rituals and in Lakota culture. Rather, he is coming up with a new way of being Lakota, flooded with a Christian light. It is in Christ that the people will dance and live. But as Lakota.

Costello is adamant that Neihardt’s interpretation of Black Elk suffers from his own Euro-American, secularizing biases, including his decision to channel his life’s work into a poem about Manifest Destiny. Moreover, Costello asserts, even Native American voices who have dismissed Black Elk’s Christianity have done so under the compulsions of colonialism and the modern divisions between culture and economics, city and land, religion and life. Living off-reservation and being non-speakers, they lacked resources, though to a lesser degree than Neihardt, to interpret Black Elk as he himself would have been understood in his own on-reservation, language-speaking, economically-restricted, early-20^th-century environment. Costello’s post-colonial lenses are cognizant of the dynamics.

Closing parallels to Black Elk are drawn from Rastafarianism and William Apess, another Native American (Pequot, later adopted Mashpee) example. Like them, Black Elk navigates colonialism, and he genuinely believes and puts into practice with his whole heart Christianity. One’s mileage may vary with these notes in the concluding chapter. But it’s indisputable that they situate Black Elk in a larger family of those who take the Christian message but simultaneously turn it back on the deficiencies of supposedly “Christian” cultures, all while using not just its deepest truths, but its language and symbology within a cultural matrix that is far from European.

To understand Black Elk’s life journey, we need to rise out of the fog of modernity, and the post-colonial tools of Costello bestow enough added height to do just that. He lets local Lakota voices, especially those who knew Black Elk for significant lengths of time, speak. The Black Elk debate may not be solved to everyone’s satisfaction. But Costello, I think, makes a convincing case that the form it has taken is to a large extent a fight between those who are reading things through the lenses of modernity itself, and those who are trying not to, whether that be because of their own alienation from it as Native Americans of a certain place and time, or because of their commitment to dismantle the impediments and harms of modern assumptions. There could always be more to the story yet to come. But as things stand, the (previous) stakes in the debate seem to have been discerned.

As regards Black Elk himself, it is no wonder that we are now seeing him put forward as a Servant of God. Despite limited resources for interpretation, what we do have depicts a kind of holiness. It’s an inculturated one. It’s a radically anti-colonial one. It’s a gentle and steady one, focusing on the long arc of history and yet exercised under extreme conditions of economic, political, and cultural subjugation that previous generations of settler culture were not willing to face up to. There is perhaps no better way to cap off a review of Black Elk: Colonialism and Lakota Catholicism than with the book’s own final paragraph (p. 182):

Even today Black Elk’s vision has a message that needs to be heard. Black Elk teaches us that the problem of Western expansion was not in bringing the gospel to the Lakota; instead, the problem was not hearing the gospel. The focus on nonviolence, equality, and the rejection of greed the firm rejection of colonialism is the witness that Black Elk’s vision preached and still preaches to Western Christianity, to the church, and to the broken world. Despite the tragedy of Western colonialism, there is still hope, there is still time to hear and respond to the gospel. Black Elk, a great saint of the colonial era, still calls all people through his vision and the witness of his life to hear the Lakota Christ: colonialism must end so the sacred tree may one day bloom for all people.