Book description
In Black Elk Speaks and When the Tree Flowered, John C. Neihardt recorded the teachings of the Oglala holy man Black Elk, who had, in a vision, seen himself as the "sixth grandfather," the spiritual representative of the earth and of mankind. Raymond J. DeMallie makes available for the first…
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Why read it?
1 author picked The Sixth Grandfather as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
His life story in Black Elk Speaks ends when Black Elk was only twenty-seven years old. He would live another sixty years. The Sixth Grandfather completes his biography.
Black Elk successfully made his way into the utterly new White man’s world, performing in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in Europe and converting to Catholicism and becoming a deacon. Toward the end of his life, Black Elk renounced Catholicism and with a providential encounter with the poet John G. Neihardt, he found the person in whom he could entrust his great vision, which he had never truly forsaken.
He spoke in…
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