In the middle of January, Black Elk gets news of another attack. He rides out, despite the fact that his wound is not completely healed. The Indians attack soldiers at Smoky Earth and take their horses and then retreat into the Badlands. Black Elk wants to form a larger war […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 25 – The End of the Dream

Analysis The whites were worried that the presence of Big Foot would catalyze an Indian attack. It was the cavalry’s intention to disarm the Indians at Wounded Knee and to ship the more troublesome Indians to Omaha by train. The disarmament proceeded peacefully among the older Indian men, but several […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 24 – The Butchering at Wounded Knee

Black Elk makes a speech exhorting the Indians to fight if necessary and to depend on the spirits of their departed relatives. More Indians join them. Father Craft, a Catholic priest whom the Indians trust, tries to get them to return to Pine Ridge, and two chiefs arrive to take […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 23 – Bad Trouble Coming

Analysis Black Elk became a high priest of the ghost dance religion, sometimes called the “Messiah craze.” The reader sees in this description of the ghost dance much of the symbology that has recurred in Black Elk’s visions during his childhood and, later, in France: a red-painted man, the sacred […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 22 – Visions of the Other World

Analysis The premise of the ghost dance religion, or “Messiah craze,” as it was sometimes called, was the belief in an imminent apocalypse — a belief that the end of the world was near and that goodness would be restored and evil destroyed. Apocalyptic beliefs often occur among people who […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 21 – The Messiah

Analysis It is an interesting dimension of Black Elk’s character development that he should have had a Parisian girlfriend. (Black Elk was later married twice: first to Katie War Bonnet, the mother of his son Ben, and then, following her death, to Anna Brings White.) His experiences with Buffalo Bill’s […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 20 – The Spirit Journey

Analysis This chapter sees Black Elk further displaced and entirely out of his element on a train and then on a ship. Observing Omaha, Chicago, and New York, he realizes that the white men do not have any secret knowledge. He is surprised that the lights of New York outshine […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 19 – Across the Big Water

After healing Cuts-to-Pieces’ son, Black Elk goes to Fox Belly, a medicine man, to tell him the bison part of his first vision so that he can help his people walk the red road of that vision. Fox Belly helps him perform a bison ceremony, in which Black Elk and […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 18 – The Powers of the Bison and the Elk

Black Elk thinks about the four-rayed blossoming herb he saw in his first great vision and in the dog vision. He and One Side go out to find it and, after singing a sacred song, Black Elk sees it growing in a gulch. He digs it up and brings it […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 17 – The First Cure

To enact the dog vision, two heyokas kill a dog with much ceremony; it is skinned and its head and heart are boiled. While this is happening, 30 heyokas move among the crowd of Indians assembled at Pine Ridge, playing tricks and entertaining. Black Elk and his friend One Side […]

Read more Summary and Analysis Chapter 16 – Heyoka Ceremony