After recently rereading Black Elk Speaks, lucid images and ideas came to life. The markings on the clothing, dwellings, animals, and skin. The reds, blacks, yellows, and rainbows adorning the camps and characters. Intentionally, specifically, providing means for sacred energy to flow. The characters have come alive. Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, the horses, storms, and grandfathers of heaven, Black Elk himself, and all the imagery of bounty, beauty, hardship, and famine is clear. As the story of the medicine man, and the nation that he serves, evolves through its experience with the trespassing aliens, the rites, ceremonies, and dances become more and more urgent. Nature itself is consistently encouraging Black Elk, the fearful healer, that it is time. It is time. Black Elk’s visions have been, and are, performed in order that he may use the power of them. The pursuit of the indigenous people across the Dakotas is relentless. Read Cloud’s bargain is not sufficient to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the invaders. As desperation, death, and famine begin to dominate, an interesting response develops; dancing.
It is literally in starving desperation that the community joins other communities in seeking help, and hope. It is the Wanekia, the One Who Makes Live, that they meet; the Messiah. His name is Wavoka. There is another world. A world in which all things live. It is accessible. Wovoka gives the instructions on how to enter the other world to the scouts. Paint the faces red with the sacred red paint, and dance a ghost dance that you have been taught. After returning to their community the scouts bring this message. It spreads. It spreads to our friend Black Elk. The story continues.
Ghost dancing swept the across the tribes in like 1890-91. Black Elk had a vision of the other world. It was as the messiah had described. Everywhere the medicine man visits the people are dancing. Indigenous North American human civilization has existed for thousands of years on the continent. Now facing extermination in the late Nineteenth Century its cultural response is mesmerizingly interesting. The internal gravity, I’m feeling as the reader, is specific. My own personal beliefs about this story are not relevant. This is all based in truth. Ghost dancing, as it’s happening in the North American west-midwest in the late 1800’s, is an earth grounded human cultural response to being rubbed out. It is not only believed to be powerful by those dancing it, it’s believed by the invaders. The invaders are afraid. The ensuing massacre is its own story. Wounded Knee, as told by the medicine man, brings up the same feelings that come up seeing the leveled communities of the Middle East of more recent vintage. Extermination of peoples has so many versions. Despair, for anyone with any compassion, can only be avoided with some combination of detachment, apathy, anesthesia, and narrative manipulation. Ironically, the US Pledge of Allegiance, and the closing phrase “With liberty and justice for all.” is written in 1892. There’s a sick twist about this.
Abandonment of the Manifest Destiny myth that has prevailed for some time now, as an enforced American narrative, does not seem near as unsound as maintaining it. The warp speed industrial impact on the same earth indigenous peoples have roamed is stunning. The notion of the other world is well received here. The modern world is culminating with the sixth mass extinction. It’s not just human races being eradicated, and all this life energy has to go somewhere. The Wanekia spoke of another world coming as a cloud. All that has ever been killed is around. The Wanekia held out his hat. In it was visible the whole world. For one looking, however, all he saw was the inside of the hat. That’s not the one I would like to be. Right now it would be hard to claim to know what to do to access the full life world. Claiming that it exists doesn’t.