Black Elk Speaks Sparknotes

The Life of Black Elk

In Black Elk Speaks the author meets Black Elk and starts learning about his story about himself and his tribe after Black elk offers the peace pipe. The One Hundred Slain War happens and Black Elk begins to see and hear things. Black Elk becomes very sick and he has his main vision. In the beginning of this vision the six grandfathers start giving him gifts. Crazy Horse gets murdered by a Lakota policeman. A band of Lakotas escaped the reservation to Canada and started starving. The tribe started recreating Black Elk’s vision and the horses starved. The tribe went to the the reservation and the soldiers did not give them anything. Black Elk goes with Buffalo Bill to London for his Wild West Show. The Battle of Wounded

At the end of this book it is very sad seeing how everything for the Sioux went downhill fast. This really hurt the tribe when all of this happens.“I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother.” If the sacred hoop is broke or the flowering tree dies, the tribe will fall apart. Once the tribe starts dying the go to the reservation and lose all power. “I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered.” Lots of people died and were wounded and the tribe could not do much but surender. This is a very sad thing to see, but it came to a point where they could not do much of anything