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Summary Of The Book 'Black Elk Speaks'

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In the book Black Elk Speaks the main character Black Elk started to tell his life story to the John G. Neihardt. Black Elk spoke of his early life and how “The Grandfathers” spoke to him telling him things like, take courage and he now has a cup that gives life. He then goes on and talks about his first major accomplishment which was killing a buffalo at the age of ten. Some of his childhood stories were told too. When he and other kids would play they would do things like, cut off the uppermost portion of a flagpole which resulted in Redcloud talking peace into the soldiers with words of wisdom. There was a remarkable story about an old man with dry lips that showed him how to spearfish. Black Elk had failed to do this and made the old man laugh which resulted in his dry lips cracking and bleeding. …show more content…

The daughter refused because she wanted to be bought like a woman. Black Elk talked about when they moved camp to stay away from the soldiers and that they found “yellow metal” that was useless to them. There was a chief that would sacrifice himself for the good of his people and did not have many horses like most chiefs would. The soldiers had to lie to him to get him to a point that was suitable to kill him and the age of 30. A quote from Black Elk about a fight with the Wasichus. The quote is, “I made up my mind that, small as I was, I might as well die there, and if I did, maybe I’d be known.”(78) At this point in the book a theme I have picked up on is that you do not have to be selfish and you will learn from your mistakes. A major idea seems to be that children will be children and violence is not always the solution to problems. Most of the characters in the book so far are people who taught him something or children that he would play

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