Problems with the work stem from the circumstances of its transcription and edition and can never be satisfactorily resolved. Enid Neihardt's transcription is included in her father's papers at the University of Missouri, but even a comparison of the transcription with the printed text fails to get at the problem. Readers trying to answer the question of authenticity must acknowledge the many-layered composition of this book: Not only the layer between Enid's transcription and John Neihardt's final copy, but the layer interposed by Ben Black Elk's interpretation of his father's spoken words, and the layer between Ben's words and Enid's writing. And perhaps foremost, readers must acknowledge the layer of time, 60 years of which had passed between Black Elk's vision and his account of it to Neihardt. By the time he spoke to Neihardt, Black Elk had converted to Roman Catholicism, and it is difficult to know how much Catholic iconography influenced his telling of the story. The passage of time also witnessed major cultural displacement among the Indians, which, like any trauma, can alter memory. These can be distracting questions but they are probably not the most important ones.
Black Elk Speaks received favorable reviews when it was published in 1932, but soon fell into neglect; an argument can be made that the economic depression of the 1930s distracted potential readers away from a book that seemed fairly esoteric. Interest in the work was revived in the 1950s when the internationally known psychoanalyst Carl Jung made reference to it in a footnote; Jungian psychoanalysts found enlightening its description of community ritual growing out of a personal vision. During the 1960s and 1970s, the book won new readers among the counterculture, with its depiction of communal lifestyles, environmental conservation, and alternative spirituality. Black Elk Speaks was one of several texts of the period — including Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and the films Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse — that spoke to a general revival of interest in American Indian life at a time when the American Indian community was calling for a new sense of identity and was claiming its political prerogatives. The Sioux scholar Vine Deloria says that the book's greatest effect has been on young Indians trying to establish their own identity, and that it will become "the central core of a North American Indian theological canon which will someday challenge the Eastern and Western traditions as a way of looking at the world."
