Black Elk Speaks

Black Elk Speaks is an example of personal narrative, which is, most simply, the story of someone's experiences narrated by that person. Memoir, autobiography, and published diaries — like Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, for example, or The Diary of Anne Frank — are traditional versions of the personal narrative. More precisely, Black Elk Speaks is a narrated autobiography and a spiritual autobiography. Narrated Indian autobiographies had been an established literary form in the United States at least since the 1833 publication of Black Hawk: An Autobiography. These life stories were narrated because most of their Indian subjects did not have the fluency in English to write for the American reading public. But simply to record a life story, even one's own, does not necessarily create a work of literature; a biography or autobiography, just like a novel or a play, usually has a point of thematic or dramatic interest around which the narrative can shape itself. In the case of Black Elk's life, that point of interest is the mystical vision he was granted. His story is an attempt to explain his successes and failures in enacting the promise of that vision: To what extent he did or did not fulfill the task the vision had delineated for him, the cultural factors that supported his efforts, and the political factors that worked against them. Because the vision was a mystical vision and the task was to be fulfilled in his role as holy man, Black Elk's story in this respect is a spiritual autobiography: It is based on the premise of a divine power's existence, as that power is defined in Sioux belief, and it is the story of how Black Elk developed in his relationship to the divine. As the life story of someone whose culture was marginalized and, at times, pushed to near extinction, within the United States, Black Elk's narrative also has affinities with the American slave narrative and Holocaust survival narratives.