Black Elk Speaks, a personal narrative, has the characteristics of several genres: autobiography, testimonial, tribal history, and elegy. However, Neihardt's editing and his daughter's transcription of Black Elk's words, as well as Black Elk's son's original spoken translation, raise questions about the narrative's authenticity. Black Elk Speaks is divided into 25 chapters, which depict Black Elk's early life. As an autobiography, the narrative traces Black Elk's development as a healer and holy man empowered by a mystical vision granted to him when he was young. As a tribal history, it records the transition of the Sioux nation from pre-reservation to reservation culture, including their participation in the Battle of Little Bighorn, the ghost dance, and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Black Elk Speaks offers testimony to the price in human suffering that the Sioux paid for the westward expansion of the United States. As an elegy, it mourns the passing of an age of innocence and freedom for the American Indian and his current cultural displacement.
Neihardt frames Black Elk Speaks with his Preface and Author's Postscript, which, though modest, remind readers of an editing presence. In these two pieces, Neihardt describes the circumstances of his conversation with Black Elk. Chapters 1 and 2 are preliminary to the description of the great vision in Chapter 3; they convey Black Elk's confidence in Neihardt and record the first few years of Black Elk's childhood, including the first time he heard voices at age five. Chapter 3, the longest and most complicated chapter of the book, describes the vision that Black Elk was granted when he was nine years old. Highly iconographic and symbolic, Black Elk's early vision depicts his journey to a cloud world in the sky where six grandfathers give him sacred objects and empower him to maintain his people's sacred hoop. From this vision, Black Elk gains a sense of himself as different from others in his band in ways that are both privileged and unsettling.
