Black Elk's most distinctive personal characteristic is his spirituality. His acceptance of his visionary experience and participation in the ghost dance, about 20 years later, show that Black Elk believes deeply in a divine power greater than himself. Throughout his daily life, he recognizes a divine presence — in a thunderstorm, in the coming of spring. In his deepest expression of sorrow at the dislocation his tribe has suffered, he is mindful of that spiritual reality: "We are prisoners of war while we are waiting here," he says of reservation life. "But there is another world." Black Elk converted to Catholicism in 1904, 14 years after the point at which Black Elk Speaks ends, and worked among the Sioux and other tribes as a catechist; those experiences are not included in his narrative.
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