John Neihardt, who is responsible for Black Elk's narrative in the form of Black Elk Speaks, can be seen in both positive and negative ways. His conversation with Black Elk, his transcription and editing of their talk, preserved Black Elk's story, which has enlightened generations of readers. It seems clear that Black Elk Speaks inspired other people, outside the Sioux tribe. Joseph Epes Brown, author of The Sacred Pipe (1953), for example, recorded and edited Black Elk's explanation of Sioux spiritual traditions. But Neihardt gained Black Elk's confidence in a rare way. There seems to have been a meeting of the minds between the two men that did not exist between Black Elk and anyone else. In the course of the narrative, readers learn that Black Elk has not told even his closest friends some of what he will tell Neihardt. So, Black Elk Speaks is a testament to the apparent good faith between the two men and evidence of Neihardt's embrace of Sioux culture and spirituality, of his respect for another man and another culture.
But any text that has been through the process that Black Elk Speaks has raises questions of authenticity. The man who lived it recited the narrative after 40 to 60 years had passed since the events he narrates. Black Elk's son Ben translated his father's spoken Oglala dialect into spoken English. Then, Neihardt's daughter Enid, who often functioned as her father's secretary, recorded Ben's spoken English in shorthand. A man who was not an anthropologist or a linguist but a poet, Neihardt himself edited her written transcription into its final form. The narrative is historically accurate in terms of the chronology and events in tribal history that it records. The transcript seems to indicate that the accuracy is due to Black Elk's memory; the collaboration of his friends Standing Bear and Iron Hawk is also important, as is the fact that Neihardt researched some of this same material for his Song of the Indian Wars completed in 1925. In any case, Neihardt's Cycle of the West, the epic poem about the settlement of the American West that was his life's work, indicates that he was certainly the most sympathetic of listeners. He had great respect for the Omahas he met in Nebraska, and the job he would later undertake at the Office of Indian Affairs is another indication of his high regard for the Indian community. His own lifestyle indicated a contempt for material things and a reverence for the artistic and spiritual. All these factors make it difficult to separate Black Elk's voice from his own.
