But the greatest point upon which authenticity can be argued is the elegiac tone of the narrative. Black Elk is depicted as a man who failed — or, certainly, thinks he failed — as a leader of his people. He laments that his vision had not been granted to someone worthier; his conclusion is that the task he had been given, that of maintaining the sacred hoop of his nation, has not been accomplished and that the Sioux are essentially a lost culture. It is this perception that some scholars in the Indian community have argued with. They do not see Black Elk's culture as having disappeared, but as having been transformed into something more consistent with the circumstances of reservation life. They would argue that Neihardt had his own disappointments (public neglect of his poetry, for example) and felt himself culturally marginalized. As someone with an essentially romantic temperament, Neihardt may have found the nostalgic picture of a bygone day more gratifying than the less glorified remnants of Sioux culture in the present day. Because we do not know whether Black Elk or Neihardt determined the point at which the book would end, it can be argued that Neihardt chose to end it with the massacre at Wounded Knee in order to reinforce a romanticized view of Sioux tribal life. It may be that the life Black Elk went on to lead afterward (which included working in a store and doing some farming, as well as marrying twice, raising children, and converting to Catholicism) was of no interest to Neihardt because it was not consistent with his own imagined view of Indian life.
Chapter 3's description of the great vision poses additional textual problems. To what extent does the iconography of the vision owe something to Neihardt's own religious experiences and even to Black Elk's later knowledge of Christianity (he converted to Catholicism in 1904 and worked as a lay catechist). These questions cannot be answered satisfactorily, but to examine them is to try to get closer to the very important and fascinating topic of how the story of a human life is shaped and interpreted through the lens of the imagination.
