Army continued its relentless land clearance, pushing Natives further West or on to reservations in order to make room for white settlers. His career as a warrior was as fleeting as the victory at the Little Big Horn. The son and grandson of an Oglala medicine man, he was expected to carry on the family tradition from a very early age, he began to have visions. Still, from his youth, it was clear that he would not follow the warrior path. Cousin to the famous Oglala warrior Crazy Horse, he would later recount the glee with which he scalped white soldiers during the battle. Nicholas was too young to have fought in this war but participated in the greatest Native victory of the Indian wars, the triumph over George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. This war ended in 1868 with the second Fort Laramie Treaty, which established the Great Sioux Reservation. Native American tribes united under the leadership of the Oglala chief Red Cloud. Within a few months of Nicholas’s birth, the Powder River War broke out. westward expansion, which led to war against the Native Americans who posed the main obstacle to that expansion. The end of the Civil War in 1865 brought a renewed commitment to U.S. Nicholas Black Elk was born around 1866, along the Little Powder River in Wyoming, near the Wyoming/Montana border. Only in recent years have Native American Catholics begun to reclaim the Catholic dimension of Black Elk’s life. John Neihardt, the anthropologist who interviewed Nicholas, deliberately suppressed this fact in the original edition of the book. Scandalously absent from Black Elk Speaks is an account of Nicholas’s conversion to the Catholic faith in 1904. Originally published in the 1930s, the book became a sort of bible for the counter-culture of the 1960s, a time when Americans were disillusioned with the materialism of modern American life and looked to the traditions of Native Americans for an alternative, more spiritual, way of life. This obscurity is relative to the notoriety he achieved through the book Black Elk Speaks, a transcription of interviews in which he described the religious practices and world-view of the Oglala Sioux. A member of the Oglala Sioux tribe, Nicholas served his people and other Native American groups in relative obscurity as a lay catechist. 1866-1950), a Native American Catholic currently at the “Servant of God” stage on the path to canonized sainthood. December 6th is the anniversary of the baptism of Nicholas Black Elk (c. Some American Catholics are also now associating the day with a different Nicholas. December 6th provides an occasion for Catholics in the universal Church to celebrate the life of a great fourth-century saint: St.
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