Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala

In Black Elk Speaks (1932) and The Sacred Pipe (1953), John Neihardt portrayed the Lakota Sioux elder Black Elk as a 19th-century figure, steeped in memories of pre-reservation life. In this scholarly study, Steltenkamp revises these nostalgic portraits of the Sioux spiritual leader as a victim of Western subjugation, showing that he preached Christianity to his people in his later life and used this consciousness to push them to renewal. The author, professor of anthropology at Bay Mills Community College in Mich., bases much of his study on the recollections of Black Elk's daughter, Lucy Looks Twice, whom he met while teaching on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. ``After he became a convert to Catholicism, in 1904 and started working for the missionaries,'' Lucy, who died in 1978, remembers, ``he put all his medicine practice away. He never took it up again.'' Steltenkamp's prose is pedestrian (``Here was an amazing story and a humorous tale being told . . . ''), but his book should spur re-evaluation of views ``concerning the adaptation of Lakota people to changing times.'' Illustrations not seen by PW . (Sept.)