The Providence of God in Black Elk's Life BEFORE his Conversion & the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Connection

Notes from the Archive

The life of Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk has taken on a mythical/legendary status among those who admire the man. The question for any historian is how best to peel away some of that mythical status to see the man more clearly. The onion of Black Elk’s life becomes a bit more complicated when the historian realizes that much of what we know about him is shaped by an oral historical tradition—one that isn’t too concerned with the particular but, instead, with the motif and the truth conveyed in the art of the story.

For those of you unfamiliar with Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, it’s been said before that Black Elk’s life spanned two worlds—the pre-reservation nomadic horse culture of the Lakota and the forced reservation life inflicted upon the American Indian by the United States government. There’s debate about the year Black Elk was born; many settle on dates between 1862 and 1865. I suspect there is a romantic notion for pushing Black Elk’s birth year earlier, making him older during the Battle of the Little Bighorn, or as the winners of the battle call it, the Greasy Grass. Black Elk was also present during the Wounded Knee Massacre.

Between those two events, Black Elk spent time as a dancer in Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show, traveling through Europe, where he could encounter Christianity outside the reservations and missions. Though he was baptized an Anglican as a condition for traveling with Buffalo Bill Cody, Black Elk did not truly convert at this time, though he was moved by the Christian concepts of the will of God and Christian love and charity, which he wrote about in a letter to a Sioux newsletter in 1889. Black Elk married a Catholic named Katie War-Bonnett, and his children were baptized, but Black Elk, a medicine man for the Lakota, was not baptized Catholic until 1904, when he had a sort of altercation with Fr. Lindebner, S.J. Black Elk would serve the next 30 years as a Lakota Catechist, a role that resembles what we would recognize today as the permanent diaconate.

A major source for Michael F. Steltenkamp, S.J., is Black Elk’s daughter, Lucy Looks-Twice. What is interesting when reading Steltenkamp’s first book, Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala, and rummaging through the folders of Marquette’s archives is that I found a primary source from another person who matches key points of a story about Black Elk that was likely told by Black himself to his daughter, Lucy. It’s a touchpoint between the oral and written traditions. I cannot go into much more detail because it becomes a pivotal point in my manuscript.

However, something that is likely very well known, I either didn’t stop to think about it when I read it previously, or made the connection, is how Black Elk, before his conversion to the Catholic Church, still played a role in its actions.

When you arrive at an archive, in the few that I have worked out of, you’re allowed paper and pencil. In larger archives like Marquette or the Lincoln Presidential Library, there will typically be a secretary—a gatekeeper—who, unless you’re a student or a well-known historian, you will be treated with a taste of suspicion, “who is this person…looking at this stuff…”

You get signed in, sign your life away by promising to act civilized and obey all the rules of the archive, and after that, you’re pretty much left on your own in a reading room. The archivist wheels in your requested material and, pretty universally, tells you that you can only pull one box at a time off the cart and gives you a large placeholder card. The purpose of the card is to place where you pull out a folder, so that you know where the folder goes back into the box. What is interesting about the archives, which I’ve learned a bit about through emails, is that archivists sort of know what they have at their archive, but not really. I suppose their job is more or less preservation of the documents. It makes sense, but originally I emailed, for example, the State Historical Society of Missouri, about John Neihardy correspondence about a letter I read about in a book, and said, “I am looking for the occasion of this letter, can you PDF a scan?”

Well, after some back-and-forth in the email, it became apparent that I knew what I was looking for and that I needed to go down and look in the box myself. The same went for the Black Elk Papers at Marquette University.

The challenge of an archive is that you have to know something about your subject before visiting it, so you know which boxes to request. In fact, it makes me admire folks like Michael F. Steltenkamp even more because much of his research would be groundbreaking—he laid the path for others to follow. The same for Raymond DeMaille, too. Or Joseph Epes Brown. For me, I’ve read all of these authors, so I know the key figures and the supportive cast, so to speak. I had an idea of which years and boxes I needed to request.

The beauty of the archive is finding the unexpected—BUT, especially if your time is limited, as was mine, you need to be careful not to get sucked down a rabbit hole. The great thing about technology, though, I can only imagine 30-40 years ago, is the ability to use your smartphone as a digital scanner, which makes the process no doubt a lot faster than the ole’ Xerox machine.

One unexpected find is the folder that held a letter to the Holy Father, Pope Leo XIII, in support of the canonization of St. Kateri Tekakwitha, with 140 signatures from Lakota men—Heleiyaksapa, or Black Elk, being one of them, dated 1885, which is nearly 20 years before Black Elk’s Catholic baptism, and five years before the Wounded Knee Massacre.¹