ABSTRACT
Black Elk was born in 1862 on the banks of the Little Powder River, a tributary of the Yellowstone River in what is now the state of Wyoming. Black Elk lived through the transformation of the central plains of North America from their aboriginal condition inhabited by indigenous peoples to a land of Wasichu farms, ranches, railroads, highways, power lines, towns, motels, monuments, parks, diners, movie theatres and all the other trappings of modern American civilization. Black Elk, like most of the Lakota, turned his back on European-American culture, and defiantly continued to practise traditional medicine, which put him in conflict with the missionaries on his reservation. He was a religious genius, and he turned this genius into a career as a catechist in the Catholic Church's St Joseph Society, spreading the gospel to other Lakotas in their own language. As late as the eighteenth century, the Lakota were a woodland people living in the region of western Great Lakes.
