ABSTRACT
The author focuses on a long excursus concerning Jonathan Lear's attempt to negotiate the evidence of Plenty Coups and the Crow in his book Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Then the way this negotiation of evidence plays out in one of the inaugural exhibits of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). Such negotiations might suggest about the future of both Christianity and the ruins of Native America. The Black Elk Speaks book was published in 1932, and became something of a cultural phenomenon in America, long after Black Elk was dead. A Crow warrior and chief born in 1846, Plenty coups told Linderman his story through a translator just a few years before he died in 1932, the same year John Neihardt published his story of Black Elk. Indeed, Linderman and Neihardt were part of a larger effort in the early twentieth century to preserve a record of the life Indians had once led.
