![]() ![]() The Indians drink from the sacred cup, which will help them follow the good red road. Fox Belly helps him perform a bison ceremony, in which Black Elk and One Side are painted red and act like bison. He worries that he may die now because he has described the vision, but he thinks it is best to leave some record of it.Īfter healing Cuts-to-Pieces' son, Black Elk goes to Fox Belly, a medicine man, to tell him the bison part of his first vision so that he can help his people walk the red road of that vision. He says that, in talking to Neihardt, he has for the first time told as much of his vision as can be told in words even his son and his friend Standing Bear have not heard it before. He also explains that power works through him if he thought it originated with him, it would be gone. Messiah a professed or accepted leader of some hope or cause.Black Elk digresses from his story to explain that it is necessary to perform a vision before its power can be used he could become a healer only after he had acted out the heyoka ceremony. Census Bureau announced that the frontier closed in 1890, it was announcing the fact that there was no longer any territory in the United States that was not under the control of whites. The Dawes Act of 1887 had established reservations and the allotment of land to individual Indians, but the principle of allotment was ignored in many places and the land opened to homesteaders. The appropriation of tribal lands, the relocation of the population to reservations, the eradication of the bison herd, and the shocking decrease in the Indian population (from an estimated 5 million in the sixteenth century to about 210,000 in 1910) substantiates the Sioux's fear that life as they know it has come to an end. They are left with making a grand appeal to divine power and hoping against hope that their present world will come to an end, returning them to their original state of happiness and prosperity. (The reader might consider the fright that often attends the turn of a century.) The best defenses of the Sioux seemed ineffective against the overwhelmingly destructive onslaughts of the whites. Apocalyptic beliefs often occur among people who are living in duress, as the Sioux were, or among people who fear they might be. The premise of the ghost dance religion, or "Messiah craze," as it was sometimes called, was the belief in an imminent apocalypse - a belief that the end of the world was near and that goodness would be restored and evil destroyed. ![]() He feels sad that he has not been able to enact his own vision, but then becomes happy that perhaps the time has come to do so. He sees a ceremony that is like his vision after all - a circle, with a flowering stick, and the faces of the dancers painted red. ![]() Another is to be held at Wounded Knee Creek and Black Elk goes to see it. Black Elk is puzzled because this is not like his vision at all. Some believers claim to have seen their dead relatives. Through the year, rumors grow about the redemption the Wanekia promises. This Wanekia had a vision and says that the Indians might be saved if they perform a "ghost dance." Black Elk thinks that perhaps this man had the same vision he did and that he was meant to help him. The Oglalas send three men to investigate, and they come back with the news that a man named Wovoka, whom the whites call Jack Wilson, is a Wanekia (a great spirit, "One Who Makes Live"). ![]() Rumors of a man among the Paiutes who would save the Indians and bring back the dead and the bison, circulates among the Indians. He says that his power was dead while he was gone and he thought it was gone forever, but now that he is back, he continues to work as a healer. Black Elk himself is suffering: His father dies his younger brother and sister have died while he was gone. The treaty of 1889 left the Indians with even less land, the bison are gone, crops will not grow, the food that the white men promised to send is not forthcoming, and measles and whooping cough are taking lives. Black Elk comes back to see that hunger and disease ravaged his people. ![]()
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