the Lakota peoples and Ghost Dance were viewed with suspicion by government authorities who did take it literally. In late December 1890, an army detail of 500 or so intent on disarming Big Foot and Sioux people, who resisted the procedure, dispatched about 200 Lakota--mainly women and children--at Wounded Knee. Black Elk was a young man in 1890 living at Pine Ridge, near Wounded Knee. In Neihardt's account of his life he reports hearing the gunfire of the "butchering," and setting off with about 20 of his friends to fight, arriving just at about the time the cavalry unit was leaving the scene.
Wounded Knee, which was a decisive moment for the Lakota people as a whole, appears to have been a life-changing personal experience for young Black Elk, who had been attracted to the Ghost Dance and more generally was receptive to resistance ideology among Native Americans. He was a cousin of the warrior Crazy Horse, who had led the attack on Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876. And he witnessed the absolute truncation of Native American warrior culture that occurred after 1890. Not until 1973, when Russell Means led what he terms a "siege" of Wounded Knee, or a nine-week standoff between US government agencies and the American Indian Movement, was anything like armed Indian resistance a part of Native American or US Army experience.
When Black Elk Speaks was first published, it appears to have been subjected to relatively little critical scrutiny by the community of academic anthropologists and historians, even though Black Elk's biographer, Neihardt, was much more a poet than a rigorously trained scholar and was gathering material for a narrative historical poem about the American West. Further, as Neihardt himself explains, his encounter with Black Elk was serendipitous, not particularly planned. He was, however, looking for "some old medicine man who had been active in the Messiah Movement and who might somehow be induced to talk...