part of North America. Thanks to these scrolls, we also know about the discovery of white cowrie shells, which are found only in certain saltwater areas.
The scrolls are very much a piece of living history, kept alive by the Native peoples of today, particularly among the medicine (midewiwin) societies. The contents of the scrolls are often memorized, and the interpretations can remain a secret among the elders of the group.
BIRD WOMAN
See Sacajawea
BLACK DRINK
The Native Americans of the southeast blended a particular type of brew which they then used in ritual and ceremonial practice. The primary ingredient of the tea was a poisonous plant called Ilex vomitoria; also included were tobacco and other herbs. As the name of the main ingredient might suggest, the tea induced vomiting, believed to detoxify the body as well as provide visions.
BLACK ELK
“And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.”
1863–1950
That we know so much about the life of Black Elk is because of a man named John Neihardt. As an historian and ethnographer, Neihardt was, in the interests of his personal research, searching out Native Americans who had a perspective on the Ghost Dance Movement. He was introduced to Black Elk in 1930, and thus began a productive collaboration which would provide a major contribution to the Western perspective on Native American life and spirituality—coming, as it did, from an authority on such subjects. The books they produced, including Black Elk Speaks, became classics, and are still in print today.
Living during the time that he did, Black Elk was in a unique position: born into the Oglala Lakota division of the Sioux, he not only participated in the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, when he would have been 12 or 13, but also toured as part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in the 1880s, and traveled to England when the show was performed for Queen Victoria in 1887. He was 27 when the massacre at Wounded Knee took place in 1890, during which he sustained an injury.
Black Elk was a heyoka, a medicine man, and a distant cousin to Crazy Horse. Elk was born in Wyoming in 1863. Acknowledged as a spiritual leader and as a visionary, Black Elk’s first revelation came to him when he was just nine years old, although he did not speak of it until he was older. In this vision, he said, he met the Great Spirit and was shown the symbol of a tree, which represented the Earth and the Native American people.
After Wounded Knee, Black Elk returned to the Pine Ridge Reservation and converted to Christianity. He married Katie War Bonnet in 1892. All three of their children, as well as their mother, embraced the Catholic faith, and in 1903, after Katie died, Black Elk, too, was baptized, although he remained the spiritual leader among his own people. He saw no inherent problems in worshipping both the Christian God and Wakan Tanka, or the Great Spirit—an open-minded attitude which undoubtedly was not shared by his fellow Catholic. Black Elk married once more in 1905, and he and Anna Brings White had three more children. He was one of the few surviving Sioux to have first-hand knowledge of the rituals and customs of the tribe, and he revealed some of these secrets to both Neihardt and Joseph Epes Brown, who published books based on his knowledge.
BLACK HAWK (MAKATAIMESHEKIAKIAK)
“Courage is not afraid to weep, and she is not afraid to pray, even when she is not sure who she is praying to.”
1767–1838
In what is now called Rock Island, Illinois, there was once a village called Saukenuk, and this is where Black Hawk, also known as Black Sparrow Hawk, was born. His father, Pyesa, was the medicine man of the tribe, and, in accordance with his destiny to follow in his father’s footsteps, Black Hawk inherited Pyesa’s medicine bag after Pyesa was killed in a battle with some Cherokee.
Like many other young men of his people, Black Hawk trained in the arts of battle from an early age. When he was 15, he took his first scalp after a raid on the Osage tribe. Four years later he would lead another raid on the Osage, and kill six people, including a woman. This was typical of the training in warfare given to young Native Americans.
After the death of his father Pyesa, Black Hawk mourned for a period of about six years, during which time he also trained himself to take on the mantle of his father, as medicine man of his people. It would also prove a part of his destiny to lead his people as their chief, too, although he didn’t actually belong to a clan that traditionally gave the Sauk their chiefs. It was Black Hawk’s instinctive skill at warcraft that accorded him the status of chief; this sort of leader by default was generally named a “war chief” since, sometimes, circumstances dictate the mettle of the leader that was needed.
When he was 45, Black Hawk fought in the 1812 war on the side of the British under the leadership of Tecumseh. This was an alliance that split the closely aligned Sauk and Fox tribes. The Fox leader, Keokuk, elected to side with the Americans. The war pitted the North American colonies situated in Canada against the U.S. Army. Britain’s Native American allies were an important part of the war effort, and a fur-trader-turned-colonel, Robert Dickson, had pulled together a decent sized army of Natives to assist in the efforts. He also asked Black Hawk, along with his 200 warriors, to be his ally. When Black Hawk agreed, he was given leadership of all the Natives, and also a silk flag, a medal, and a certificate. He was also “promoted” to the rank of Brigadier General.
After this war, Black Hawk led a group of Sauk and Fox warriors against the incursions of the European-American settlers in Illinois, in a war that was named after him: the Black Hawk War of 1832. It was this Black Hawk War that gave Abraham Lincoln his one experience of soldiering, too.
Black Hawk was vehemently opposed to the ceding of Native American territory to white settlers, and he was angered in particular by the Treaty of St. Louis, which handed over the Sauk lands, including his home village of Saukenuk, to the United States.
As a result of this treaty, the Sauk and Fox had been obliged to leave their homelands in Illinois and move west of the Mississippi in 1828. Black Hawk argued that when the treaty had been drawn up, it had been done so without the full consultation of the relevant tribes, so therefore the document was not, in fact, legal. In his determined attempts to wrest back the land, Black Hawk fought directly with the U.S. Army in a series of skirmishes across the Mississippi River, but returned every time with no fatalities. Black Hawk was promised an alliance with other tribes, and with the British, if he moved to back to Illinois. So he relocated some 1,500 people—of whom about a third were warriors and the rest old men, women, and children—only to find that there was no alliance in existence. Black Hawk tried to get back to Iowa, and in 1832 led the families back across the Mississippi. He was disappointed by the lack of help from any neighboring tribes, and was on the verge of trying to negotiate a truce when these attempts precipitated the Black Hawk War, an embittered series of battles that drew in many other bands of dissatisfied Natives for a four- to five-month period between April and August of 1832. At the beginning of August the Indians
