Black Elk Speaks

The first time I read this, I did not realize that there were few pages missing and was confused. After I figured out that couple of pages were missing, I read it again, but I still could not make sense of what I was reading. "Black Elk Speaks" is a strange story; as Black Elk says, it is "not the tale of a great hunter or of a great warrior, or of a great traveler" (359). I had to read it once again--this time very carefully--to understand that this story is about a vision.

Black Elk had a great vision where he is mingling with the nature. In his vision, he rode with great horses in the clouds. They were beautiful but frightening because "their manes were lightning and there was thunder in their nostrils" (362). After meeting the horses, he followed the bay horse to a tepee with a rainbow door, where six old men blessed him with great power. With the power, he killed drought and saved many animals. During his vision, he had an epiphany that everything must coexist in peace: "I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being" (368).

Perhaps, Black Elk envisions a world close to the Garden of Eden

After his vision, his sympathetic imagination grew greatly. Before he had this vision, he was a simple child who boasted that he "was riding horses now and could shoot prairie chickens and rabbits with [his] bow" (360). After his vision, however, he could no longer kill the animals without a hesitation: "just as I was going to shoot, I felt queer again, and remembered that I was to be like a relative with the birds" (368). He failed to shoot the bird because he put himself in the position of a bird's relative. When he killed the frog after letting the bird go, he almost cried at the thought of killing an animal.

Black Elk almost shed tear at the thought of killing this small creature

It is interesting to see how Black Elk's vision affects him. As a Native American, he must hunt and kill animals in order to survive, but because he sympathizes with the animals, he can no longer kill them without feeling guilt and uneasy. Just a simple vision entirely changes one's view of the world. Maybe if we could all share his vision, the power of sympathetic imagination will cause the animal cruelty in today's world to dissipate.