Response Paper on Black Elk Speaks

Nicholas Black Elk, Lakota visionary and healer communicates his painful conclusion to John G. Neihardt at the end of his interviews in the following way The farmings basketball hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree diagram is dead(207). After he narrates the unspeakable tragedy of his nation, the concluding lines mugful the tragic end of a personal flavor and that of a subject displacement. Black Elk Speaks reads as a mourning text, commemorating a heathenish loss.Black Elk attributes the loss of cultural values to the typic loss of the circle, the location of the Power of the World. As in nature everything moves cyclically and repetitively, the life of Native Americans was to a fault organized around this principle they built their tepees on a circular frame and the communitys structure was withal circular. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds and these were always set in a circle, the nations hoop, a nest of many nests, w here the Great Spirit meant for us to hatch our children (150-51).However, when they were moved to the grey, square houses of the reservation, this power was lost forever despair, cultural displacement took the place of the older, happier days. What is to mourn the loss of identity? How to work through such a trauma? A form of single and communal working-through can be found in the presence of dreams and in the decipher of their meanings. Native American dream-visions (also called prophetic dreams) were go steadyed by the whole community, and functi unrivalledd as healing, recuperating activities for the tribe.Freud in his Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety also emphasised that dreams can express and thereby help to deal with anxiety (77-172). In Black Elk Speaks the dedicated visionaries and medicine men serve as healers of the nation, but when they fail to interpret and fulfil their prophetic dreams, working-through becomes impossible for the community it is hard to follow on e great vision in this world of darkness and of many ever-changing shadows.Among those shadows men get lost (Black Elk 192) and he also stresses temporary hookup referring to the massacre at Wounded Knee that a peoples dream died there. It was a beautiful dream (Black Elk 207). Thus, the restoration of a cultural identity becomes impossible as Black Elk also fails to fulfill his mission he was given in his dream, that of healing, ameliorating individual and/or communal pains.