Black elk speaks study guide11/24/2023 ![]() Everyone in the village seems to be dead or dying, but as he rides through, they revive. Black Elk succeeds in killing him, and knows that he has taken the form of rain and killed drought.īlack Elk sees a circled village and is told it is his. White troops, red troops, and yellow troops try to charge the blue man, and are beaten. In his vision, he rides the bay horse until he comes across a blue man in a flaming river. He gives him the name Eagle Wing Stretches.Īfter the Grandfathers finish speaking to him, a voice summarizes all he has been given. He tells Black Elk that he will have his, the Grandfather's, power and that his nation will know great trouble. The sixth Grandfather changes before his eyes, regressing in age until he is a boy who is Black Elk himself. The fifth Grandfather turns into a spotted eagle and tells Black Elk that he will have a special relationship with birds. He says that Black Elk will walk with power on both and will destroy a people's foes. The fourth Grandfather tells Black Elk that the north-south road (the red one) is good and the east-west road (black) is trouble and war. Black Elk thinks he sees in the shade of the stick a village of people lying like a hoop, the stick in the middle blooming like a tree at the intersection of a red road and a black road. The fourth Grandfather gives him a red stick, sprouted and with birds in its branches, saying that it is the living center of a nation and that Black Elk will save many. He points to a red man who turns into a bison and joins the sorrel horses that also turn into bison. The third Grandfather gives him a peace pipe with a spotted eagle on it and tells him that he will make well whatever is sick. The second Grandfather tells Black Elk that he will make a nation live and that he will have the power of the white giant's wing he turns into a white goose. The second Grandfather gives him an herb that fattens the black horse, which becomes the first Grandfather again. He tells Black Elk that his spirit is Eagle Wing Stretches and then turns into a starving black horse. The first Grandfather gives Black Elk a wooden cup of water that contains the sky, which is the power to live, and a bow, which is the power to destroy. Each of the six Grandfathers in turn tells Black Elk something about himself and his people's future and gives him a symbolic object. Black Elk then realizes that these are the Powers of the World. The first Grandfather tells Black Elk that his Grandfathers all over the world are having a council and that they will teach him. Inside the tepee the six Grandfathers are waiting. They come to a cloud that changes into a tepee with a rainbow for a door. The sky then fills with dancing horses who change into diverse animals and flee as the bay and Black Elk walk on, leading a formation of the horses from the four directions. The bay tells him that the horses will take him to his Grandfathers. Twelve horses are in each direction, each group of 12 matching in color: the horses to the north are white, those to the south are buckskin, to the east, sorrel, and to the west, black. ![]() The bay horse makes a circular turn in the four directions, north, south, east, and west. ![]() In cloud world, a bay horse greets Black Elk and tells him that he will tell Black Elk the life history of himself and others. Black Elk describes it in precise detail. ![]() A cloud takes him, following the men, to a place made of cloud in which he beholds an extraordinary, highly symbolic vision. They call to him that his Grandfathers are waiting for him. When he is laid down to rest in his parents' tepee, he sees through the opening in the top the same men he had seen in the sky four years before. The Indians are moving camp, but he is so ill he has to be carried. Half of the herd was more than Black Elk's people could use anyway.īlack Elk is eating when he hears a voice telling him to hurry because his Grandfathers are waiting. The building of that railroad and its subsequent expansion into the Transcontinental Railroad (1869) had divided the huge grazing ground of the bison into a north and south half. During this time, the white men had moved away from Indian encampments to live along the newly built Union Pacific Railroad. There is nothing to report from his life between the ages of five and nine. In this unusually long chapter, Black Elk has a vision at the age of nine. ![]()
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