Black Elk Summary

I love the visual images that Black Elk gives when he talks about the village or war party made up of all the different nations. The number of people that must have been there in order for you to not be able to see all of the tepees that were in the valley is truly astounding. That would have been an amazing place to be. I would have loved to see how all of the people intermingled, and interacted. There might have been a very large intermixing of families at the event. I would assume that members of the different nations would have married each other. This time must have also been a great reunion between friends and families. People that have been separated for years could have been brought back together, which would cause a massive amount of information being shared between

I know that throughout the book the Lakotas and the Crow are enemies, and it makes me wonder if the Crow were maybe at a different time part of a similar group of nations comprised of people that they got along with. In the book Black Elk mentions that the Black Feet were part of the war party, but later on in the book when he starts to become more powerful he stops some Black Feet from attacking his small band of people. So I would wonder if they are putting their differences past them for the event or if the altercation that occurred later on is just a squabble between two smaller groups. Now that I am looking the part of the story that Iron Hawk tells he talked about the Crows being with the soldiers that he was fighting. So I think that it is unlikely that the crows were part of a big war party at another time, or it could be that they inevitably lost and had just adapted to their new circumstances. The amount of fighting that went on at that time was really telling of their relationship with the white folk. The Native Americans were much better fighters and seemed be able to easily win most of the battles that occurred. They were in better shape and were seemingly