Book Report On Black Elk

Literature Review - Black Elk Speaks Black Elk Speaks by Nicholas Black Elk is Black Elk’s life story, as well as his visions, and perspective on settlers invading his homeland during the nineteenth century. Native American, Black Elk, vividly describes everything he remembers. He goes through the basics. He was a Lakota of the Ogalala band. He bore the name, Black Elk, as it was his father’s, his grandfather's, and the father of his grandfather’s name. He also includes more specific moments in his childhood like when he claims to have first started hearing “the Voice” and graphic descriptions of war. The wording Black Elk uses sticks out to me the most when reading this book. It is often simple but fairly poetic. It was interesting to learn

Subsequently, this is followed with personification as “thunder beings lived and leaped and flashed” (18). Black Elk uses another figure of speech involving the sky when using a metaphor to describe horses he claims to have seen. “Their manes were lighting and there was thunder in their nostrils” (18). With all three of these on the same page, this piece of literature by far has the most figures of speech I have ever seen used in a book. Using literary devices like in examples I mentioned, are pretty sounding and add more character to the simple language used in the

citizen which I found interesting. This was apparent to me in one of the brutal war scenes where he laughs at a scared, dying person. “I saw something funny. Two fat old women were stripping a soldier, who was wounded and playing dead. When they had him naked, they bagan to cut something off that he had, and he jumped up and began fighting… He was swinging one of them around, while the other was trying to stab him with her knife. After awhile, another woman rushed up and shoved her knife into him and he died really dead” (94). Although I do not fully understand it, some of the humor and lightheartedness Black Elk found in such repulsive acts as cutting off a man’s testicles while he is alive, could have come from spite. Later, Black Elk is proud of a killing he makes when “I showed my mother my first scalp,” (95). Something my mother would be disgusted by, is an accomplishment and seems almost like a milestone to them. It is not that Black Elk valued life flippantly, he just seemed much more desensitized to it. In fact, in some ways, Native Americans valued and understood life much more respectfully and differently than many people today. This also says a great deal about my culture. Generally, people today are not exposed to the conditions Native Americans were and although there are still reservations, Native American life is not the same today as it was