The catholicity of the Church is most radiantly clear in the communion of saints.
One of the beautiful paradoxes of the Christian life seems to be that the more one is conformed to the image of Christ, the more distinct the individual becomes. No two saints are alike.
C.S. Lewis put it this way: “How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”
Among the “gloriously different” communion of saints is a singularly surprising new Servant of God. I refer to the Lakota mystic and medicine man, whose life spanned nearly a century; who fought at Little Bighorn and traveled with Buffalo Bill; to whom Queen Victoria once bowed; who was arrested by Scotland Yard as a suspect in the Jack-the-Ripper case; who had a vision of the Crucified Christ decades before his conversion; who first responded to aide those attacked at Wounded Knee; and for whom the highest peak in the Black Hills is named.
I am speaking of Black Elk, the holy man of the Oglala.
His fame spread widely after the publication of John Neihardt's book, Black Elk Speaks. The book recounts lengthy interviews with Black Elk, who, having been born sometime around 1858, could still remember “the old ways” when Lakota life followed massive buffalo herds across the Great Plains in those now almost mythic, pre-reservation days.
Furthermore, Black Elk was a powerful medicine man and a mystic whose visions and wisdom shaped generations of Lakota.
In one such vision, recounted in Neihardt’s book, Black Elk is taken before “the holy tree all full of leaves and blooming” at the center of all things. “But that was not all I saw,” he continues.
“Against the tree, there was a man standing with arms held wide in front of him. I looked hard at him, and I could not tell what people he came from. He was not a Wasichu [a white man], and he was not an Indian. His hair was long and hanging loose, and on the left side of his head, he wore an eagle feather. His body was strong and good to see, and it was painted red. I tried to recognize him but I could not make him out. He was a very fine-looking man. While I was staring hard at him, his body began to change and became very beautiful with all colors of light, and around him, there was light. He spoke like singing: ‘My life is such that all earthly beings and growing things belong to me. Your father, the Great Spirit, has said this. You, too, must say this.’ Then he went out like a light in a wind.”
This was Black Elk’s vocation, to share what he had received in his visions and build up the people. Much of Neihardt’s book is dedicated to Black Elk’s work to understand and follow his calling.
But the book stops the narrative of Black Elk’s life when he was 26, making no mention of the fact that for more than twenty years before its publication, Black Elk had lived not only as a Catholic but as a catechist.
Black Elk was baptized “Nicholas” on the feast of St. Nicholas, December 6th, 1904, after receiving instruction from a Jesuit at Pine Ridge. The day was so important to him that he considered it his birthday. But even before his baptism, Black Elk was married to a Catholic Lakota woman, Anna Brings White Horses, and had all his children baptized.
Three years after his own baptism, Black Elk became a catechist. For more than thirty years, Nick Black Elk traveled across the Great Plains, evangelizing from the Dakotas to the Arapahoe in Wyoming (with whom he did not even share a language). As he traveled great distances to pray and teach, even without roads and through blizzards, he helped the priests (of whom there were too few) to found and support numerous parishes across the region.
Black Elk is credited with some 400 conversions among the native peoples during this period.
So dedicated was he to studying the faith that the Jesuits at Pine Ridge recall he taught himself to read the Bible in Lakota. In his pastoral letters, Black Elk urges the people to “read or teach yourself to read; study the Bible and hold on to it strongly.”
In one of his pastoral letters to a parish in Manderson, he wrote, “I am a catechist, and that job is to pray with people — teaching them how to pray.” His favorite prayer was the Rosary.
He was a regular Communicant (as often as priests were available) and would walk from the General Store in Pine Ridge to Mass, praying the Rosary, at least until his seventies. He continued to walk and pray the Rosary even as his health began to fail.
In his eighties, as he began to go blind and his health failed, he continued to kneel at the altar rail to receive the Eucharist.
He was bedridden for the last five years of his life but was very patient in his suffering and offered it up for the good of his relatives and friends. Before his death in August 1950, Black Elk told his youngest daughter, Lucy, that she would know all was well with him if she saw a sign in the sky.
Having received six of the seven Sacraments, Black Elk died and was buried at St. Agnes Church in Manderson, South Dakota.
The night of the wake, as those grieving were walking under the broad South Dakota skies, the most majestic display of Northern Lights became visible. Father William Siehr, one of the Jesuits at his funeral, reported, “When we came back from the wake, the sky was lit up, and everything was illumined all the way around... There were streaks of light and flashes, and it seemed like there were fireworks in between it. It had a very forceful effect on me. It was something I’d never forget.”
Astronomy Magazine reported that the Northern Lights were visible from Toronto through the Great Plains that evening. It was received with hope and joy as a sign that Nicholas was at peace with the Lord God, whom he had served so well.
Black Elk had been among many indigenous people to sign the petition for the canonization of St. Kateri Tekakwitha. In God’s Providence, Black Elk’s own cause for canonization began at St. Kateri’s canonization in Rome when his last surviving grandson, George Looks Twice, met a biographer of Black Elk, Mark Theil.
With the help of Archbishop Charles Chaput, the cause was taken up and formally received by Archbishop Robert Gruss in October 2017.
While his cause is in progress, many hope and pray for the day that “St.” Nicholas Black Elk may be officially recognized by the Catholic Church as the great Catechist of the Lakota.
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