Nicholas Black Elk (1863?–1950) is undoubtedly among the best known of Native American spiritual leaders. His fame beyond his own Oglala Lakota community is largely due to Black Elk Speaks (New York: William Morrow, 1932), John Neihardt's interpretive account of the early years of the holy man's life. The book gained large audiences in the 1960s as part of that era's fascination with Native American spirituality, and it continues to be widely assigned to college students as a moving firsthand depiction of Lakota religious and historical experience. Black Elk was present as a boy at the battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, lived through the Lakotas' transition to life on the reservation, participated in the Ghost Dance in 1890, and mourned with his people after the massacre of Ghost Dancers that December at Wounded Knee. Neihardt structured the book around a powerful vision Black Elk experienced at age nine, and concluded with a tragic portrait of an old man apparently mourning the loss of his people's sacred way of life: “And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now as a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.” Black Elk's legacy as the leading interpreter of Lakota religious tradition was solidified by the publication of Joseph Epes Brown's The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Lakota Sioux (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), which became even more influential in some circles as an introduction to the religious meaning and continued relevance of key Lakota ceremonies.

This clear-cut image of Black Elk as a Lakota traditionalist began to unravel in the 1980s with the revelation that he had converted to Catholicism in 1904 and served his people as a Catholic catechist for the next half-century. Introducting a published version of Neihardt's interviews with Black Elk, Raymond DeMallie wrestled with Black Elk's Catholic identity and made it clear that much of Black Elk Speaks (including that famous concluding quote) had not been voiced by Black Elk at all but reflected Niehardt's view of Indians as a romantic and vanishing race. (Of course, none of this was news on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where family and friends knew the full span of Black Elk's work as a religious leader, and where the Jesuits of the Holy Rosary Mission had immediately repudiated Neihardt for presenting a false portrayal of one of their most faithful catechists.) Michael Steltenkamp—who studied anthropology with Joseph Epes Brown, taught at Pine Ridge Reservation, and subsequently became a Jesuit priest—entered this debate in 1993 with a rich description, based on Jesuit archives and interviews with Black Elk's daughter Lucy along with other Lakota elders, of the holy man's life as a catechist. In response, defenders of Black Elk Speaks, including Neihardt's daughter along with several of Black Elk's grandchildren, insisted either that Black Elk's conversion to Catholicism had been superficial or that he had renounced it late in his life. Most subsequent interpreters have argued either that Black Elk understood Catholicism as a fulfillment of Lakota tradition—a view consistent with the Catholic idea of “inculturation” but controversial elsewhere—or else that he interpreted each tradition through the lens of the other and saw no contradiction between them.

Steltenkamp's new contribution to this literature is advertised as a “full interpretive biography of Black Elk,” presenting the holy man's entire life story and religious journey “in one volume” for the first time. This promise is largely fulfilled. Nicholas Black Elk offers a complete and concise overview, and although the writing style is unfortunately somewhat dry, I would certainly recommend it for those readers who seek a one-volume introduction to the holy man and his role in Lakota religious history. For anyone who is already familiar with the literature summarized above, there is very little new material in this volume. Perhaps most interesting are Steltenkamp's reflections on the relationship between Catholicism and Lakota tradition in Black Elk's religious life. The book ends by making explicit the author's current understanding of that relationship, which (among other things) engages the Christian theological question of how the gospel relates to other traditions. Steltenkamp relates the Lakota “Star Boy” story as remembered by Black Elk's daughter Lucy, a version of the same story Black Elk told Neihardt at the end of their second set of interviews in 1944. Steltenkamp concludes that for Black Elk “Jesus was a special kind of ‘Star-boy’ revelation,” and that “the Christian figure added new revelation to what the people already believed” (232). In other words, he is suggesting not that Black Elk saw Catholicism as superseding Lakota religion in any way, but that the holy man's Catholicism simply represented a complementary addition to his developing Lakota religious worldview.