Response Paper on Black Elk Speaks

Nicholas Black red deer, Lakota long-winded and healer communicates his painful conclusion to posterior G. Neihardt at the closing of his interviews in the chase way The nations gang is broken and scattered. There is no totality any longer, and the sacred tree is brain dead(207). After he narrates the unspeakable calamity of his nation, the concluding lines mark the tragic end of a personal life and that of a national displacement. Black Elk Speaks reads as a lamenting text, commemorating a cultural pass.Black Elk attri plainlyes the spill of cultural values to the symbolic loss of the circle, the location of the Power of the World. As in nature everything moves cyclically and repetitively, the life of Native Ameri rouses was similarly organized around this principle they create their tepees on a circular redact and the communitys structure was likewise circular. Our tepees were round like the nests of birds and these were always sterilise in a circle, the nations ho op, a nest of many nests, where the bulky Spirit meant for us to hatch our children (150-51).However, when they were move to the grey, square houses of the reservation, this power was lost forever despair, cultural displacement took the place of the older, happier days. What is to mourn the loss of identity? How to work by dint of such a trauma? A form of individual and communal working-through can be found in the strawman of dreams and in the decoding of their meanings. Native American dream-visions ( excessively called precursory dreams) were interpreted by the livelong community, and functioned as healing, recuperating activities for the tribe.Freud in his Inhibitions, symptoms, and anxiety similarly emphasised that dreams can express and thereby help to deal with anxiety (77-172). In Black Elk Speaks the holy visionaries and medicate men serve as healers of the nation, but when they fail to interpret and fulfil their prophetic dreams, working-through becomes unacceptab le for the community it is hard to trace one great vision in this world of darkness and of many changing shadows.Among those shadows men get lost (Black Elk 192) and he also stresses while referring to the kill at Wounded Knee that a peoples dream died there. It was a beautiful dream (Black Elk 207). Thus, the getting even of a cultural identity becomes impossible as Black Elk also fails to fulfill his mission he was wedded in his dream, that of healing, ameliorating individual and/or communal pains.