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www.shamansociety.org 29 One Black Elk the poet and the dream passport One of the great creative and spiritual encounters in American history took place under a shelter of pine boughs on a barren hill on the Pine Ridge reservation in the summer of 1930. The men who met that day were John G. Neihardt a renowned poet and critic from Nebraska and the Lakota shaman and holy man Black Elk. Neihardt was engaged in writing the last narrative poem in his epic Cycle of the West. He was eager to talk to an elder who had been warrior and healer hunter and seer who had worn the Ghost Dance shirt survived the massacre at Wounded Knee and lived the brave and tragic history of his people. The government agent at Pine Ridge had arranged an interview describing the old Sioux as a kind of preacher a wichasa wakon holy man. Neihardts Lakota interpreter counseled him not to get his hopes up. Black Elk now almost blind was reclusive and reluctant to talk about sacred things. But Black Elk proved eager to speak with Neihardt. He spoke not only from memory but from vision of things that he deemed holy. Black Elk said I feel in this man beside me a strong desire to know the things of the Other World. He has been sent to learn what I know and I will teach him.1 Black Elk was not mistaken. Both men had received their calling in dreams and visions and they immediately recognized that in each other. Black Elk placed a power ob- ject representing the Morning Star round Neihardts neck and started talking about a power-vision from his boy- hood. When he was just nine years old the Lakota fell into a trance on Harney Peak and saw the sacred hoop of the world and the tree of life and the powers of the six direc- tions. I was standing on the highest mountain of them all and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw for I was seeing in a sacred man- ner the shapes of all things in the spirit and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.2 In the rst conversation with Neihardt Black Elk gave only ashes of what the vision contained. But he invited the poet to come back in the spring to receive it all. He an- nounced that his purpose was to save his Great Vision for men he had chosen Neihardt to be his word sender the one who would take his story from one language and mindset and root it in another. Neihardt was ready to understand and interpret not only because he had studied Native American traditions for thirty years but because he was a dreamer whose life had been shaped by a big dream in his boyhood. Aged 11 on his own hill of vision in Nebraska Neihardt rolled on his bed in a fever. Three times during the same night he felt himself hurled through a vast emptiness at terrifying speed his arms stretched forward while a great voice drove him on. He interpreted the dream as a mandate for his life calling to follow a higher purpose that he would manifest through poetry.3 Two decades later Neihardt evoked this dream in a poem titled The Ghostly Brother. Here he presents the driving force of the dream as a greater self or daimon that tells him I am you and you are I. The poem speaks of the tension between a power that calls him to travel somewhere out of time and place beyond the outer walls of sense and the everyday self that wants safety and comfort and rest. When Neihardt shared the dream with Black Elk the Lakota elder called it a power-vision using the same lan- guage with which he described his vision on Harney Peak. Black Elk told Neihardt that he thought the voice in the dream was an Indian brother and that the same being who had sent young Neihardt ying through space had brought them together. It seems that your ghostly brother has sent you here.4 S H A M A N I C P R A C T I C E Shamans as Dreamers Dreamers as Shamans By Robert Moss __________________________________________________ . __________________________________________________ Opposite Caption . . .