The Mythologies of Las Casas and Black Elk

Author(s): Paula Kane

Source: U.S. Catholic Historian , Summer 2011, Vol. 29, No. 3, Religious Biography and
Autobiography (Summer 2011), pp. 93-94
Published by: Catholic University of America Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41289664

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 The Mythologies of Las Casas
and Black Elk

Paula Kane

Ralph Waldo Emerson's statement that "There is properly no history, only biog-
I raphy." Ralph raphy.
was disappointed
" This claim didWaldonot This
seem claim
true toEmerson'
me then,s oras now.
did aIngraduate
my own not statement seem student true that to "There me in American then, is or properly now. Studies In no my when history, own I undergrad- discovered only biog-
undergrad-
uate courses, therefore, I use biography sparingly, because I find that students have
been seduced already by that approach to history, as evidenced by the popularity of
the History Channel ("All Hitler all the time"). As one of the vestiges of a masculin-
ist worldview in the profession which imagines history as created and governed by
"great men," biography also undermines my own approach to the discipline. The
adding of "great women" to the mix does not seem to me to solve the problem.
Consequently, when I do choose a biography for required reading, I try to select texts
and lives that are problematic in some way, and that challenge our received notions
about an individual or historical moment.

Two works that I have used recently are Another Face of Empire: Bartolome de
Las Casas , Indigenous Rights , and Ecclesiastical Imperialism by Daniel Castro
(2007) and Black Elk : Holy Man of the Oglala , by Michael Steltenkamp (1993). Las
Casas, often called the "founder" of human rights activism even though the concept
was non-existent in his lifetime, and regarded by some as the ancestor of "liberation
theology," was a Dominican friar and missionary to New Spain. He traveled back and
forth across the Atlantic to plead with the King of Spain about the cause of the indige-
nous peoples and to defend their humanity and ensoulment. But his circuitous career
path did not always produce the desired moral results: once an entitled encomendero
in Cuba, he held slaves until his "second" conversion when he abandoned his title to
those lands, but liberating his property had scant impact upon uplifting natives or
challenging the system. Las Casas was also disliked by his own countrymen who
regarded him as the originator of the so-called "Black Legend" about the Spanish
conquest because his scathing account of their actions in his "Brief Account of the
Destruction of the Indies." Furthermore, as a pious friar and royal go-between, Las
Casas rarely had personal contact with the natives he supported, and his outlook
towards them can be fairly described as paternalistic. Castro's account of the rich life

93

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94 U.S. Catholic Historian

of Las Casas is repetitive in spots, but it does handily cover a host of issues, includ-
ing the legal system constructed by the monarchy in Spain to deal with a new colo
nial world, and it raises significant questions about European guiding ideology of
divine mandate to rule over the "savages," the formulation of theories of empire in
situ , and the relationship between conquering armies and the imperialism of the
Catholic Church.

Almost four centuries later, the story of Nicholas Black Elk (d. 1950) forces us to
question the very act of historical writing, as a form of imperialism. Black Elk's life
has been told numerous times by previous biographers, each of whom conveniently
used him for their own purposes. Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux who was a child wit-
ness to the Battle of Little Big Horn and an adult survivor of the Wounded Knee mas-
sacre in 1 890. After practicing as a medicine man he abandoned tribal healing prac-
tices and converted to Catholicism, serving as an ardent catechist among native
peoples for nearly fifty years. Best known among the accounts of his life was John
Neihardt's 1932 biography, Black Elk Speaks , which was a staple in American (and,
thanks to Carl Jung, German) classrooms for decades. Neihardt was not a trustwor-
thy recorder, since he skewed Black Elk's oral history to preserve the image of the
chief as one of the last of a dying breed of noble savages, a visionary who gained spe-
cial sacred and psychic powers, ignoring completely his Catholic conversion and life
among the Jesuit missions of the Sioux reservations. Joseph Epes Brown retold the
story of Black Elk in 1953 in The Sacred Pipe , but again fell into the trap of roman-
ticizing Oglala rituals and ceremonies. (That Indians were complicit in the myth of
the noble savage could only be suggested recently, and through the use of autobio-
graphical humor, in such native-American writers as Sherman Alexie, in his collec-
tion of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, (1994) which
inspired the film, "Smoke Signals" (1998). Since readers of Neihardt's "spiritual clas-
sic" will never learn of Act Two of Black Elk's life, Steltenkamp is a necessary cor-
rective. Although in 2009 Steltenkamp published another biography, Nicholas Black
Elk: Medicine Man , Missionary ; Mystic , it does not add substantially to his earlier
book. Like his earlier work, it can be used to engage students about the desire of his-
torians to claim hybrid figures like Black Elk for their own camps. Where Neihardt
may have erred on the side of the Lakota visionary, Steltenkamp, a Jesuit, may ignore
sources that complicate his image of Black Elk's life as a Catholic hero.
By engaging the revisionist biographies of Las Casas and Black Elk, students can
move beyond the details of individual lives to questions of cause and effect in history
and the larger social and cultural forces at work. But the complicated nature of these
two lives also oblige us to ask: what do we learn from a Spanish Catholic who con-
verted to advocate native rights, and a Sioux Indian who converted to the faith of his
conquerors? As readers, what are our implicit notions about the adaptation of tribal
groups to modern times and different religious traditions? Does evidence support the
myth of Las Casas as the crusader for Indian rights? Does Black Elk represent the
tragic end of a "warrior society," or a hybridity that has been part of identity in the
Americas since 1492?

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