The Mythologies of Las Casas and Black Elk

Abstract

I was disappointed as a graduate student in American Studies when I discovered Ralph Waldo Emerson's statement that "There is properly no history, only biography." This claim did not seem true to me then, or now. In my own undergraduate 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 masculinist 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: Bartolomé 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 indigenous 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 of Las Casas is repetitive in spots, but it does handily cover a host of issues, including the legal system constructed by the monarchy in Spain to deal with a new colonial world, and it raises significant questions about European guiding ideology of a 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 witness to the Battle of Little Big Horn and an adult survivor of the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890. After practicing as a medicine man he abandoned tribal healing practices 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 trustworthy 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 special 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 romanticizing Oglala rituals and ceremonies. (That Indians were complicit in the myth of the noble savage could only be suggested recently...