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Black Elk Speak Analysis

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Black Elk Speak Analysis
Response Paper on Black Elk Speaks

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Nicholas Black Elk, Lakota visionary and healer communicates his painful conclusion to John G. Neihardt at the end of his interviews in the following way: “[…]The nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead”(207). After he narrates the unspeakable tragedy 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 mourning text, commemorating a cultural loss. Black Elk attributes the loss of cultural values to the symbolic loss of the circle, the location of the Power of the World. As in nature everything moves cyclically
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