Years later Black Elk was to reflect on his own personal experience as well as on the experience of his cultural tradition: "A man who has a vision is not able to use the power of it until after he has performed the vision on earth for the people to see." (9, p. 173, author's emphasis).

He was to realize in his adult role as a medicine man himself that: "It was not I who cured. It was the power of the outer world, and the visions and ceremonies had only made me like a hole through which the power could come to the two-leggeds." (9, pp. 173-174).

The form which Black Elk's vision took was that of the Horse Dance, a longstanding, traditional ceremony of the Oglala Sioux. The native American people already had conventional forms through which their mystics could express their dreams and visions. The year of his vision performance was 1880. Within the next ten years overwhelming changes took place, both for Black Elk as an individual and for the Indian nation as a whole, the primary change being the replacement of traditional life with reservation life.

The Ghost Dance

By 1890 strange news was coming out of the West. The story was that a sacred man had arisen among the Paiutes; this man had talked to the Spirit in a vision and had received the promise of a new earth. At first Black Elk did not believe, fearing that his people were being led on by their despair. Delegates were sent from the various tribes to the West to search for the truth. They found Wovoka, the Indian messiah, a Paiute sheep herder and once an obscure shaman. During his youth, following the death of his father, he was adopted by a white rancher named David Wilson and given the name Jack Wilson. While living in the Wilson household, Wovoka came under the strong influence of Christianity, which was to have direct impact on his later visions and teachings. At the age of 35 he went back to live with his people.

On January 1, 1889, an eclipse occurred which stirred up great fear in the hearts of the Indians. Wovoka lay ill with a fever. During the eclipse he claimed to have experienced a vision. It was a message from God promising to renew the earth but demanding in return the acceptance of a moral code which stressed non-violence and the performance of the "Ghost Dance." The injunction against fighting was revolutionary, for the highest values of most of the Indian nations at that time were placed on war.

Wovoka described his vision in this way: "When the sun died, I went up to heaven and saw God and all the people who had died a long time ago. God told  me  to  come  back