Get Familiar to: The Medicine/Holy Man, -Ben Black Elk-, Lakota Tribe #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

Heȟáka Sápa (Black Elk) (December 1863 – August 19, 1950) was a famous wičháša wakȟáŋ (medicine man and holy man) of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux). He was Heyoka and a second cousin of Crazy Horse. Black Elk was born in December 1863 along the Little Powder River (thought to be in the present-day state of Wyoming).According to the Lakota way of measuring time (referred to as Winter counts) Black Elk was born "the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed on Tongue River".In his early 40s in 1904, Black Elk was christened with the first name of Nicholas after becoming Catholic. When other medicine men would speak of him, such as his nephew Fools Crow, they would refer to him both as Black Elk and Nicholas Black Elk.

When Black Elk was nine years old, he was suddenly taken ill and left prone and unresponsive for several days. During this time he had a great vision in which he was visited by the Thunder Beings (Wakinyan), and taken to the Grandfathers — spiritual representatives of the six sacred directions: west, east, north, south, above, and below. These "... spirits were represented as kind and loving, full of years and wisdom, like revered human grandfathers."When he was seventeen, Black Elk told a medicine man, Black Road, about the vision in detail. Black Road and the other medicine men of the village were "astonished by the greatness of the vision. He had learned many things in his vision to help heal his people. He had come from a long line of medicine men and healers in his family; his father was a medicine man as were his paternal uncles. Late in his life as an elder, he related to John G. Neihardt the vision that occurred to him in which among other things he saw a great tree that symbolized the life of the earth and all people.Neihardt recorded all of it in minute detail, and consequently it is preserved in various books today.In his vision, Black Elk is taken to the center of the earth, and to the central mountain of the world. What mythologist Joseph Campbell explained as "the axis mundi, the central point, the pole around which all revolves ... the point where stillness and movement are together ... ." Black Elk was residing at the axis of the six sacred directions. Campbell viewed Black Elk's statement as key to understanding myth and symbols.

As Black Elk related:

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy.

infomation obtain from: http://www.indigenouspeople.net/