Reviews for Wild Birds

The average rating for Wild Birds based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-10-08 00:00:00 Steven Maier Reading Road Trip 2020 Current location: South Dakota It's my favorite time of year, and I've got all the liquids in my cauldrons bubbling on the stove: soup, applesauce, Love Potion #9, and my standard Witches Brew (for poisoning). In the background, I've got a simmering panic, wondering why in the hell I chose this heavy memoir, Black Elk Speaks, to read now, as it's already October and I've still got 13 more states to get to before the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve. This book could be used, easily, as a door stopper, and it's as dense as a marble rye to boot. (Were you aware of how many highly detailed prophetic dreams Black Elk had? I wasn't). The way I see it, I can either stop everything and read this book alone for the rest of 2020, or I can finish my challenge like the overachiever I am. I've made it to the half-way point, and the audio book is now on its way, too, but I had some interesting revelations of my own, while I was reading this important work. Right at the beginning of this story, Black Elk mentions what year it was when he was 9, and I suddenly realized that Black Elk was the same age as Laura Ingalls Wilder (Black Elk was born in 1863, Ms. Wilder in 1867). They were only 4 years apart. Their connections don't stop there. They were not only two of the most famous people ever to put South Dakota on the map, but they both told their stories, for the first time, in print, in 1932. Both books were well-received, but Ms. Wilder's illustrated story of a simple family life was a bigger hit during The Great Depression than a complicated story of the relocation and decimation of an entire race of people. Go figure. However, they were both successful at the same thing: depicting South Dakota as one of our most beautiful states, a place where young children and their families could both rely on Nature's bounty and be restored by it, in every sense. It is a state I hold so dear to my heart, and both of them have made me love it even more, realizing what it must have been for them. Black Elk and his people were considered a serious “inconvenience,” to the U.S. government, and I think most of us know how their story went. I never knew, before I read this memoir, how much gold was perceived as being up in those hills or just how motivated the U.S. government was to get the Native peoples out of dodge, for that very reason. Tell me, why is gold behind almost every misdeed?? I regret that I didn't know this story, Black Elk's story, as a girl. What if it had been beautifully illustrated, like Laura's story, and they could have sat, side by side, on my bookshelf? Also, I wonder at Black Elk's life of prophecy and visions. Almost all of them came true, but where are the new prophecies and visions? Who's dreaming them now? What is our vision now, for Native peoples? What do we see for our lives together, in the future? Do we mean for them to keep chewing on cactus and rocks forever? I'm back to the cauldrons, stirring away, stirring away at those pots.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-28 00:00:00 Declan Mccarthy This is a haunting and moving transcription of interviews with the revered medicine man Black Elk of the Oglala band of the Lakota Sioux in 1930 at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. The editor, John Neihart, was a poet who was writing an epic poem about Messiah movement in the 1880’s among diverse Plains Indians and was seeking Black Elk’s perspective. Black Elk, then in his mid-60s, reflects back on a life spent trying to heal his people as a whole, not just individuals with medical problems. This mission was instilled in him from a mystical vision he had while seriously ill at age 9. In the narrative he goes into great detail about this vision for the first time because he felt it could still be important to inspire young Indians. As an outsider to this culture, much in the vision was baffling, but I could at least appreciate the poetic power of its imagery and get glimmers of the comprehensiveness of the spiritual system embodied in it. Thunder Beings swept him into the sky and take him to a mountain at the center of the world where the ideal of a tree of life flourishes and provides shelter for the community. They display to him arrays of horses acting out the meanings of the four directions on earth, the sacred hoop of the community of people, the paths that they must follow on the good Red Road and difficult Black Road, the intersection of these roads where the tree must be planted and made to flourish, and the story of the sacred pipe of peace bestowed by the White Bison in the form of a woman. He felt he failed in that life quest considering all the broken treaties and sad outcomes to his tribe from violent conflict with the U.S. Army during his youth. He was 13 when the Black Hills were taken from the tribe for its gold and was present during the Battle of the Little Big Horn of 1876, was close at hand when his hero Crazy Horse was killed while in custody. By 17 he was recognized as a medcine man and began sharing his visions. In his 20s he was caught up in the millenarian fervor of a return to Indian dominion of the West as infused in the Ghost Dance ceremonies in the 1880’s. He was devastated by the killing of Sitting Bull and his experience of the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, which was incited in part by paranoia among the military about the potential threat Ghost Dancers and extreme overreaction to some Indians’ resistance to its being banned. These events are best understood by reading books of history and biography, but I felt the impact of their cultural trauma in a powerful way through the authentic voice of Black Elk: I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream. And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth—you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead. After Wounded Knee, the tribe had to knuckle under, and Black Elk set out to learn more of the ways of their conquerers. He joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show for several years and traveled to the big cities of the East and Europe. As usual, he dwells little on the detailed events as he lived them but focuses on the big picture. He was awed by the power of a civilization that could make railroads, steamships, and engines of war. He was moved by the kindness of individuals, like families he stayed with and the sincere respect he felt in communicating with Queen Victoria. But in no way could he see the way of life of the whites (Wasichus) as superior to that of Native peoples: I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation’s hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother. At the end of the book, Neihart takes Black Elk out to a site of spiritual significance to him, where he enacts a moving prayer of hope that the surviving roots of the sacred tree might yet be nurtured to life. The book as published in 1932 had little readership, but its translation into German inspired Jung and others, and a new English edition in 1961 reached a wider audience that peaked in the 70’s. Potential readers of the account can sample it or read it in full as web pages at First People or in a pdf version posted here.