American Indian Culture and Research Journal

As a great fish swims between the banks of a river as it likes, so does the shining Self move between the states of dreaming and waking. — The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad In March 1932, John G. Neihardt, poet laureate of Nebraska, received an unusual thank you letter from a woman in New York City. It began, “Dear Mr. Neihardt, I have just finished ‘Black Elk Speaks.’ It makes me happy and sad all at once—sad for the days that are gone, and glad that a white man really lives who can enter into a right understanding of a Dakota’s vision, and can translate it into so poetic a form.” The woman writing Neihardt was Ella Deloria, a linguist and ethnographer at Columbia University, who was also a Yankton Indian. She wrote movingly to Neihardt about how her father, Philip Deloria, a Yankton chief and son of a “medicine man,” had abandoned his traditional Yankton life and become a Christian clergyman in order to help his people adjust to the social on-slaught of the white world. Deloria was deeply impressed by Neihardt’s ability to understand an important aspect of Native American spirituality in his book and present it so clearly to the outside world. She closed her letter by saying, I have in my texts collected for anthropological studies not a few examples of different people’s visions. I find them very inspiring—but I never knew until now how their meaning could be expressed in such a way as to be understandable to people of such a material civilization as this.