Clyde Holler, _Black Elk's Religion: The Sun Dance and Lakota Catholicism_,
	Syracuse UP, 1995. pb., 246 pp.
reviewed by Prof. Arthur Versluis, Department of American Thought and Language,
	Michigan State University, versluis@pilot.msu.edu

   The past two decades have seen many changes in scholarship on the major
figure in Lakota Sioux spirituality, Black Elk.  Especially since the
publication of Raymond DeMallie's reconstruction of the original Black Elk
interviews with John Neihardt, published as _The Sixth Grandfather_ in
1984, there has been heated controversy over Neihardt's famous _Black Elk
Speaks _(1931), and over the degree to which Black Elk in that book was
distorted into a tragic figure.  Certainly the reader of Neihardt's final
postscript to the original book, which shows a broken Black Elk lamenting
over the death of his tribe's spirituality, might well be inclined to see
Lakota spirituality as a thing of the past and the book as a kind of poetic
relic.  But with DeMallie's and others' scholarship, as well as revelations
about Black Elk's relationship to Catholicism, Black Elk has begun to
emerge as a much more complex figure.  In this book, _Black Elk's
Religion,_ Clyde Holler attempts to sort through the scholarship on these
topics and determine at least something of where Black Elk himself stood on
a range of important issues.

   Holler is quite forthright about his own approach to these issues and
topics.  Near the beginning of the book, he explains how he himself came to
confront Black Elk and Lakota spirituality for the first time when he had
to teach _Black Elk Speaks_ in a course.  Asked by a student whether one
could trust the book to be faithful to Black Elk, he decided to find out
for himself, and that sent him on the course of inquiry that led him to
publish this book.  A "philosopher of religion" whose academic training was
on Kierkegaard, Holler remarks that he simply does not accept that only
Native Americans can study Native American spirituality.  This is a fairly
controversial subject in itself, and Holler comes down very clearly on the
side of objective religious studies scholarship, even though he himself was
very much moved by his experiences at a Lakota Sun Dance.

   The primary use of this book is in offering an overview of scholarship
on the Sun Dance in general and on views of Black Elk in particular.
Holler is helpful in tracing ethnographic scholarship on the Sun Dance, and
obviously is seeking to be as neutral as possible in examining
controversial questions about Lakota spirituality in the modern era.  That
his efforts nonetheless have proven to be controversial is not surprising,
for this is a charged area of scholarship, one in which people often form
camps strongly opposed to one another's views.  Some scholars insist that
Black Elk was a Lakota traditionalist to the end, and only adopted Roman
Catholicism as a show in order to appease missionaries and provide some
respite for himself and his people.  Others, including some Jesuit
scholars, insist that Black Elk more or less gave up on his traditional
ways and wholeheartedly adopted Catholicism.

   The question that this book proposes to readers of this review is above
all this: can one belong to two religions wholeheartedly at the same time?
In other words, is it possible that Black Elk was a Lakota traditionalist
and a Catholic at the same time?  This is a question whose ramifications
extend far beyond the specific case of Black Elk, interesting though that
case is.  If we assume that religions consist in a series of logical
propositions that one must accept in toto, then of course it is very
difficult to accept two religions at once.  But such an approach to
religions is a peculiarly modernist one, and totally ignores the
experiential nature of religious life.  When we turn our attention from
religion as a series of propositions to be accepted or denied, to religion
as lived experience, it is entirely possible that one could wholeheartedly
accept two religious traditions at once.  Contemporary religious dialogue
between Buddhism and Christianity, and the existence of Zen Buddhist
Catholic priests or Zen Buddhist Protestants clearly indicates such a
possibility of dual religious practice.  It seems entirely likely that such
religious syncretism will continue, and that from the viewpoint of the
practitioner, as in the case of Black Elk, this syncretism will not be a
problem.  It is chiefly those with an axe to grind, be it scholarly,
political, or religious, who demand that one be in only one camp and not
the other.  Undoubtedly the truth is, as usual, in the middle.

Link to Syracuse University Press.