Black Elk

Joe Jackson's biography recovers Black Elk, the Lakota holy man best known from Black Elk Speaks, the 1932 testimonial John G. Neihardt shaped from interviews with Black Elk and others on South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation. Born as violence grew among U.S. troops, white settlers and the Sioux, Black Elk took his first life at the Little Bighorn, watched his second cousin Crazy Horse die and toured Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. He then joined the Ghost Dance movement and was shaken by the massacre at Wounded Knee. He chose the path of healer and holy man, and although he embraced Catholicism he kept practicing the old ways in secret. The book won the Francis Parkman Prize.

Joe Rogan, nearing the end of it, called it one of the most moving books he had ever read.