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unusual facts about John Neihardt


Black Elk Speaks

In the summer of 1930, as part of his research into the Native American perspective on the Ghost Dance movement, the poet and writer John Neihardt, already the Nebraska Poet Laureate, received permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to go to the Pine Ridge Reservation with his two daughters to meet an Oglala holy man and shaman named Black Elk.


Blue Highways

He outfits a green van with a bunk, a camping stove, a portable toilet and a copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks.

Harney Peak

Harney Peak is the site of the Sioux Native American Black Elk's "Great Vision" which he received when nine years old and the site to which he returned as an old man, accompanied by writer John Neihardt, who popularized the medicine man in his book Black Elk Speaks.


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