The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

sought, and his vision was bestowed on him without his asking.
In this respect also his experience parallels Sweet Medicine,
who was also given to vision and miracles before he reached
maturity.
In Black Elk Speaks, 11 Black Elk tells of his initial vision and
the subsequent visions during the years of his growing up. This
singularly complete account of a holy man’s vision, the
ceremonies performed in reenacting the vision, and the powers
held by the person who had the vision all indicate the centrality
of vision to ritual, song, and myth. In fact, if Black Elk as
narrator were removed from his own account and Black Elk as
mythic character left in and if the point of view of the narrative
were shifted from first-person personal to third-person
omniscient, the vision would become identical in form and
symbolic content to those great myths that have come down to us
not only from the Oglala but from peoples as diverse as the
Tlingit of Alaska, the Hopi of Arizona, the Cherokee of the
Carolinas and Georgia, and the Iroquois of New York and
Canada. Certainly, with the exception of the narrator’s presence,
the story is in the most proper sense a myth. Consisting of a
logical progression of symbol, it is in truth a metaphysical
statement that is significant in its cosmological implications, its
prophetic content, its narrative sequence, its sense of
timelessness, its characters, and, ultimately, its meaning for
people all over this country. Seen that way, it is an example of
myth at its most sacred and abstract.
Every element in such a story is meaningful on the deepest
levels of human understanding. Thus it is that the true
significance of Black Elk’s vision is yet to be discovered; the
meaning of the vision has not yet been explicated in terms of
ordinary human consciousness, and the great sweep of history it
encompasses has not yet been lived. Yet much of it has been
lived, and those parts are undeniably true. This gives us another