Black Elk Speaks 2

Ever since I read a couple of students’ opinions in this class on the similarities between Black Elk Speaks and the motion picture Avatar, I have been fascinated with the parallels between the two stories. Both tell stories of a native people extremely in touch with and grateful for the nature around them. Both are about a nation of individuals misunderstood by those groups of people around them and both threatened by those groups. Both nations are very spiritual, filled with gratitude and reference for their ancestors who came before them. As a result of this, in my own mind I have created the same visual picture of the world in which Black Elk lives, hunts, and despairs in as the world of Pandora in Avatar. Let me tell you, it has made Black Elk Speaks that much more of a great read for me, because I feel like the story itself is even better when I picture him riding a huge, majestically blue horse in 3D!(I'll be honest, Black Elk Speaks is a much better read when you picture all the action happening in a beautiful place like the setting in Avatar. image courtesy of:http://www.scifiscoop.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/avatar_new_1.jpg). But, I digress. I wanted to speak now about a couple of my favorite similarities between our reading tonight and Black Elk Speaks. The examples I cite are not necessarily the most obvious examples nor the most important, some might argue. They are simply the instances in which I felt that the scene in Black Elk Speaks fit perfectly with the Avatar-esque 3D vision in my head.

“Before this, the medicine men would not talk to me, but now they would come to me to talk about my vision,” Black Elk says in the excerpt (Black Elk Speaks, xx). As soon as I read that these Native American peoples had medicine men, I was transported back to Avatar and reminded of the Navi character Mo’at – the Navi’s spiritual leader and Neytiri’s (a main Avatar character with whom the main human character Jake Sully falls in love) mother. She was the sort of “medicine [wo]man” of the Navi people – reminding me again of James Cameron’s attempts to make the human’s view of Navi relatable to old and outdated caucasian views of Native American’s. (This is a picture of the character Mo'at - the Navi's unofficial medicine woman. image courtesy of:http://amaliehoward.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/Moat-Copy1-150x150.png).

The other portion of Avatar that I felt connected very strongly and uniquely with the story told in Black Elk Speaks was the climax of the movie. In Avatar, the main concern of the Navi was not that they themselves were going to be potentially killed by the humans, but thattheir nature, their land, and especially their “tree of souls” would be destroyed. This instantly reminded me of the quote in Black Elk Speaks that says, “If a man or woman or child dies, it does not matter long, for the nation lives on. It was the nation that was dying, and the vision was for the nation; but I have done nothing with it,” (Black Elk Speaks, xxi). It was the same for the Navi – if their tree of souls, where the links to their ancestors were stored, was destroyed – it would be worse than if they themselves had died. It would wipe out the spiritual connection between themselves and their ancestors, effectively killing their nation. Humans with machine guns, helicopters, and more were coming to attack them and destroy their people but their concern was with the nature and tree surrounding them for they knew that was where the heart of their nation lay. (Human attack was coming to the planet Pandora. image courtesy of:http://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/avatar-2.jpg). Finally, this sentence reminded me of another important scene in Avatar: Few Tails now told me what I was to do so that the spirits would hear me and make clear my next duty. I was to stand in the middle, crying and praying for understanding," (Black Elk Speaks, xxii). When the fabled human attack did eventually come to Pandora and it seemed that all hope was lost for the Navi, Jake sully performed a similar "hail mary" type of act when he sat beneath the tree of souls and begged for guidance from his ancestors - a request that every single Navi thought was futile. Eventually, however, this tactic worked out in some way for both Black Elk and for Jake.