A widely admired work of American Indian literature, Black Elk Speaks is increasingly read as a spiritual and philosophical guide, though the visionary Lakota medicine man himself has faded from view. This outstanding biography—winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, among many other honors—seeks to remedy that. Joe Jackson follows Black Elk from the Battle of the Little Bighorn to his travels in Europe with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and the massacre at Wounded Knee. Married to a Catholic woman, Black Elk converted after her death and taught others about Christianity, yet privately practiced the old ways and sought meaning in the spiritual visions he experienced.