Black Elk was born in December of 1863 into the Oglala Lakota people to a family with a long history of working as medicine men and healers. He grew up in present-day South Dakota and Wyoming and was the second cousin of Lakota war leader Crazy Horse. 

Following a severe illness in his childhood where it is reported that he lay motionless and unresponsive for several days, Black Elk frequently had spiritual visions. In his first vision, during that period of illness, he witnessed kind and loving spirits that he interpreted to be Thunder Beings — wise and revered spirits like grandparents — who implored him to help save his people from the settlers destroying their way of life. As he shared these visions, the other healers in his community were astonished. 

He became a spiritual and physical healer among the Lakota, often using song as a healing element. He took his visions seriously and, after experiencing the decimation of the population of wild buffalo by white settlers, and his people being forcibly confined to reservations, he witnessed the great suffering being forced upon his community by colonizing forces. In response, he fought in the Battle of Little Big Horn as well as in the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, being grazed by a bullet to the hip during the battle. The violence at Wounded Knee was, partially, in response to the Plains tribe’s interest in Black Elk’s Ghost Dance Movement. He developed the Ghost Dance to bring a message of hope to his people — that the invaders would leave, the buffalo would return, and the systematic destruction of their culture would soon end. 

He recovered from his injuries and went on to live at the Pine Ridge Reservation. There, he married his first wife, Katie, a Lakota Catholic convert, and they had three children — all were baptized Catholic. After Katie died in 1903, Black Elk also converted and took on the additional name, Nicholas. He eventually remarried and had more children, baptizing and raising them all Catholic. 

Nicholas Black Elk became a catechist and blended his Catholic faith with traditional Lakota practices and ceremonies. He continued to be a resource of spiritual wisdom when he became a catechist and gave talks to those in his community and in neighboring reservations. Through his evangelizing efforts, he had a hand in helping over 400 people convert to Catholicism and served as godfather for over one hundred of them.

In 1934, Black Elk created a performance show that ran for a decade. It introduced and taught visitors and tourists from white communities about Lakota culture, sacred rituals, and dance. His spiritual visions and teachings were put together into a book, Black Elk Speaks, by biographer John G. Neihardt who spent days interviewing him. In the book, Nicholas Black Elk shares his vision for human unity and the story of his people’s tribulations and perseverance at the end of the 19th century. Black Elk’s witness to his faith, commitment to anti-colonialism, and loyalty to his culture during the collapse of his native world was also documented by ethnologist Joseph Epes Brown in his 1947 book The Sacred Pipe. 

Black Elk’s cause of sainthood was opened in 2017 and he is officially recognized as a Servant of God for his life’s work of harmonizing his Catholic faith with his Lakota culture and bringing hundreds to the faith. He is buried at the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.