Cause for Canonization--

Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk

In 2017, Bishop Robert Gruss officially opened the cause for the canonization of Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk.  The official date of Black Elk's birth is supposed to be around 1863, although difficult to ascertain with certainty.  He was a teenager at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, and a young man at the tragedies that unfolded in Wounded Knee in 1890. 

Black Elk was baptized as a Catholic on the feast of St Nicholas in 1904, and took the name Nicholas.  Over the next several decades, he dedicated himself to the work of evangelization and catechesis among the Lakota people.  As one writer notes, "Nicholas demonstrated a powerful gift for teaching, able to grasp complexities of theology and explain them to people on the reservation in a way that honored and incorporated, rather than eradicating and replacing, their cultural signs and symbols."