Aging & Wisdom Quote by Black Elk

There is pride in this memory, but it’s sharpened into a weapon: Black Elk isn’t merely reminiscing about boyhood on the Plains, he’s indicting a world that made that boyhood impossible. The line “no one taught us; we just learned” frames masculinity as apprenticeship without instructors, an education delivered by necessity and example. It’s a claim to legitimacy: our strength wasn’t performed, it was required. In a culture where survival, hunting, and defense were daily facts, “learned by doing what we saw” also points to communal coherence - men lived in view of boys, and boys grew into responsibility because responsibility was visible.

Then comes the hard pivot: “we were warriors at a time when boys now are like girls.” Read plainly, it’s a gendered insult. Read historically, it’s also the language of displacement speaking through available categories. Black Elk lived through the violent compression of Lakota life: warfare gave way to confinement, buffalo economies were destroyed, children were routed into boarding schools, and leadership was systematically undermined. In that context, “boys now” aren’t simply softer; they’ve been cut off from the social machinery that once produced competence and status.

The subtext is grief disguised as toughness. By contrasting “warriors” with “girls,” he reaches for the most stinging comparison his audience will register - a rhetorical jolt meant to dramatize what colonization did to Indigenous manhood and continuity. It’s not nostalgia for cruelty; it’s a refusal to let enforced dependency be mistaken for choice, or cultural rupture for moral decline.