John Neihardt

"We near the realization of that supreme social concept, our whole view of life and, consequently, of art, will be correspondingly modified. We shall come to insist more and more upon experts in all things. Respect for standards, love of order, will return. The petty personalism, that has long dominated us, will die away. Our poets will achieve the objective view of the world of men and things—and it is out of that view that all great art, as all great life, must grow."

"Meeting and getting to know John Gneisenau Neihardt was one of those thrills of a lifetime."

"The relationship between the counterculture and Indian country was complicated from the beginning. Desiring a deeper connection with the Earth and a more meaningful form of spirituality, hippies made pilgrimages to reservations searching for the mystical Indian wisdom they had read about in books like John Neihardt's Black Elk Speaks and Carlos Castaneda's wildly successful but fraudulent series about the Yaqui shaman Don Juan Matus."