This pastoral letter, published on January 15, 1907, is one of Black Elk’s few surviving letters that have been translated into English. Black Elk wrote this as an official catechist— a local person who teaches at a Christian mission— on behalf of Lakota Catholics in the United States. He wrote this letter while he was living at the Holy Rosary Mission in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He wrote the letter in the Lakota language to Catholics who were Lakota. We do not have copious material from Catholic Native Americans. By 2024, Black Elk had been declared a Servant of God within the Catholic Church, and his cause for canonization as a Catholic Saint had been opened and was being investigated. This letter represents an important part of that record of a Native American striving to live out the Catholic faith in the United States. The community he was serving was very poor. One of the reasons Black Elk was writing was to gather funds to contribute to the building of a prayer house where the community could gather and pray together.