The Franciscan Mission to the Wisconsin Chippewa: The Evidence of Sermons

LAWRENCE T. MARTPN University of Akron

In 1875-76 about a hundred Franciscan Friars came to North America as exiles from the persecutions of Catholics in the Prussian Kulterkampf and within three years they had taken up Indian mission work. In 1878 the bishop of LaCrosse, who then had charge of all of northern Wisconsin, invited them to undertake the mission to the Chippewa or Ojibwe people in the area under his responsibility. Two years later they extended their work to the Menomini in northeastern Wisconsin, and in 1884 they also took over the mission to the Ottawa at the northern extreme of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan (Habig 1958:148-9, 497). The area served by the Franciscans' mission to the Chippewa covered a large area, more or less the northern third of Wisconsin plus some of Minnesota. The Franciscans divided this large area into four mission districts: 1) The Lake Superior region, especially the area around Chequamegon Bay, which included La Pointe on Madeline Island, the Red Cliff reservation north of Bayfield and the Bad River reservation just east of Ashland. From here the Franciscans also regularly visited Lac du Flambeau, the easternmost outpost of their mission to the Chippewa. r 2) The Chippewa River Valley, from the Lac Courte Oreilles reservation down the rivert o Flambeaufarm, at the intersection of the Flambeau and Chippewa Rivers, a few miles north of the town of Chippewa Falls. 3) The St. Croix River valley, in Burnett and Polk counties. 4) The Minnesota missions in the area of the Fond du Lac reservation just west of Superior-Duluth, at the western end of Lake Superior. The town of Superior itself also had a sizable Indian community at this time. 196 LAWRENCE T. MARTIN

When they were not travelling throughout these four districts, the Franciscans lived in three friaries, at Superior, Bayfield, and Ashland. There was not, however, a firm and unchanging pattern regarding which friary served which of the four districts, except that the Minnesota missions were always served from Superior. The Franciscan mission to the Lake Superior Ojibwe began with Chrysostom Verwyst in 1878. He is known to linguists for his pedagogi­ cal grammar of Ojibwe, which was originally published in 1901 and reprinted in 1971. Actually, in 1878 Father Verwyst had not yet been saddled with the name Chrysostom, since he had not yet joined the Franciscans. Also, he was not a German like all of his successors in the Wisconsin Ojibwe missions. He was born in Holland in 1841, but his family migrated to the United States when he was about six or seven, and he grew up in a community of Dutch immigrants in southern Wisconsin. He studied at the Milwaukee seminary, became a diocesan priest, and after working as a parish priest for ten years was put in charge of the Indian missions in the Lake Superior country, stationed in Bayfield. In the fall of the same year (1878), however, the Franciscans took over the Chippewa missions. Verwyst was not willing to give up the work, so he asked to be sent to Superior, where there was a congregation that was about two-thirds Indian, and he also served several Indian missions in the adjacent area of Minnesota. In 1880 he published his first Chippewa work, a prayer book, Mikana gijigong enamag (The path leading to Heaven), and he began to work on his Chippewa Bible History, which was published a few years later. In 1881 Verwyst asked to be released from his obligations to the diocese of LaCrosse so that he could join the Franciscans, perhaps at least partly because he had been impressed by their work with the Indians from their center at Bayfield, and he may have felt that he would have a better opportunity for work in Indian missions and his associated linguistic interests as a Franciscan (Habig 1958:502, Franciscan Clerics 1936:278). In any case, the bishop agreed to release him if the Franciscans would take over the parish in Superior, so Oderic Derenthal was sent there. This was the first of several times that Derenthal took over an Indian mission job from Verwyst. Their careers continually overlapped up until the time of Verwyst's death in 1925. THE FRANCISCAN MISSION TO THE WISCONSIN CHIPPEWA 197

For some reason, probably traceable to their educational formation, the early German-American Franciscans happen to have left an amazingly large paper trail concerning their Indian missionary work. Some of their writings were published (partly at a press they set up for purposes of vocational training of Indian printers at their school located at the Ottawa mission in Harbor Springs, Michigan). In addition, a great deal of unpublished material found its way into the archives of the Province in St. Louis, and a few years ago most of the material in the archives that concerns the Indian missions was microfilmed and made available at the Marquette University Archives in Milwaukee. Sermons are important because they offer an opportunity to see just what sort of teachings missionaries gave to Anishinabe people during an important period of great cultural transition — from slightly after the establishment of the reservations up into the early 20th century. Many generalizations have been made about the missionary enterprise, some based on solid scholarship and some not, but little attention has been paid to the content of the theological message that the Indians were given. The Franciscan sermon archives also offer a potentially rich source of information that could be of interest to linguists and historians. This paper simply attempts to give some idea of the material available in the archives under the name of a single Franciscan missionary, Father Oderic Derenthal, who spent about 50 years among the Wisconsin Chippewa and Menomini, from 1881, when he took Verwyst's place at Superior, up until Derenthal's death at Bayfield in 1934. Under Derenthal's name the Franciscan archives have nearly 400 items classified as sermons or sermon notes. However, about 25 of these items are not sermons but more or less secular addresses or simply misfiled documents such as memoirs. Of the remaining 350 or so sermons, about 205 are in English, 135 in Ojibwe, and 15 in German. All of these numbers are approximate, since there are several fragments which may be misplaced parts of other sermons in the collection. Nevertheless, we are talking about close to 350 sermons given in Indian country between about 1880 and 1930. Nearly all of the documents are dated, and the majority also contain an indication of where they were given. Quite often the same sermon was used more than once, for example, a sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Easter, which was given 198 LAWRENCE T. MARTIN at Lac du Flambeau on 9 May 1909, and reused at Reserve, at Lac Courte Oreilles, on 5 May 1912 (28:132).' Sometimes there is added evidence for dating supplied by Derenthal's habit of occasionally writing his sermons over the top of dated letters or other documents — for example, one item is written over an invoice for altar wine dated 6 October 1924 (28:218). None of the sermons is signed. I began working under the assump­ tion that all of the sermons in the archives under Derenthal's name were in fact by him, but I soon discovered that this is not the case. As I read through the microfilms I realized that there were changes in handwriting — even within sermons supposedly given about the same time. I verified Derenthal's handwriting from some other writings of his in the archives, particularly his diary, and it appeared that generally speaking most of the sermons from around the turn of the century on were in fact his, but the earlier sermons were partly Derenthal's and partly the work of more than one additional writer. As I looked more closely at the suspicious sermons, I discovered that the date and/or place references often did not correspond to information I had about Derenthal's career. For example, the earliest sermon in the collection is in Ojibwe, dated 1879, and labelled as having been given at Bayfield, Bad River, and certain other locations. The gospel text referred to in the sermon suggests that it was given on the Feast of the Assump­ tion, i.e., 15 August 1879 (27:788). There is also one other Ojibwe sermon dated Bayfield 1879, and reused at La Pointe in 1882 (27:792). It is quite impossible that these two sermons were the work of Oderic Derenthal, since he was not ordained to the priesthood until May 1880, and he did not come to Indian country until 4 August 1881, when he arrived at Bayfield knowing as yet little English and no Ojibwe (Francis­ can Clerics 1936:248). It was not too difficult to identify the two 1879 sermons as the work of another Franciscan, Casimir Vogt, on the basis of some very distinctive features of his handwriting represented in documents in his section of the Franciscan archives. Vogt and John Gafron, the two earliest Franciscan

1 References in this paper to the sermons in the Franciscan archives are to the microfilm copies at Marquette University, giving the number of the microfilm followed by the numbered frame upon which the item in question begins. THE FRANCISCAN MISSION TO THE WISCONSIN CHIPPEWA 199 missionaries to the Chippewa, arrived at Bayfield on 13 October 1878 (Habig 1958:499). It would have been quite amazing for Vogt to have been able to preach in Ojibwe just nine months after his arrival in Wisconsin. Father Marion Habig, the official historian of the Franciscan Saint Louis Province, points out that at the time when Vogt and Gafron arrived in Bayfield, a Jesuit linguist, Martin Ferrard, happened to be there gathering material for a dictionary of the Chippewa language, and "under his direction the two Franciscan priests devoted themselves with such diligence to the study of the Chippewa language, that by Christmas [i.e., just over two months after their arrival] they were able to preach to their charges in their native tongue" (Habig 1958:500). It is hardly believable that the two Franciscans composed their own sermons in Ojibwe this soon. It is possible that the supposed Christmas sermon and also the two 1879 sermons mistakenly attributed to Oderic Derenthal could have been ghost-written by the Jesuit Ferrard and written down and read by Casimir Vogt, or Vogt may have copied them from Baraga's published sermon-instructions. In fact, in his memoirs, Vogt tells of a visit to Gordon early in his missionary career (no exact date given), and he says that he did not yet know Chippewa well enough to deliver sermons (i.e., compose his own), so he read some part from Bishop Baraga's instructions, to which he added some explanations (Franciscan Clerics 1936:120). The earliest Ojibwe sermon in the Derenthal files that could possibly be by Derenthal is dated Superior, December 1881 (27:811). Derenthal came to Bayfield on 4 August 1881, and not quite two months later, on 29 September, he moved to Superior, where he studied the Chippewa language with Verwyst for a few months. The December 1881 Ojibwe sermon in Derenthal's filei n fact turned out to be in Verwyst's handwrit­ ing, although it is of course possible that in a couple of months Derenthal had learned enough to be able to read the sermon to the people. By the following February at least, Verwyst had left Superior, gone off to become a Franciscan himself. The Franciscans then sent Servace Altmicks to work with Derenthal in Superior. Altmicks was the pastor of the parish in Superior, and Derenthal was in charge of the outlying missions in Wisconsin, as well as the Fond du Lac Reservation in Minnesota. There are many sermons in the Derenthal archives that seem 200 LAWRENCE T. MARTIN to date from 1881-85, the years when Derenthal was living in Superior and serving the outlying missions. Most of the 1882 and 1883 sermons are in English, but beginning in 1883 Ojibwe sermons begin to dominate. In at least one case there are English and Ojibwe versions of the same sermon. The English version was given at Superior, while the Ojibwe version was given at Gordon, Sable, and also at Superior (27:861, 863). Between 1883 and the end of 1885, there are about 45 Ojibwe sermons, though I think they are not all in Derenthal's handwriting. In several cases, although the original date is within Derenthal's time in Superior, there are notations of subsequent use in Superior or nearby Indian communities after Derenthal himself had gone to work among the Menomini (from 1885 to 1897). Either his successors were using his sermons, or the sermons of some colleague or other have found their way into Derenthal's file in the archives. Apparently the Franciscans quite freely shared their sermon notes with each other. The sharing seems particularly prevalent in the case of the sermons in Ojibwe, which may indicate that a priest whose Ojibwe was particularly good sometimes wrote sermons which were actually delivered by another priest whose Ojibwe was adequate for reading but not for writing. It is also possible that some sermons were sent to be read by a lay person on Sundays when one of the Franciscans was not able to visit. There seems to be only one sermon in the files from Derenthal's 12 years among the Menomini. Since he clearly was one who wrote and kept his sermons, evidently a loss occurred in this case — although it might prove fruitful to check the archives under the names of other Franciscans who worked among the Menomini, in light of the fact a fair number of his colleagues' Ojibwe sermons are filed under Derenthal's name. In 1897 Derenthal returned to the Ojibwe missions in the area around Chequamegon Bay. Most of the 250 or so sermons of Derenthal in the collection from this point on are in English, especially those given at Odanah. However, there are also a fair number of Ojibwe sermons from this period as well, presumably indicating that several places had both English-speaking and non-English-speaking communities. For example, there are some from 1914-15 given at Lac Courte Oreilles and Lac du Flambeau, and quite a few given at Bad River or Bayfield (i.e., Red THE FRANCISCAN MISSION TO THE WISCONSIN CHIPPEWA 201

Cliff). The evidence quite clearly shows that there was no need for sermons to be preached in Ojibwe at Odanah after about 1900. The sermons in the collection for which dates and places are indicated could obviously be used, therefore, as evidence regarding native language use among the Wisconsin Chippewa both on and off the reservations. These sermons should, however, also be valuable for what they tell us about the message preached to Indian people during the 50- year period of Oderic Derenthal's missionary career, and perhaps also for what they reveal about missionary attitudes toward native culture and traditional religion. There is space here for only a few generalizations which can in no way do justice to the content of this large body of sermon literature, most of which represents the thought of Oderic Derenthal. First, the most striking thing about these sermons is how little reference they make to the world of the listeners. Most of the sermons could as well have been delivered to a white audience in St. Louis or Chicago — or, except for the language, in Germany. Even when Derenthal uses an exemplum or story to drive home his point, it is usually taken from the standard corpus of sermon exempla, lives of the saints, etc. However, there are some significant exceptions to this generalization. For example, there is a sermon from Odanah in 1904 dealing with the advantages of the Catholic school over the government school (38:6), and there are a couple of undated and unplaced sermons in Ojibwe which deal with Indian beliefs about the afterlife and Indian burial customs (38:142, 143), as well as one which refers to the shaking tent ceremony (38:139). However, these sermons are very much the exception. Although in a way it is disappointing to find so little reference to Indian issues in Derenthal's sermons, it is significant that he apparently did not regard Indian culture and beliefs as something that needed to be preached against, and in general it would appear that he cannot be accused of having used the pulpit to any great extent as an instrument for the eradication of native culture. Although Derenthal's sermons do not reveal much about his attitude toward Indian people or institutions, there is one quite striking sermon from 1916 against racism. Unfortunately the location is not indicated, but it clearly was delivered to white listeners who are roundly chastised for 202 LAWRENCE T. MARTIN looking down on Indians. The sermon catalogs Indian contributions to American society, and the preacher points out that Indians tend to be far less materialistic than white Christians, and many of the faults that Indians have, especially love for whisky, they learned from whites (38:49). Even the majority of sermons, which make no reference to Indian issues, tell us something about Derenthal's attitude toward his Indian congregations. Far from being condescending, he treats his listeners at Odanah, Lac du Flambeau, Lac Courte Oreilles and elsewhere as intelligent people who are interested in theological issues. This theologi­ cal content is especially noticeable in several series of thematically- connected sermons given over the course of several weeks. We find,fo r example, a series on the attributes of God, a series (in Ojibwe) on Christ's sufferings, two series on the nature and attributes of the Church, another on the sacraments, and a separate series on baptism. There is a series on grace, one on the qualities of faith, and another on dangers to faith. The heavy theological content of the sermons reflects the official Catholic understanding of the function of the sermon at the time. Partly the sermon was supposed to deal with the biblical readings for the day (viz., one reading from the Epistles and one from the Gospels).2 In addition, however, there was an expectation that sermons would cover, in a regular cycle, the chief Catholic doctrines on faith and morals as set forth in the Roman catechism, or The catechism of the Council of Trent. I am aware of one manual for Catholic sermons, dating from 1921, which sets forth (in four volumes) for each Sunday and Feastday, some section of the Catechism, along with sermon outlines and a couple of model sermons by various famous preachers (Callan and McHugh 1921-22). There is no evidence that Derenthal knew this specific work, which would have been available to him only for his latest sermons in any case. He may, however, have had access to a less elaborate work which provided some sort of schema for covering the major doctrines of the Catechism in sermons, and this could well have had a particular influence

2 The lectionary, i.e., the prescribed course of biblical readings for Masses throughout the year, in Derenthal's time utilized a one-year cycle, not the three- year cycle used in Catholic liturgy today. THE FRANCISCAN MISSION TO THE WISCONSIN CHIPPEWA 203 on the various series of sermons unified around a particular doctrinal theme. In fact, Derenthal does appear to indicate a few sources in notes at the beginning of some sermons. These source notes are very highly abbreviated, and at least some of them seem to point to German theological manuals. I have not been able to identify most of the sources referred to in these notes, except for a four volume set entitled Christian mysteries, or discourses for all the great feasts of the year, by Geremia Bonomelli, originally published in Italian, with an English translation published in 1910. This work, however, is referred to only in one of Derenthal's last sermons, in 1926. This paper has attempted to give an overview of a large body of sermon literature and also to suggest some ways in which this type of material could be of interest to linguists and historians. It has been possible to only skim the surface, and there has not been an opportunity to examine Derenthal's sermons as oral literature, i.e., as artful use of language. I will therefore conclude by quoting a short excerpt from one of the earliest sermons in the collection, one given in Superior. It is admittedly more poetic and less doctrinal than most of the sermons in the collection. I do not know what the view was like from the Franciscan church in Superior at that time, but I invite you to imagine the morning sun shining across Anishinabe-kitchigami, the great sea of the Ojibwe, Lake Superior, on a fine morning in August, the thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost in the year 1883:

Who shall describe the favors of graces without end which have been showered down upon us from the firstmomen t of our life by our merciful and loving God? Every beautiful and good thing which we possess, as well as all that we are, all comes from his bountiful hands and is his precious gift. Cast your eyes over the surface of the earth, raise them to heaven, and you will see that everything is arranged for our benefit. God has made the earth for us to walk on, he has made the winds and air that you might have air to breathe. For us the sun shines by day and by night [to] enlighten the thick darkness, for [us] the lake is filled with fishes, the air with birds to [give joy to] our hearts by their sweet music, for us the grass grows on the meadows and the com ripens in the field. Who gives us plenty to eat in the morning, who gives us our dinner and supper? It is Almighty God. He feeds, he nourishes us; and how abundantly, how richly [he provides] for us. [27:862] 204 LAWRENCE T. MARTIN

REFERENCES Bonomelli, Geremia. 1910. Christian mysteries, or discourses for all the great feasts of the year, except those of the Blessed Virgin, translated by Thomas S. Byrne. 4 v. New York: Benziger Brothers. Callan, Charles J., and John A. McHugh. 1921-22. A parochial course of doctrinal instruction for all Sundays and holydays of the year, based on the teachings of the catechism of the Council of Trent and harmonized with the Gospels and Epistles of the Sundays and feasts. 4 v. New York: Joseph F. Wagner. Franciscan Clerics. 1936. Franciscan missions among the Indians of Wisconsin Franciscan Herald 23:118-121, 248-249, 278-280. Habig, Marion A. 1958. Heralds of the King: the Franciscans of the St. Louis-Chicago province, 1858-1958. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press.