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

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