FOSTERING OKODAKICIYE: MISSIONS AMONG THE YANKTON

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A Paper Presented to Dr. Joseph M. White, Ph.D., M.L.S. The Catholic University of America

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In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Course TRS 728J – American Catholics & Social Reform

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by Joshua Patrick Finn, T.O.R. December 18, 2010 (updated May 21, 2011)

Okodakiciye (pronounced “o-ko-da-kee-chee-yay”) is a term in the Dakota language that, loosely translated, means “spiritual bonds of friendship.” It is also the title of the newsletter of

St. Paul Indian Mission in Marty, S.D., where I was privileged to live with the people of the

Ihanktonwan Oyate (Yankton Sioux Tribe) for eight weeks last summer helping to build the

Church through personal and communal prayer, presence, learning, and cultural immersion. One learns quickly while working on an that any effective ministry will always be based upon fostering friendly and positive human relationships with the Natives, and simply trusting them. Fostering this virtue of okodakiciye has been and continues to be the backbone of all missionary work on the reservations of the Sioux tribes of and elsewhere. It is what the missionaries have been doing—to varying degrees of success—since the first encounter of Fr. Louis Hennepin, O.F.M. with the Santee Sioux in 1680.1 This paper will serve as a personal reflection and synthesis of the history, current state, and future of the Catholic Indian missions of present-day South Dakota—especially the mission among the Yankton people—with special consideration given to the ways in which they have sought to be instruments of social reform in the lives of the Sioux.2

Upon surveying the landscape of available literature on the history of Catholic missionary activity among Native Americans, it becomes quickly apparent that the ideological span of material is as wide as the horizon. Sources can be categorized in a roughly threefold fashion, expressing a continuum of emotional energy and investment behind them. The first I call

1 Described in Ross Enochs, The Jesuit Mission to the Lakota Sioux: a Study of Pastoral Ministry, 1886- 1945 (Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1996), 1-3. This first encounter in fact began with Hennepin’s capture by a group of Santee Indians. Through the fostering of positive long-term friendships with a Santee chief, however, Hennepin laid effective groundwork for future Catholic missionary endeavors among the Sioux.

2 The possible directions for study of the Native American missions in the U.S. are innumerable; thus, the restriction of this study to the South Dakota Sioux context, especially the Yankton Sioux.

1 2 “oleaginous”; literally meaning “oily,” these are effusive accounts of widely varying value, typically written by white people. These frequently reveal heavily colonialistic values and prejudices, referring to the “pagan religions” of the Natives and decrying their devil worshiping ways. Most of the older material on mission history falls into this category, such as the anonymously penned (and uncommonly long-titled) memoirs3 of Fr. Samuel Mazzuchelli, O.P., an Italian-born Dominican missionary to the Indians of present-day Minnesota and Wisconsin.

(He was sent alone to North America at age 22 and was ordained at Cincinnati by his confrère

Bishop Edward Fenwick, O.P., in 1830.) Another example of this type is the magisterial 1947 book by Sr. Mary Claudia Duratschek, O.S.B., revealingly titled Crusading Along Sioux Trails. 4

Such titles reveal much about the ecclesiology and missiology in force at the time of their publication, and certainly offer a great deal of other useful information as well. Not all of these rather complimentary titles are old, however; a more recent work in this category is that of

Margaret and Stephen Bunson, Faith in the Wilderness: the Story of the Catholic Indian

Missions.5

Further toward the center of this literary continuum can be found several modern treatments of Indian missionary history, by mainly white and Catholic authors like Enochs, Mark

Clatterbuck,6 and Michael Steltenkamp.7 These readily acknowledge that the white, and often

3 Anonymous, Memoirs, Historical and Edifying, of a Missionary Apostolic of the Order of Dominic Among Various Indian Tribes and Among the Catholics and Protestants in the of America (, IL: W.F. Hall Publishing Company, 1915).

4 Mary Claudia Duratschek, O.S.B., Crusading Along Sioux Trails: a History of the Catholic Indian Missions of South Dakota (Saint Meinrad, : The Grail, 1947).

5 Margaret & Stephen Bunson, Faith in the Wilderness: the Story of the Catholic Indian Missions (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000).

6 Mark Clatterbuck, Demons, , and Patriots: Catholic Visions of Native America through The Indian Sentinel, 1902-1962 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009).

3 European-born missionaries were not saints; many did inflict serious cultural insensitivities and misunderstandings upon the Native people, while taking an historically balanced approach to the history, recognizing the legitimate good that was done.8 Clatterbuck on the whole takes a moderate perspective, but shows the oft-uncomplimentary (when viewed from today’s standards of cultural sensitivity and Indian self-determination) accounts of missionary activity found in The

Indian Sentinel (the newsletter of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions until 1962). Indeed, some of what is presented is downright appalling to the modern eye.

The lion’s share, however, of popular literature on American Indian cultural anthropology or missionary history—much of it written by Natives—is of a quite reactionary bent. It evidences what is often termed “red rage,” the justified and understandable tendency of many Natives to show great collective anger at the cultural violence done to their people. Such titles would include Oglala Religion9 and Vine Deloria, Jr.’s book Custer Died for Your Sins.10

Thus we can see some of the biases and/or perspectives of much of our source material. In the realm of primary sources, it’s worth mentioning here that the archives of Marquette University

(under the care of Mark Thiel, who has, by acknowledgement in many of the works I’ve cited, provided much assistance to authors and researchers), host the vast majority of the papers of the

7 Michael Steltenkamp, Nicholas Black Elk: medicine man, missionary, mystic (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). This book seeks to correct the popular misconception of the famous Oglala medicine man-turned-missionary catechist Nicholas Black Elk as an agnostic spiritual seeker instead of the devoted Catholic that he was.

8 See, for instance, the foreword for Bunson, Faith in the Wilderness, penned by Charles Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., an enrolled member of the Potawátomi Tribe of Oklahoma.

9 William K. Powers, Oglala Religion (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1977).

10 Vine Deloria, Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto (New York: Macmillan, 1969).

4 U.S. Catholic Indian missions.11 Researchers interested, for instance, in the records of early missionaries on the Rosebud, Pine Ridge, and Yankton reservations will find there the complete records of St. Francis, Holy Rosary, and St. Paul’s missions, among others, along with the archives of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions.

With a good picture of our sources established, we turn now toward the different eras of history in the Sioux missions. A minimum of three distinct (and possibly overlapping) eras can be discerned, beginning after the first encounters of the missionaries with the Native peoples.

With each era, we’ll have a look at how this was lived out Ihanktonwan reservation (now centered in the southern portion of Charles Mix County at present-day Marty, S.D.). Our main source for this latter point will be the rather homespun but nonetheless footnoted and documented historical work of Mary Eisenman Carson, Blackrobe for the Yankton Sioux.12

The first of the three eras of Sioux Indian missionary service I call “frontier circuit- riding.” This was the time when the Sioux came into contact with several different missionaries

(stretching all the way back to Fr. Louis Hennepin in 1680), but no stable missionary presence was yet to be. The next documented missionary contact with the Sioux is that of the Belgian

Jesuit Fr. Pierre De Smet in 1838; he also made his first visit to the Yankton tribe in 1839, finding a great welcome.13 Other missionaries would come and go as well, celebrating the sacraments as often as they were able, often riding circuits of hundreds of miles.

11 A current listing of archival resources can be found online: http://www.marquette.edu/library/archives/NativeGuide/Help/index.shtml.

12 Mary Eisenman Carson, Blackrobe for the Yankton Sioux: Fr. Sylvester Eisenman, O.S.B., 1891-1948 (Chamberlain, S.D.: Tipi Press, 1989).

13 Enochs, 5 (also Carson, 1).

5 Positive encounters between the Natives and the missionaries were certainly a factor in their desire for a fulltime Catholic missionary presence. But what were the other motivations?

The new reality of reservation living, an increasing folio of broken promises from the U.S. federal government, and intermarriage with French fur trappers led to frequent requests for the

“Blackrobes” to come. At the “Great Council at Ft. Laramie, a gathering of over 10,000 Native

Americans, …De Smet spoke of the many French Catholics living in the ‘Indian territory’ who sought priests. …Even in the 1850’s a mixing of cultures had taken place.”14 This mixing of cultures had come mainly through the French émigrés who “did not bring many women with them when they colonized America.”15 A look through the local phone book, a trip through any of the local cemeteries, or attendance at a Yankton Sioux powwow shows a large number of

French surnames—Cournoyer, Zephier, Drapeau, Picotte—alongside the more characteristic

Native names—Thunder Horse, Little Owl, Yellow Bird, etc.

The reality of broken promises from the newly dominant culture is important to grasp.

This fact of historical trauma inflicted by one culture upon another is a factor that continues to contribute to inordinately high rates of suicide, alcoholism, and violence on the reservations.16

The Yankton Sioux felt the full weight of these broken promises as their chief, Blue Cloud, lay dying in 1918. Carson notes that they—a formerly nomadic tribe of buffalo hunters—had been

14 Enochs, 10-11.

15 Enochs, 11.

16 See for example, Healing and Mental Health for Native Americans: Speaking in Red, edited by Ethan Nebelkopf and Mary Phillips (Lanham, Maryland: AltaMira Press, 2004); James B. Waldram, Revenge of the Windigo: the Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples (Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

6 confined to the reservation 60 years ,17 and life was looking dark. “The old-timers spoke, low and sad. They felt keenly the decline of their race to its lowest ebb. In spite of treaty promises and the United States governments ‘Plans’ and ‘Policies,’ in spite of the hard work of many Indians farming the harsh land, all efforts had failed. The land left to them would not sustain a ‘buffalo people.’”18 The times were difficult for the Ihanktonwan Oyate.

It had been plain to the leaders of the tribe, as far back as Chief Struck by the Ree in

1844, that the die had been cast; the definitive and irreversible entry of the white man onto the land of the Indians had occurred. The only way to stand up for their own rights was to be educated in the ways of the white man. Chief Struck by the Ree had “pressed demands in 1844 for a Catholic mission on his land for the instruction of children and members of his tribe.”19

Carson cites a second letter of Struck by the Ree in 1866 when he renewed his plea:

I have made up my mind on this subject 22 years ago. I wish to put the instruction of the youth of my tribe into the hands of the Blackrobes; I consider them alone the depositaries [sic] of the ancient and true faith of Jesus Christ, and we are free to hear and follow them. My mind is made up.20

This striking determination of the chiefs never flagged, even in spite of the hostile “Peace

Policy” of Ulysses S. Grant enacted in 1873. Under this policy, the different reservations were parceled out to different denominations, with the Yankton tribe being assigned to the

Presbyterians and Episcopalians. But as we’ve seen, the chiefs (most notably Struck by the Ree) wanted nothing to do with them, strongly preferring the religion of the “Blackrobe” missionary.

17 For an exhaustive history of the travesty that is the federal diminishment of the Yankton Sioux reservation, see Beth R. Ritter, Dispossession to Diminishment: the Yankton Sioux Reservation, 1858-1998 (Ph.D. diss., University of Nebraska, In Dissertations & Theses: Full Text [database on-line]; available from http://www.proquest.com.proxycu.wrlc.org (publication number AAT 9929225; accessed November 8, 2010).

18 Carson, 1.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

7 Here, perhaps, we can see shining through yet another fruit of the early missionaries’ fostering of positive friendships! For the moment, the tribe would face no other choice but to be content with the occasional itinerant missionary’s visit.

Soon, however, Struck by the Ree’s desire would be vindicated, bringing a faint note of hope as Blue Cloud lay dying on the plains that had been his home. Word was beginning to circulate that a Blackrobe was on his way! “He was young, strong, and eager, and already spoke their language. Would he be the one to carry out Blue Cloud’s dream at last? Would the old chief hang onto life until the anticipated one arrived? By God’s own timetable, the answer was

‘yes.’”21

We see here the first indications of a shift to the second era of Sioux-Catholic interaction: that of institutional evangelization, eventually embodied in the mission school. This shift happened long before on the Rosebud Reservation in 1886 with the founding of St. Francis

Mission by Fr. John Jutz, S.J., who in turn founded Holy Rosary Mission at Pine Ridge the following year.22 We see how unique the Yankton Sioux-Catholic encounter, however, was when we consider how long it took for the Ihanktonwan people to welcome their first full-time blackrobe: Fr. Sylvester Eisenman, O.S.B. in 1918.

Fr. Sylvester (né Norbert) was a of St. Meinrad Archabbey in Indiana and had grown up not far away from the . A man of on-again, off-again health, Fr. Sylvester’s first contact with Indian mission work also constituted his first priestly assignment: the charge to assist another Benedictine at the Devil’s (now “Spirit”) Lake Reservation in . (The felt that the cold weather would be good for his health.) This assignment was itself not

21 Carson, 4.

22 Enochs, 1.

8 easy; it involved long trips to a number of mission stations, often being gone from the home base in Fort Totten, N.D. for days on end.

We read excerpts of a letter from Fr. Sylvester to his older brother, diocesan priest Fr.

Omer, in which he describes his experiences at Christmas traveling to Midnight on horseback after dark in –35°F temperatures. Even in these days, the priests who cared for the

Indian missions also often had charge of other duties for white settlers. The Mass was celebrated

“in a private residence, about 20 communicants, all white. At 1:45 AM I was again on the road.

…There were two bad stretches with only one house each—14 miles. …Reached Ft. Totten at 6

AM, just in time to distribute Communion to the Sisters & school children.”23 Later in the letter, he alludes to a struggle that would perpetually dog the Indian missions: funding. “Both our schools, however, are threatening to close down until September. We have all been writing to

Washington, but so far no definite response,” he writes.24

Fr. Sylvester’s mother, Mary Elizabeth, documents the fruit of fostering meaningful human relationships between the missionaries and the Indian people. Natives showed great goodwill toward both the sisters teaching at the Fort Totten school and her son. “Indians are great for naming their children for someone they like very much. There are lots of Jeromes on the gravestones [the Benedictine pastor’s name], and there are already lots of little Sylvesters running around.”25 But Fr. Sylvester would not be near Spirit Lake for much longer; in fact, he would soon leave there to get a little closer to his long-term earthly home with the Yanktons.

23 Carson, 19-20.

24 Carson, 21.

25 Carson, 22.

9 His next missionary assignment found his home base at Stephan (pronounced “ste-

FAN”), S.D., the center of the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation. This was to be his “base camp” for the ten monthly stops at the mission stations, including stops on the Lower Brule Reservation

(across the Missouri River from Stephan, but with no easy ferry crossing26) and three chapels (St.

Paul’s, built in 1913 through the efforts of Fr. Henry Westropp, S.J., 10 miles south of the railroad stop at Ravinia; Greenwood; and White Swan) on the Yankton Reservation.

The image of a Benedictine monk-priest on the road for days and weeks at a time should give us pause. Fr. Sylvester is the epitome of the new missionary role of American pioneered by such figures as Boniface Wimmer of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and Martin Marty of

St. Meinrad. Such leaders saw the American frontier as their cloister, perhaps reacting against overly authoritarian abbot-rulers in their original European .27 He would be gone for days and weeks at a time, visiting the mission stations one by one, under the watchful leadership of the builder-priest Fr. Pius Boehm, O.S.B., at Stephan since 1887.28 The Benedictines’ responsibilities centered on the Mission and School at Stephan, but their circuit-riding duties to provide the sacraments to far-distant mission stations places them between my two eras (frontier circuit-riding and institutional evangelization).

As an aside, it’s worth mentioning that the Swiss-American Benedictines of St. Meinrad, as well as the American Cassinese of Conception Abbey in Missouri, were—alongside the Jesuits—among the dominant Catholic religious forces among the Native Americans of

North and South Dakota, staffing a majority of the missions in both states. Blue Cloud Abbey,

26 Carson, 36.

27 See, for instance, Joel Rippinger, The Benedictine Order in the United States: an interpretive history (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1990).

28 Carson, 34.

10 the only Benedictine monastery in the world named for an Indian chief, the same Yankton chief mentioned above, was founded in 1950 at Marvin, S.D. as a daughter house of St. Meinrad. With its foundation, responsibility for the Swiss-American-sponsored missions passed to its monks.

Blue Cloud Abbey is no longer involved in any direct mission work due to precipitously declining numbers of monks.

The only real remaining hope of the Yankton Sioux to see change in their lot in life was to have a school built. With the monthly visits of Fr. Sylvester came new hope for such a possibility; the Natives informed him on the first night he arrived on the reservation (September

8, 1918) that they had raised $400 to go towards a school. “Our children are growing up wild and spoiled. We are ashamed of them. In the country of the Rosebud, west of the River, the Sisters teach the Indian children. There they learn to read, write and pray. They are good and obey their parents. Will you help us get a school?”29 This desire and hope for real and substantial change in life (a pragmatic response to the cultural onslaught of white America) through formalized western-style education would see many roadblocks, not the least of which being a massive influenza attack that ravaged the Dakotas during the winter. And the obvious applies as well: Fr.

Sylvester was not, as yet, appointed full-time to begin a new mission school; his primary responsibilities remained 150 miles up the Missouri in Stephan.

A minor breakthrough occurred with the conclusion of a nearly year long process of moving a larger wood-frame church 12 miles across the prairie from the town of Wagner. The existing older church, built in 1913, would then serve as a meeting hall and school building. A solitary Irish Franciscan sister came from Baltimore to teach at the behest of Msgr. William

Ketcham, director of the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions in Washington. Without a resident

29 Carson, 39.

11 missionary priest, she didn’t last long, and neither did her lay successor. “Optimism for a school at St. Paul’s Mission was far from universal. In 1921 all three of Father Sylvester’s pivotal superiors were quite apathetic, if not positively opposed, to his dreams in connection with the development of the missions.”30 Indeed, the prospect was dealt an additional near-fatal blow with the St. Meinrad abbot’s May 1920 decision to drop the Yankton mission. The Natives, however, would have none of this; with other avenues exhausted, they sent a delegation to Indiana

to plead with [the] Abbot to leave them their missionary. The prospect of a thousand-mile journey to the secluded abbey hills did not deter them. Thunder Horse, age 80, Edward Yellow Bird, 65, and his cousin, David Zephier (Black Spotted Horse) 67, the latter as interpreter, set out for the train depot ten miles north. Abbot Athanasius, in order to soften the disappointment of a negative answer, told the three he would need time to consider. The Sioux said: “Good! When you come to an answer, let us know.” They would not be hard to contact, as they pitched their tent on the lawn immediately in front of the church at St. Meinrad and waited.31

The emissaries took their case to an assembly of the monastic community, which applauded them. “…The Abbot finally relented,” and even went a step farther: he replaced Fr. Sylvester at

Stephan, freeing him up to work full-time with the Yanktons; “…The Yankton Indians had won their Blackrobe, Father Sylvester Eisenman, as first resident pastor at St. Paul’s.”32

Then began in earnest the arduous work of building what would become a large mission school. Carson’s work, exhaustively researched from the various archives, documents the ongoing struggle of fundraising quite well. The human resources that allowed the project to go forward, however, are of particular interest. Among these were the commitment of three sisters by “Mother Katharine” Drexel of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament33 and the arrival of Fr.

30 Carson, 73.

31 Carson, 91.

32 Ibid.

33 Carson, 104.

12 Sylvester’s mother, Elizabeth, in 1922.34 St. Joseph’s Hall was built in 1922, and a former government school building at Greenwood was purchased, taken down, and reassembled on the mission grounds to serve as an elementary school building. With these, “the Marty boarding school opened its first full term September 2, 1924,” with classes beginning on October 11.35

A dramatic expansion of the physical plant—a move that definitely took the Marty

Mission into the institutional age—came with another addition to the Eisenman team at Marty: the missionary’s engineer brother Leonard and his family in 1929. “A new future opened up for

Marty…when Leonard arrived at the Mission. The good-humored blend of the two genius minds,

Sylvester and Leonard, took immediate spark.”36 Indeed, among all those who came to work (or, more frequently, volunteer) at the Mission in those early days, “a real family spirit permeated,” with “real Catholic community living”: daily Mass and Novena, common meals in the mess hall, hikes with the students, “silent movies or amateur programs,” etc.37 (This is a pattern that continues today, even in the mission’s newest and different form: the Sisters and

Franciscan T.O.R. frequently gather for Mass, Liturgy of the Hours, and meals together.)

Throughout the years of this institutional era, the school grew and flourished a great deal; students came from tribes and reservations all over the country to Marty for a high quality education. In 1935, a religious community was established from a number of the Native schoolgirls with the continued aid of Mother Katharine (for whom one of the buildings was named, pre-canonization, “St. Katharine’s Hall”), known as the Oblate Sisters of the Blessed

Sacrament. An orphanage, named for St. Placid, was in operation for a number of years three

34 Carson, 105.

35 Carson, 112-113.

36 Carson, 159.

37 Carson, 164.

13 miles north of the mission complex. Trees were planted all around, giving green foliage to the formerly barren and Dustbowl-ravaged prairie.38 Most significant of all was a stunning new limestone Church built by the locals: natives, school kids, monks, and sisters (everyone had a task), under the direction of Leonard Eisenman. Three different farms supported the inhabitants of the little mission colony named for the pioneer Benedictine abbot. A metalworking shop and cobbler’s operation rounded out a number of vocational training opportunities.

The challenges continued to be many; chief among these were the untimely deaths of

Leonard (due to a tragic fall from a scaffold by the Shop building on August 21, 194739) and Fr.

Sylvester (on September 14, 1948). “Father Sylvester’s neglect of his health, the long hours, the urgency to complete his projects—all this in order to take in the students waiting for admission in September—everything caught up with him.”40 Both were buried in the mission cemetery north of the Church, Leonard being the first white man to be buried there.

After the death of Fr. Sylvester, Fr. Gualbert Brunsman, a co-worker and assistant at

Marty for several years was appointed the new Mission Superior. He continued to build up the physical plant and educational quality of the “Marty Mission school.” He also built an enormous new convent for the Oblate Sisters in 1958 just across the road from the Mission Church, not far from the cemetery—directly in the path of an active floodplain. (This was not an unadvised decision, but he insisted on locating the new building there.) This responded to a desire to give the sisters space and “breathing room” away from the relatively small footprint of the school campus.

38 It is now virtually impossible to get an unobstructed photo of the entire Church due to tree growth!

39 Carson, 264.

40 Carson, 268.

14 Given our concern for discerning the different eras of Native evangelization, however, let us jump ahead to the early 1970s with the advent of AIM: the American Indian Movement. This was a strong movement that would have a stunning effect on the face of Catholic Indian missions nationwide. Running alongside this movement, and also fueled by it a great deal, was an unmasked desire on the part of many Natives to have greater control over their own destinies and no longer live at the mercy and charity of others, especially the dominant white culture.

The influence and permanence of the resulting changes caused by this movement can’t be overstated. A number of factors determined what can safely be termed a grave decision: the desire of the Natives to take over the education of their young people; sharply decreasing numbers of Benedictine monks, Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and Oblate Sisters of the

Blessed Sacrament to teach—simply put, the realities of a changing world. The monks of Blue

Cloud Abbey (to whom sponsorship of the Mission had passed upon Blue Cloud’s foundation) elected to begin a phased withdrawal from all sponsorship of St. Paul Indian Mission. They began to transfer ownership of the school campus to an all-Native tribal school board, giving members of the tribe complete responsibility for the operation of the school, which would—after

51 years—no longer be a Catholic mission school. The Church and Benedictine rectory would make up the reduced footprint of the mission property, and the Oblate Sisters’ property would remain their own.

The monks agreed to provide annually reduced financial support for about five years as they trained the new school board and leadership personnel in the operation of the school, which would now be known as Marty Indian School. The Benedictines moved to the in Wagner, while continuing to pastor the newly established parish of St. Paul. (Up until this point, the

Mission Church had served essentially as a chapel for the school, though many locals still

15 attended Mass there.) In time, though, even this arrangement proved untenable, and the

Benedictines returned to the abbey in the mid-1980s, their sixty-year presence definitively ended.

For a time there was no resident priest in Marty. Two Oblate Sisters were in turn appointed administrators of the parish by the Bishop of Sioux Falls, with a Priest of the Sacred

Heart coming for Mass from the parish in Lake Andes, 16 miles to the northwest. This arrangement persisted until the 1996 arrival of the Franciscan Friars from Loretto, Pennsylvania.

The Oblate Sisters moved out of their immense brick convent, into the former rectory, as the convent was sold to the Yankton Sioux Tribe to serve as their new tribal headquarters. (The former headquarters at the old Greenwood colony, on the banks of the Missouri, had been built on shifting ground and was beginning to crumble.)

Three symbolic acts related to these changes, each with a different outcome, shed light on the evolving place of the Church in the Yankton Sioux culture: first, when the tribe moved into the old convent, plans were formulated to use the former chapel as a meeting room. However, Fr.

Gualbert’s altar was too large and too permanently attached to remove it; so it remains there to this day, the sanctuary walled off from the now-dark room, its pews removed to the Church and the stained glass windows covered after being shot at too many times. Second, the cross from the chapel roof was removed; it was eventually set up as a shrine across the street on mission property. Finally, there had been an intricate shrine in the rear of the former convent lot; tribal leaders instructed a staff person of “The Shop” (the tribe’s Department of Transportation and maintenance facility) to bulldoze and destroy it, statue and all—it also was too permanent to move. As the anecdote goes, the employee was in the bulldozer approaching the shrine but then acknowledged that his conscience wouldn’t allow him to do it. In time, the statue was removed and returned to the Mission, but the grotto remains today. The layers of possible psychological

16 and religious symbolism to these corporate actions, and the circumstances that surround the difficulty in completing them, are not lost on the careful observer.

The institutional era, then, has definitively ended for St. Paul’s Indian Mission. Various acts of cooperation between the Mission and Marty Indian School have been attempted since the handover of the school to the Tribe. For instance, the Spirit and Life Center in the new elementary school building was an attempt at a Catholic campus ministry that lasted a short time.

Just this year, the Pastor and Director of Mission Services were invited to the opening prayer ritual of the school year, the first such invitation in a very long time. Several Sisters of the

Blessed Sacrament (before their 1982 departure from Marty41) and Oblate Sisters continued to teach in the school, with one Oblate Sister currently teaching in the tribal Ihanktonwan

Community College. The current pastor of the mission, Fr. David Tickerhoof, T.O.R., will deliver the commencement address at the college this year. The Mission continues to serve hundreds of Yankton Sioux each year through its works of mercy: the “Needy Nook” food and clothing center; twice yearly furniture distribution; ministry of presence at Indian wakes and funerals; an increasing number of Natives coming for healing prayer according to the

Theophostic Prayer Ministry model; and other outreaches as well.

The future, just as much now as it was in the early days of Fr. Sylvester Eisenman, is uncertain. The tribal headquarters will relocate to a new building in Wagner, a 13-mile drive from Marty, after its longtime home in the former convent was heavily damaged in the flash floods of June 12, 2010. (This was at least the eighth flood to ravage this complex.) Some tribal operations will remain on the upper floors, but what will this mean for the community at Marty?

And who will assume leadership of the Mission when the present pastor retires? Will the

41 Carson, 204.

17 commit to a continued presence? How will the of Sioux Falls reorganize the parish structures of southern Charles Mix County? What will become of the Oblate Sisters, who have welcomed no new vowed members for decades? Who will finance expenses?

Most importantly, how will the Church respond to the joys, hopes, griefs, and anxieties42 of the children of God in the Ihanktonwan Oyate? And how will the Church realize its fundamental vocation of evangelization among this people in the future? John Paul II said to

Native Americans gathered in Phoenix on September 14, 1987 (coincidentally the 39th anniversary of the death of Fr. Sylvester Eisenman), “The Gospel of Jesus Christ is at home in every people. It enriches, uplifts and purifies every culture.”43 How the Church will continue to encourage and bring about this encounter and mutual enrichment of culture and Gospel will be determined, in large part, by the degree to which caring Christian people—white, Native, or otherwise—foster the virtue of okodakiciye.

42 The titular virtues of Gaudium et Spes.

43 John Paul II, “Address to the Native Americans,” September 14, 1987 (online at http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/speeches/1987/september/documents/hf_jp- ii_spe_19870914_amerindi-phoenix_en.html; accessed December 18, 2010).