Catholic Missions Among the Yankton Sioux

FOSTERING OKODAKICIYE: CATHOLIC MISSIONS AMONG THE YANKTON SIOUX ___________________ A Paper Presented to Dr. Joseph M. White, Ph.D., M.L.S. The Catholic University of America ___________________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Course TRS 728J – American Catholics & Social Reform ___________________ by Brother 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 Indian reservation 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 South Dakota 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 Saint Dominic Among Various Indian Tribes and Among the Catholics and Protestants in the United States of America (Chicago, 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, Indiana: 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, Saints, 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 Archbishop 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.

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