The Road to Promise

We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money. 

The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?

With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.

Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.

I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good." 

I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church. 

The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.

The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week. 

And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself. 

Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?

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