MISSION WARRIOR RETURNS

After spending her entire monastic life “on mission,” as Benedictines call service to others outside the monastery, Sister Dolores returned to the monastery to retire yesterday. We were thrilled to have her back in our tent, after her many years as a teacher, pastoral care minister, and hospital chaplain. We come, we go, we come back. The Benedictine life cycle in short.

HOLY THURSDAY

Holy Thursday comes but once a year, and we celebrate the Lord’s Last Supper with a Seder meal, followed by Mass. We manage to be quite festive at dinner throughout its ritualized service, starting with a question and answer period about why we eat bitter herbs dipped in salty water, sweet jam, matzoh, and, of course, the sacrificial lamb.

The Seder dinner is an example of just how God manifests in all of us, and that each of us is a sacred presence. One way or another, all of us have crossed the Red Sea, the waters having parted for our safe passage. Our pursuers were defeated.

As for Jesus’ dictum, “. . .you also should do as I have done to you,” whether we are washing each other’s feet figuratively or literally, our destiny is to glorify God in the tenderness of our relationships. In the end, it is the only offering we have to give.

THE LAST GREAT RESERVATION

Last weekend’s Spirituality Center hosted Clay Jenkinson on the relationship between natives and non-natives of North Dakota, and the possibility (or not) of reconciliation between the two groups. North Dakota’s history is brutally sad when it comes to the treatment of the Native American population. Other states have an equally brutal, if not more so, history of abuse, genocide, theft (under guise of eminent domain takings), fraudulent dealings, etc., of native peoples. A movement exists here, which urges the government of North Dakota to issue a formal apology to the native peoples, in the manner of the moving apology recently issues by the Australian government to the Aboriginal peoples.

I remember reading a poignant excerpt from the correspondence of Father Jean DeSmet, a Jesuit missionary in the Dakotas (Life, Letters and Travels of Father Pierre Jean De Smet, Vol. III, p. 884): “They [the indigenous people] cultivate a large field, 1200 acres, raising corn, potatoes, melons, and beans, with no tools but sharpened sticks, with a few spades and mattocks [an instrument shaped like a pickax but having one end broad and flat instead of pointed, used for loosening soil]. They complain bitterly of the government agents and soldiers. They first deceive them and rob them in the distribution of their annuities, and the others demoralize them by their scandalous conduct. All last winter they were the playthings and slaves of a hard and tyrannical captain, who seemed to make it his business to torment the poor wretches. When the old women with their starving babies came up to the fort to pick up the filthy refuse thrown out of the soldiers’ kitchen, they were pitilessly driven off with scalding water thrown upon their emaciated bodies, covered only with rags in the severest of cold weather.”

Father DeSmet probably was referring to the people of the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, who make up the population of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Ft. Berthold as an U.S. Army outpost pre-existed Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation, which is about one hundred miles north of this monastery, as the crow flies. But we can include the Dakota, Lakota, Cheyenne, and Crow in the misery described by Fr. DeSmet.

The Dakotas and Montana remain the only states with significant populations of Native Americans. They are states in which the census is clearly divided between native and non-native. For example, North Dakota has about 600,000 non-native people, and 35,000 native people. The non-native people are contracting, while the native population is growing. At some future point, parity will be reached.

The issues around the formal issuance of a governmental apology are complex and manifold. One major issue is the continuing effect of the damming of the Missouri River at Garrison, which inundated native towns, farms, homes, and crop fields. For example, Fort Yates—downstream from the dam—runs out of water every summer. The Standing Rock Indian Reservation continues to suffer the consequences of the submergence of the Three Affiliated Tribes land by the Army Corp of Engineers in 1949-1953. Sacred Heart’s own original convent and mission school at Elbowoods was likewise swept under the flood of progress.

[to be continued]

The Northern Steppes

A couple of years ago, I was driving back from Bismarck, and I thought I couldn’t take another day of the bleak brown and gray winter landscape, one drab, colorless, tawny hill after another, with gray clouds like suffocating pillows that stanched my soul. Then spring sprang. Glorious spring arrived in full flower a few days later in a tumultuous green, blooming with green, green, green. Oh, life itself was restored! Such are the northern steppes of the United States.


Today, with a soft, sleety rain falling, I know that the prairie crocuses and daffodils and irises are quivering below ground with anticipation for the air and sun and the freedom of these great plains. Transformation is just a few days, or a few weeks away. One day, I will look outside and they will have punched their way through the hard ground, and in so short a time, they will totter on their tender stems in the breeze, dancing with happiness.


I first visited here a few years ago, at the beginning of a September, on a kind of vocation vacation. We were rooting out potatoes in the garden one afternoon. I was bent over in the dirt, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a golden dome shining brightly in the afternoon sun. I thought it must be a building of some sort nearby, maybe a temple. I later realized that it was a hill of sparkling, golden wheat—magical in my eyes, a hill robed in wheat, majestically simple and abundant with promise.