Members from nine congregations on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation slated for closure by the Diocese of South Dakota met Sept. 20 in Kyle to discuss their options.
Some of the congregations scheduled to close by Nov. 30 want to file injunctions in tribal court, claiming that Native American landowners long ago donated land to the diocese for the churches and, in at least some cases, there may have been extra acreage donated along with the church grounds.
“Our concern is the cemeteries, the land and the buildings,” Lydia Bear Killer, vestry president of Church of the Inestimable Gift in Allen, told the Rapid City Journal. “We’re going to do whatever it takes to maintain our church, our land and our cemeteries. Every church has a petition circulating for what it wants from the diocese,” she said.
ECUSA’s radical leadership is spending millions of dollars in law suits to gain control of pieces of property.
ECUSA’s radical leadership continually harps on the ancestral guilt that living European Americans should feel toward Native Americans for events that occurred in the 1600s through the 1800s, well before we were born.
And yet, ECUSA’s radical leadership is permitting the Diocese of South Dakota to use alleged money problems to reduce its missionary efforts towards some of the most unfortunate Native Americans in the United States.
Why hasn’t ECUSA provided the money resources to meet the needs of these Native Americans? Isn’t there a certain parish right near “815” in New York City with more than enough money to provide the required assistance?
Are these Native American parishes going to “go down the tube” while ECUSA’s radicals spend millions on MDG goals, GLBT causes and law suits against fellow Anglicans?
Can anyone spell H-Y-P-O-C-R-A-S-Y?
Can anyone smell this hypocrasy wafting on the breeze coming out of “815?”
This is considerably more than hypocrisy, AnglicanFirst. The attitude of TEC toward their Native American parishioners teeteringly borders on racism.
You are correct AR, it is more than hypocrisy. It appears to be racism, benign racism just possibly, but still racism.
Its difficult to understand how ECUSA’s leadership can be so militant in some areas of ethnicity and yet can be so blind to what exists before their own eyes in one of their own dioceses.
Let’s see, what is the ultra-liberal and revisionist bishop of the Diocese of Central New York doing for the Onandaga and Oneida tribes within his episcopate?
Why has he spent money persecuting orthodox Anglican parishes in his diocese rather than providing strong, spiritual, evangelical and material support to the Native Americans in his diocese?
Why are far off peoples and the MDGs more important to him than the people right under his nose? They are all important. Maybe he is just too culturally aloof to be able to see what is just before his eyes.
As a native of South Dakota, it’s sad to see the demise of one of the few places where the Episcopal Church actually did some great missionary work in the past, i.e., among the Lakota people (Sioux). The first Bishop of SD, the legendary William Hobart Hare, had a grand vision and a passion for the evangelization of the Lakota. The Bible and the BCP were translated into Lakota, and many native clergy trained and empowered to minister among their own people.
As a result, today about half the congregations in the Diocese of SD are located on the Indian Reservations. But alas, many of them have indeed withered away. I won’t speculate on all the reasons why this tragic decline has occurred, but it has.
David Handy+
Why isn’t Dean Peter Eaton, dean of St. John’s Cathedral in the Wilderness, Denver, a church which is underwriting a Muslim seminarian, where there is an annual service involving the chief of the Lakota Sioux, getting off the dime to generate support for this Sioux issue? Why, because he is working the system like crazy to become a bishop someday.
Enough irnony and ironic justice in this story to make for an episode of “The Simpsons” or “The Twilight Zone”. Native American parishoners fighting the Native American bishop whom they worked so hard to get elected 15 years ago and is now abandoning them! Now if it would just end up in court with TEC having to defend themselves for a change! Hmmmm….will 815 and Beers come running to the aid of the diocese if it ends up in court? I wouldn’t put my money on it. Native Americans….you are soooooo 1970. TEC doesn’t give a rat’s behind about you now.
Well, I am familiar with this situation as I worked as a seminarian on the Rosebud Reservation to the East of Pine Ridge. They have been planning these closings for years, but have tried hard to keep it working.
The problems behind the closings are numerous. If they had just been White chapels, they would have been closed a long time ago. The issue is that of the burial grounds around the chapels. Lakota especially view such areas as sacred, and the idea that the Church would and could just up and close the burial place of ancestors is repugnant.
The problem is a lot of these chapels have maybe 4 to 5 people, if any, show up on a Sunday, if that, and no money to maintain the building or insure the building. In high poverty areas with arson and vandalism problems, church insurance is huge money even for a building with little more than 4 rooms and roof with no indoor plumbing, which most of the chapels on the Reservation do not have. (Try explaining the concept of Episcopal churches with no plumbing to the mostly affluent General Convention delegates and see what their response is, but I digress…)
A lot of the chapels were built around the various encampments on the reservation back in the day, and so even if everyone in the cluster of houses shows up, its not more than 20 to 30 people. Since there is no public transit, then or now, the chapels had to be where the people are.
Secondly, especially on Pine Ridge, the Native American Indian Movement and other political moves back to traditional Lakota religion have gained a whole lot of prominence within the community. It is very hard for Lakota kids to identify as Christians in their peer groups, as Christianity is largely seen as the White Man’s religion. Unfortunately the closing of the chapels, even though largely empty on a Sunday morning will be seen by the community as further proof that the White Man can’t even respect us enough to upkeep our churches that house the burial grounds.
Its sort of a no win situation on numerous levels. If huge money suddenly appeared to fund the churches, they would probably still be largely empty as such money would be viewed as charity in a culture already turned into a completely dependant society, but if you try to close them, they is also an outcry.
It’s a truly sad situation, especially if you consider the gangs. Urban style gangs are a major problem on the reservation, and unfortunately, the tribal governments don’t know how to respond because such culture is completely foreign, even contrary, to traditional Lakota values. I had trouble understanding the appeal for a while and then a Lakota kid at the Diocesan youth camp explained it to me. He said, “It makes sense because the gangs give the kids everything they need and that no one else is largely providing, a family, an identity, a community, peer support.” When the families have huge alcohol abuse problems and the infrastructure of the tribe is largely collapsed, combined with poverty and a larger white culture that pretends Native Americans don’t exist, is it any wonder why gangs are prevalent?
I’ll quit preaching now. I could go on at some length about the issue. Suffice is to say that the church can do wonders on the reservation to combat these problems, but it can’t just be seen as another hand out.
The chief of this tribe is a Christian – what’s he doing ?
The_Archer_of_the_Forest (#7),
Bullseye. You are a straightshooter.
As a native of SIOUX Falls who left SD after graduating from high school 35 years ago, I must admit that my knowledge of the Lakota (or Sioux) people and their contemporary struggles is outdated at best. But what you’ve written above rings true to all that I know of life on the Reservations in SD. It doesn’t appear that the situation has changed much in the last few decades, except to get worse and worse.
Ironically, contrary to those seeking to revive pagan ways among the Lakota (i.e., the AIM sort, seeking to glorify traditional Lakota religion along with the rest of the endangered culture), the Episcopal Church probably has played a vital role in helping to PRESERVE the Lakota language. For the PECUSA/TEC sponsored the translation of the Bible and the BCP into Lakota, one of the very few Native American tribes (or “First Nations” people groups) to have both books in the tribal vernacular.
And as Yale Professor Lamin Sanneh has pointed out from his perspective as a historian of missions, especially in Africa, the translation of the Bible for pre-literate cultures has often been a major source of pride for the speakers of those endangered languages and it has helped enormously in resisting the full assimilation of those minority tribes into the surrounding societies, which often appear in danger of disappearing without leaving a trace of their heritage behind.
The typical liberal assumption that cross-cultural evangelism is always and inherently culturally imperialistic and amounts to Westernizing other cultures at least as much as Christianizing them is just that, an assumption, and a very misleading and one-sided one at that. The reality is that South Dakota’s first bishop, the noble +William Hobart Hare, from a patrician Philadelphia family himself with aristocratic connections (e.g., getting the super wealthy Jacob Astor to fund the building of Calvary Cathedral in Sioux Falls all by himself) was something of a buffer between Anglo society and the greatly outnumbered and outgunned Lakota people. +Hare helped protect them from some of the worst excesses of those settlers who believed that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But of course, he couldn’t completely shield them from gross exploitation and abuse. Obviously, he couldn’t prevent the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890 etc.
But my point here is not to join in the lament over the demise of the once strong mission to the proud Lakota people, although I do lament and mourn it. Rather, the even greater sadness is the demise of orthodoxy and orthopraxis in TEC these days.
Alas, those of us who pride ourselves on being orthodox are now liable to be treated with the same derision and disdain that Anglo culture feels for the inhabitants of the eight impoverished Reservations in SD (or the Navaho and Apaches in Arizona and New Mexico etc). Increaaingly, the orthodox have been driven by the TEC elite into conservative enclaves like South Carolina or my home diocese of Albany and implicitly marked for extinction.
But the reality is: Custer didn’t die for our sins (contra Vine Deloria and company). Jesus Christ did. And that eternal good news is just as necessary and liberating and universally true today as it was back in the late 1800s when +Hare led the bold pioneering mission work in South Dakota (the territory only became a state in 1889).
Sadly, unless the self-deceived and heretical leaders of TEC repent of their ways and are converted back to authentic Christianity, the great bulk of TEC will become like those deserted, empty mission chapels out on the lonely plains in Pine Ridge. What a tragedy!
David Handy+
(This is my 2000th post, if you combine those on Stand Firm and here at Titusonenine. Kendall or the Elves, does that rate some kind of recognition?. Yes, that’s 2000 posts in less than one year).