April 25, 2008
by Mary Frances Schjonberg

Episcopalians ministering on the seven Indian reservations within the Diocese of South Dakota – some of the poorest parts of the U.S. – need more support and resources from the wider Episcopal Church. They also long for a deeper relationship with their Episcopal brothers and sisters throughout the wider church.

That is the message House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson heard during a three-day fact-finding visit to the Crow Creek and Lower Brule reservations on either side of the Missouri River in central South Dakota. Anderson's April 21-24 trip came in advance of a meeting in Sioux Falls of the Executive Council's Committee on Indigenous Ministries.

South Dakota Bishop Creighton Robertson conducted the tour, which was joined by Janine Tinsley-Roe, the Episcopal Church's program officer for Native American ministry and racial justice.

Through the Diocese of South Dakota, the Episcopal Church is present on all seven of the South Dakota reservations, most of whose residents are Sioux Indians. South Dakota has more congregations that the dioceses of Alaska and North Dakota (two other dioceses with significant Native populations) and the Navajoland Area Mission combined. Seventy of South Dakota's 88 congregations are missions, 57 of which are on reservations. Some of the diocese's 18 off-reservation parishes include native members.

Poverty is the backdrop for ministry South Dakota's vital statistics paint a grim picture. Six of the 11 poorest counties in the United States, based on per capita income, are included in the state's reservations. Buffalo County, of which Crow Creek Reservation is the largest part, is the poorest county in the United States. Per capita income in the county is $5,200 a year and nearly 32 percent of its 2,100 residents live below the federal poverty line.

Nineteen percent of Lyman County residents across the Missouri River on the Lower Brule Reservation live below the poverty line. Per capita income there is $13,862. The per capita income of the U.S. is $21,587.

The median value of homes in Buffalo County is $26,300, and $44,100 in Lyman County. Unemployment is about 85 percent in Buffalo County.

Suicide rates in the area are seven times the national average. Diabetes is a leading cause of death. Cancer rates are increasing dramatically on both reservations, while drug use and drug selling, and alcohol abuse is rampant. HIV/AIDS is present but rarely talked about, behavioral health specialists say.

Casinos, once seen as a way to lift Indians out of poverty by bringing tourists and their money to the reservations, are not helping on the Crow Creek Reservation, residents say. Those who are employed often cash their paychecks at the Lode Star Casino in Fort Thompson, dreaming of doubling their money.

"People are selling everything they may have to go gamble," said Tolly Estes, a member of Christ Episcopal Church in Fort Thompson on Crow Creek and the son and grandson of Episcopal priests who served on the reservation. "The casinos have done more harm than good."

Episcopalians and federal officials on the Crow Creek Reservation say they struggle to help residents meet basic needs such as food, shelter, heat and electricity. They have difficulty helping people find the money to bury their family members, they said.

"Right now we're just trying to keep people alive . . .right now we're just trying to get people food," Estes said as he sat with Anderson, Robertson, Tinsley-Roe and others in the nave of Christ Episcopal Church. Estes told of cars following relief agency food trucks in hopes of being first in line and of a youngster at school trying to put mashed potatoes, gravy and corn in his pockets so that he could take food home to his younger brothers and sisters.

"This is the scariest I've ever seen it," Estes said.

Struggling to meet the needs "This is what the church in South Dakota tries to respond to," said Robertson, who says Buffalo County's poverty is second only to that of Haiti. "In trying to meet all those needs, we get discouraged a lot."

Meanwhile, federal, tribal and Episcopal Church budgets, all of which provide resources to residents, have been cut. Mostly recently, the 2008 Episcopal Church budget approved in February by the Executive Council included a 5 percent cut in the approximately $524,000 the diocese expected to get from the church's Domestic Partnership block grant program. The lost $30,000 amounts to a reservation priest's salary, Robertson said.

"It hurts us, it hurts us very deeply," the bishop said.

Robertson said that the Native American way to decision-making "is to be in conversation, talking about who we are, what we've done, where we think the buffalo are this year, where the wild cherries are." It takes time for solutions and directions to emerge, and such a process is not always the way the Episcopal Church makes decisions, he added.

"Yet, we feel we can offer to the church the example of a life of deep faith, of deep prayer, of deep humility and the church doesn't have a way to hear us," he said of what he called soul-baring attempts to tell the Indians' story to the rest of the church. Instead, he said, the Episcopal Church has hurt Native Americans and broken the promises made to them.

Native Americans, who feel connected in webs of relationships that span generations and physical locations, are haunted by multi-generational trauma dating at least from the 1862 Dakota uprising in neighboring Minnesota that resulting in their deportation to South Dakota. The Episcopal Church contributed to that trauma, Robertson said.

Just after the Civil War, the federal government offered various Christian denominations land in exchange for their complicity in its effort to force Indians to assimilate into the white settlers' culture – "so that they would be farmers instead of hunters and gatherers, or warriors," Robertson said. The Episcopal Church helped to carry out that plan mainly east of the Missouri River.

"We did that. That's the church's sin," said Robertson, who is an enrolled member on the Sisseton Reservation in South Dakota. "We have to confess that."

Ministries growing despite obstacles The diocese has fostered ministry on the two reservations, and in nearby Chamberlain, in the face of such life-threatening poverty and despair, and generations of abuse and broken promises.

A focal point is the four mission churches of the Mni Sose (Muddy Water) Cluster which straddles the two reservations and includes the border town of Chamberlain. The cluster includes St. John the Baptist, a country church with an outhouse and no running water about two miles northwest of the town of Crow Creek; Christ Episcopal Church in the Crow Creek town of Fort Thompson; Holy Comforter/Messiah Episcopal Church, in the town of Lower Brule on the Lower Brule Reservation; and Christ Episcopal Church in Chamberlain. The combined average Sunday attendance is about 80 but can triple at Christmas and Easter. In the three reservation churches, most hymns and service music are sung in Lakota.

The cluster has a vibrant lay ministry with lay readers leading morning and evening prayer services, often at churches other than their home churches. "If any one of them needs help, in one way or another, we go," said Sondra Zingler of Christ Church Chamberlain.

Three members of Holy Comforter – Wade Brings, Shirley Crane and Kim Fonder – are postulants for holy orders. Ann Whipple, a Sioux member of Christ Church in Chamberlain, often travels to the reservation congregations to help with services while Zingler and Brings have developed a ministry with residents of a nursing home and assisted-living facility in Chamberlain.

Armand "Red" Olson, senior warden of Christ Church Fort Thompson, is a member of the ministry team.

The cluster is served by Pastor Kristina Jensen, an ordained Evangelical Lutheran Church in America minister, who put 12,000 miles on her car last year.

"This is a real example of how mutual ministry can work," said the Rev. John Tarrant, rector of Trinity Episcopal Church in Pierre, about an hour from the reservations. Tarrant, who is also the dean of the diocese's Central Deanery that includes the Mni Sose Cluster, is mentoring Jensen.

Holy Comforter's members are working to complete a parish hall adjacent to their church. Money for the building has come from a $40,000 United Thank Offering (UTO) grant (UTO money also helped with a recent remodel of Christ Church Fort Thompson's undercroft). Additional funds came from diocesan loans along with about $20,000 raised by the community through such efforts as the sale of two horses Fonder donated and three hogs for which he also paid the butchering costs.

Vandals have wrecked one air conditioner already. Recently someone covered the door to the hall with obscenities.

The hall will host youth events as well as wakes. Jensen said the most visible ministry of the cluster comes during times of death, when the ministers of the cluster act as "chaplains-at-large." More than half of the wakes and the funerals are conducted in cluster churches, she said. Suicides, car accidents, drugs and alcohol cause most of the untimely deaths.

"People are without hope. They need hope," said Estes during the conversation at Christ Church in Fort Thompson. "They don't need to be preached to. They need somebody to be there with them in their suffering."

Long-time Lower Brule tribal Chairman Michael Jandreau agreed. "You can't build a body if it's broken," he said during a lunch meeting at the busy Golden Buffalo Casino. "You have to help that body."

Jandreau, a Roman Catholic who has Episcopalians in his family, said all churches on the reservations "can be tremendously influential" in trying to bring about systemic change. "I think the churches could be a greater advocate of peace and justice," he said.

Observing that "becoming part of the body is a daily event," Jandreau said "it takes courage to interact."

"All of us have part of piece of the answer, but do we have the courage to stand together?" he wondered.

Jandreau said he believes Jesus can bring the people of the reservations together. "As long as Jesus is Lord, you can work your way through the frills," he said.

Robertson said the Episcopal Church's reservation effort has not always been one of standing together – of ministry based on relationships. "We're working on it," he said.

At every stop of the tour, from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) administrative office on the Crow Creek Reservation to its police department on the Lower Brule to the Lower Brule's tribal council teepee-inspired meeting chamber, the conversation eventually got to the point where Robertson would ask how the Episcopal Church could help. The answers he heard ranged from Jandreau's call to increased advocacy to requests for resources to get food to people to ways the church could help ease the costs of wakes and burials.

"The church needs to step up and make its witness known," he said at one point.

Sitting in the lobby of the Lode Star Casino motel after two days on the Crow Creek and Lower Brule, Robertson said that when every difference is put aside, the remaining question is "how can we be the kingdom of God in this place on this earth."

Calling South Dakota a "kingdom diocese," Tarrant said "we're going to press that vision."

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Mary Frances Schjonberg is Episcopal Life Media correspondent for Episcopal Church governance, structure, and trends, as well as news of the dioceses of Province II. She is based in Neptune, New Jersey, and New York City.