The Journey of Deus Providebit

As David Bailey and I have been re-reading and analyzing the information from our interviews on masculinity and femininity with the Native Americans, I wanted to share with you his experience of our time there.

Thank you once again to David and for all of you for accompanying me on this journey. My hope is to begin to post from the interviews in this next week, to allow you to join ever more closely in this tour of femininity and masculinity throughout the world.

There are trips and there are journeys. We are on a journey into the realm where road and sky meet. This eight-day foray into the lives of North America’s indigenous peoples is more than a trip, it’s a voyage into the depths of spiritual reality. All of us are traveling through experiences and perceptions that compose the infinite symphony of life. In most cases, it’s the journey, not the destination, which is most important.

I spent the last 20 years working among Native nations from across the US and Canada. I’ve slept on couches and prayed in sweat lodges all across Indian Country. When I entered seminary after a ten year hiatus in Ireland, it was made very clear to me that I was being called once again to resume my previous relationships with First Nations people.

After too many years away, I finally made my way back last summer. I went to the Pine Ridge reservation, home of the Oglala, Lakota, where I had meetings at Red Cloud Indian School. I came away determined to do everything I can to help them continue. I then drove north and west to the Northern Cheyenne Nation in southeastern Montana where I visited old friends and met new ones at their annual 4th of July Powwow. Indians from across Montana, the Dakotas; from as far north as Saskatchewan and Alberta, Canada, and as far south as Arizona and Oklahoma, gathered together for three days of celebration. I was gripped by the instant recognition that, after so much time away, I needed this connection. I need it like breathing. I floated away on a high back to my home diocese and prepared for another year in seminary.

When Dr. Miller told me she was interested in meeting First Nations people at home before traveling abroad, I spent months planning every detail. No matter how much time you spend planning, you have virtually no control over how things turn out. Ultimately, it’s in God’s hands. I kept thinking of a line that wove its way into my mind. God knows what we need, and he knows when we need it. It’s in vulnerable moments where you have no control when God dispenses graces which reveal traces of his hand directly involved in your life. For us in this instance, so many things came together so quickly we both concluded, “It’s like God wants this to happen.”

Things beyond our control arranged themselves so perfectly, it was as though they were orchestrated intentionally by the divine planner. For example, on our fourth day, we drove from the heart of the Black Hills -- land sacred to all Indians in the northern plains -- through Powder River country and the traditional hunting lands of the Cheyenne, Lakota, and Crow. With the Black Hills to the south, we passed herds of deer and throngs of antelope as we journeyed north and west into Wyoming, then Montana, and then the eastern border of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. On the reservation, we went to check into Guest Housing at St. Labre Indian mission. We had an 11:00 meeting with their Cheyenne language teacher. Our arrival coincided with a student protest over issues which were never made clear. The campus was on lock-down with security and police closely monitoring the situation. We were told in no uncertain terms, our 11:00 was cancelled. We’d have to come back that evening.

With more time than I wanted before our 1:00 interview on the neighboring Crow reservation, I decided to give Dr. Miller a tour of a reservation I have always loved. Suddenly, I started thinking about our scheduled meetings at the tribal college the next day. I decided we’d stop by, introduce ourselves to the gentlemen we’d be interviewing, and double-check to make sure they were still available when we’d agreed to meet. Thank God we did.

The first person we spoke to, George Nightwalker, a professor of Cheyenne History, told us he wouldn’t be available at all the next day… but he was available in exactly ten minutes. What transpired moments later was an encounter which lasted over an hour with a gentle, soft-spoken man who told us stories of growing up listening to his grandfather pray every morning in Cheyenne. As a child, he asked his dad what his grandfather was praying about. His dad translated, “He’s praying for you and he’s praying for me. He’s praying for our Cheyenne people, and he’s praying this country will never see another war. He’s praying for peace, and he’s praying for the whole world.” Had it not been for the forced alteration of our itinerary, our encounter with George never would’ve happened.

The next day was equally providential. We returned to Chief Dull Knife College in the center of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, for a meeting with Burt Medicine Bull, their Cheyenne language professor. I was immediately impressed with Mr. Medicine Bull, and so I was quick to take his advice when he told us, “Talk to Teanna Limpy in the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO).” She hadn’t been on my radar, so I was grateful for his recommendation. After our interview, he told me where to find Teanna.

Rather than going straight over, my instincts told me to wait. Dr. Miller and I made our way to the THPO building almost two-hours later. Inside, we were told Mrs. Limpy was unavailable. She’d been away on business all morning and they had no idea when she’d return… At that exact moment, her car pulled into the driveway and she came inside. It was more than perfect timing. It was divine timing. Dr. Miller and I then spent the next hour talking to a young, strong, energetic, and vibrant woman who faces men, government agencies, and vast array of opposition every day. We both came away inspired. Deus Providebit.

Earlier in the week, we trekked into the Black Hills after three days on Pine Ridge reservation. It was Mother’s Day. At Mass that morning, two Lakota girls received baptism and First Communion. They were reborn. The theme of genesis, on a day set aside to honor mothers, continued throughout the day. At Mass, the presiding priest expertly interwove Lakota language into the liturgy. He spoke during his homily about a time when all tribes and all nations will be together in Heaven. Hours later, we went to Wind Cave, the place believed by the Lakota to be their birth place onto this earth.

That morning, during the Office of the Readings, my thoughts rested with Mary. Mary came to the Western Hemisphere as a Native. More accurately, she was a mixed-blood. She was the lowest of the low, a woman who would’ve been an outcast to both Native and Spanish communities alike. In the Nahuatl tradition, the double braids of Our Lady of Guadalupe denote an unmarried girl in her middle teens. The black sash around her wrists indicates pregnancy. If you turn the image on its side, you see the silhouette of what the Natives in Mexico called their sacred mountain. Before the end of the day, Dr. Miller and I prayed at Bear Butte. Tho it’s not an exact rendition, there are features of that sacred mountain which look surprisingly similar to the sideways image of Our Lady of Guadalupe. In taking Dr. Miller to Bear Butte, I didn’t want to oversell it. I explained the historical-cultural significance of the holy mountain and simply said, “You’ll know it when you see it.” On the mountain, we went in separate directions and prayed for those we encountered, for First Nations people, for those at home, and for those around the world.

I said I’d be a tour-guide on this journey. I was wrong. I was just the driver. It was God who led our tour. Our trip culminated in two days spent at the Montana Native Women’s Coalition annual conference in Billings, Montana, where we heard heartbreaking stories of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. We listened to the wounded survivors of church-run boarding schools, were briefed on the plague of sex-trafficking in Montana, and learned that 85% of Native women in the US and Canada will personally experience abuse in their life-time… and 70 percent of the time it’s at the hands of non-Native abusers.

After the conference, we drove back for one last night in the Black Hills. On the western edge of the Northern Cheyenne Nation, there’s a family I have known and loved for at least twenty years. Their patriarch is a mentor of mine. So much of what I know about Cheyenne ways, language, history, and spirituality came from him. I began to think I wouldn’t see him on this trip. I’d tried and failed to connect with him until that last evening. Carrying heavy the heartache we’d encountered at the conference, God proved, once again, that he knows what we need, and he knows when we need it. Waiting for us when we arrived back on the Cheyenne reservation was this elderly man, his wife, and a house full of laughing grandchildren. The reception Dr. Miller and I received in their home was the perfect ending to the perfect trip. After an amazing eight days, we spent over an hour in their company and I did not want to leave. On our way out the door, they said to us both, come back. Anytime. Come back. I hope I always will. Deus Providebit.

The Black Hills and Sacramental Reality

Gray rock.

Vast green plains.

Multi-colored prayer ties blowing in the wind.

The Black Hills in the distance.

A sacramental reality.

This hour was the culmination of my maiden three-day journey into the Native American culture.

When I first realized that addressing gender theory required both a Scriptural and a universal cultural response, I was excited about a research pilgrimage which would allow me to return to countries where I had been formed and already loved the culture: the genteel country of the Guadalupana in Mexico; the many piazzas, pontifical libraries, and lazy sun of Italy; and the great bustling energy and excuse for braids in Kenya. And yet, one day when, on a whim, I asked a seminarian about the structure of the book on masculinity and femininity, “What do you think, David?” he responded, “I think you need to go to the reservations.”

I heard from David about the reservations and his great passion for Native Americans a few months earlier. My sister called me at 7:48am as I was preparing to teach an 8am class. She wanted me to know that my nephew was close to passing. With tears streaming down my face, I stood disoriented and confused in front of my 8am classroom, wondering how I could ever make the two and a half hour drive to the hospital afterwards, when a seminarian, David, stopped me. “Dr. Miller,” he asked, “what do you need?”

On the two hour trip to the hospital, David told me about his love for Native Americans, the decades he spent loving those he had met on the reservations, and how it seemed that, after a long hiatus spent in Ireland and then studying for the priesthood, God was calling him to serve these Nations again.

Thus, when I heard, “You need to go to the reservations,” I felt both honored and commanded.

David spent months setting up the schedule, interspersing the research interviews with experiences of the culture in which these gender expressions are understood. He e-mailed professors of culture at Oglala Lakota College on Pine Ridge Reservation, at Chief Dull Knife College for the Northern Cheyenne in Lame Deer on their reservation, and Little Bighorn College on the Crow reservation. He spoke with friends and elders. He called the Native Americans “the invisible minority,” and his labor of love bore witness to the dignity of this almost invisible group of Americans.

Then, finally, on Friday, May 10, the day after graduation, we flew to Rapid City in South Dakota, rented a car, and drove to Oglala Lakota College on Pine Ridge Reservation to speak with Professor Karen Lone Hill, Chair of the Lakota Studies Department. As the green plains brought us closer and closer to the College, I was both excited and nervous. I had managed to read two of her works on the Oglala Lakota and felt that I almost knew this woman. One, a book entitled, North American Indians Today: Sioux, gave a good introduction to the Oglala Lakota Nation: its history, traditional stories, spiritual ceremonies, and current social and political realities. The second work, an essay presented as “On Learning,” in the anthology Shaping Survival. Essays by Four American Indian Tribal Women, chronicled her upbringing as a woman in the Oglala Lakota nation. It was vulnerable and beautiful, revealing her rediscovery of her cultural roots and her entrance into the traditions of her people.

When we began our discussion on masculinity and femininity in the Oglala Lakota Nation, I expected that the interview would last only fifteen minutes. This, the articles I read on phenomenological, or experiential, interviews, had assured me was the norm. Instead, the three of us sat together in comfy, flowered chairs, and David and I listened as Karen spoke. She was confident and yet quiet, as she revealed herself and her Nation through her dreams, through stories from her tradition, such as those of Falling Star and his mother, and through reflections on the transmission of gifts through female and male lineage. When I asked for final thoughts, she said, “As women…the turtle is what we're supposed to be like… turtles, because they have strong hearts and they have that shell to protect themselves.” This, over an hour later, as the three of us reluctantly peeled ourselves from our seats, hesitant to leave. David and I walked back to the car stunned. How much there was to think about, to talk about! All we did was wonder at God’s providence and the stories through which we could examine our own lives. Deep in conversation, we drove to Red Cloud Indian School.

At the school, David showed me the grave of Red Cloud. Red Cloud, an Oglala Lakota chief, had resisted the advancement of the United States cavalry into Powder River country, the final stronghold of Native American hunting and life. And in fact, his resistance to the cavalry was so successful that in the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the US government was forced to acknowledge the rightful ownership of the Native Americans to this land. However, with the discovery of gold in the Black Hills some few years later, the government sought to amend the treaty. What they did not realize was that the Black Hills were sacred to the Native Americans. No Native American would give up the Wind Cave, where the Oglala Lakota believed that they first came into the world, or Bear Butte, a mountain so sacred that even First Nations from Canada would make the long voyage to pray there. The Native Americans refused to amend the treaty, and so the government took the Black Hills by force and confined the Natives to reservations.

Red Cloud, when he was finally confined, asked that the “black robes” or Jesuits be sent to the Oglala Lakota reservation. And in fact, it is the Jesuits who still run Red Cloud Indian School where, since 2007, they have sought to more fully integrate Lakota language and cultural studies into the school, in order to complement its initial focus on general education and the teaching of the Catholic faith.

The evening we arrived at Red Cloud Indian School, we were invited to a feather-tying ceremony for the seniors. Held in the school gym, like all important high school ceremonies, it was preceded by dancing and musical chairs. The young women were almost all in their long skirts, the young men working on keeping the beat. But immediately before the feather-tying ceremony, a man in his early 30s, Tyler, had an honoring for his Aunt Philomene. We first heard a sharp whistle blow, at which everyone in the gym rose to their feet. Tyler asked that all join in dancing with his Aunt Philomene to honor her, and a big circle of dancers was formed around the gym. They came, seniors, adults, little children, to dance and honor Aunt Philomene. When the dancers had come full circle, Tyler spoke of why he wanted to honor his Aunt Philomene: for the good that she had done in raising funds for the school and in teaching their traditions, teaching him at school and at home. He told us that he loved her, and he thanked her once more. Then everyone came to shake Aunt Philomene’s hand and honor her. It was incredible to see a woman publicly honored in such a way by her adult nephew. As a whistle carrier, he had prayed and sacrificed much for his people, and yet he felt himself in debt to this little woman before him. What honor we saw, what masculine receptivity to the feminine gift!

The next day, David spent time showing me around Pine Ridge Reservation. Of great importance was our visit to Wounded Knee, the site where over 300 Native Americans were massacred in December of 1890. All of them were buried in a mass grave. Surrounding their grave, in the midst of the wind and the light rain, I saw prayer ties for the first time. Ribbons of red, yellow, black and white, the colors of the medicine wheel, they held small amounts of tobacco. Tied to the fence of the cemetery, they fluttered in the breeze and served as prayers for the hundreds buried there. We joined our prayers to theirs, as we prayed for the souls of all the faithful departed.

And finally, Sunday, Mother’s Day and the day of the Resurrection arrived. Mass was at Our Lady of the Sioux. Traditional elements of Native American prayer and spirituality had been integrated into the Mass, per the liturgical recommendations of the Diocese of Rapid City. Smudging, or the burning of sacred herbs for purification, accompanied the penitential rite. A slow drumbeat, which symbolizes the beating heart, accompanied the consecration. And two young girls, modest and shy as little girls are about 7 or 8 years old, made their Baptism and their First Holy Communion, in white dresses and beautiful, intricate beaded moccasins.

This, however, was only the beginning of the Sunday pilgrimage that led to the sacred Black Hills. In the Black Hills, we visited and prayed at Wind Cave, the birthplace of the Oglala Lakota, and then at Bear Butte, the culmination of this three-day journey. As I began hiking the 4,400 foot mountain, sacred to all of the Native Americans, I prayed for my family, my friends, all who were making this research pilgrimage possible, and for their families. I prayed to the Blessed Mother, on Mother’s Day, asking for her intercession. And rounding the top of the mountain, I realized that this was a moment that, like the green plains below, extended into eternity: a moment of prayer, for a Nation and with a Nation, that was offering its “hidden treasures” of masculinity and femininity, of culture and grace, to the world.

This was the sacramental reality carved into the gray rocks, the prayer ties, and the rolling plains colliding into the Black Hills: a reality that all of Creation, every culture, speaks to us of the Creator, of what it means to be created “male and female…in the image and likeness of God.” We only need ask for the grace and the patience to listen.