Father Francis Craft, Missionary to the Sioux (review)

This biography of the Catholic diocesan priest, Francis Craft, joins a growing list of ethnohistorical works on missionary personnel and mission endeavors. Born in 1852 in New York City, Craft had a colorful and extremely controversial career, first as a soldier and then a priest. He enlisted in the army at the age of 10 and was wounded at the Battle of Gettysburg. At the age of 12 he started medical school at Columbia and then went to Belgium to study surgery. In 1870 he enlisted in the Franco-Prussian war and also fought in the Cuban war of independence in 1871. Born and baptized an Episcopalian, he became a Catholic in the 1870s and entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1876 at the age of 23. He left the Jesuits two years later, having never found his place there. From here he worked in the Northwest missions and then returned to Omaha, where he was ordained a priest in 1883 by Bishop Marty and assigned to the Rosebud Reservation.

Craft was not one to avoid conflict with the Indian Agent, bishops, clergy from other denominations, fellow clergy, the head of the bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (Monsignor Stephan), or native people, for that matter. He was adopted, according to his own account, into the Spotted Tail family and identified himself with his own Mohawk ancestry. He was eventually banned from Rosebud by the agent and went to the Standing Rock reservation. At Standing Rock he took on most of the whites as well as the agent, McLaughlin. He was convinced that they were the ultimate cause of all reservation problems. Although Craft presented himself as a staunch defender of native people and an adaptive missionary in the tradition of the Jesuits in India, he wore out his welcome among some native peoples, who wanted him removed from their territories. From Standing Rock he was transferred to Fort Berthold, where he became preoccupied with the foundation and nurture of an order of Lakota religious women.

Craft witnessed and was wounded at the Wounded Knee massacre and staunchly defended the military and its actions there, a reversal of his general opprobrium for the agents of the United States. After recovering he formally founded the Congregation of American Sisters, which was legally incorporated in 1896 despite the opposition of many in the church. Craft's own difficult personality, questions of moral turpitude, and controversy as to whether or not native people could be successful Roman Catholic religious and clergy increased. Eventually Craft took "his" sisters to serve as nurses in the Spanish American war, where they were lauded for their service by the government but ostracized by the church. Finally, all but one of the sisters who had not died of disease left the congregation. Craft returned to the United States with the last sister, who then left the order to marry. He himself was reinstated as a priest by the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania. There he finished out his long life quietly, never returning to native work again. He died in 1920.

The author of this book, a retired labor-personnel executive, has personal family ties to Father Craft through his father's aunt. Throughout the work he remains fair to all viewpoints and opinions of this very controversial figure. He relies on the journals Craft began in 1888, as well as on a wide variety of documentary and historical sources. Toward the work's end, a chapter entitled "Was Father Craft Insane?" compares Craft's career with that of Katarine Drexel, who funded much of the early mission work of the Catholic Church on the early reservations and who herself became a sister. The author suggests that there may have been a conspiracy against Craft and that he was a prophetic visionary who saw the possibility of native clergy long before anyone else.

Ethnohistorians might be more interested in how this work expands the understanding of the early missionary interaction with...