Sweet Grass Mass and Pow Wows for Jesus: Catholic and Pentecostal Missions on Rocky Boy’s Reservation

Carl Starkloff, borrowing imagery from a prayer he once heard by an Arapaho medicine man, often encouraged Native Catholics to permit a confluence of tribal and Catholic traditions to take place in their own religious lives, like the meeting of two rivers into one.¹ As a Catholic theologian and longtime Jesuit missionary among Native people in the United States and Canada, Starkloff began challenging the prevailing winds of “syncretophobia” at a time when many religious leaders and scholars regarded syncretism as a dirty word. Through the last two decades of his life, he came to see syncretic process not only as inevitable, but as a process possessing rich possibilities for increasingly authentic religious expressions—especially among communities, like Native American tribes, who find themselves living at the intersection of two or more religious traditions.²

In July 2008, I spent ten days among the Chippewa-Cree on Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana, exploring through interviews the ways in which Native Christians are navigating the mingling of religious currents taking place there today. I was particularly interested in the syncretic confluence occurring among Native Catholics in contrast to Native Pentecostals on the reservation. During the course of my stay, I interviewed members of two mission congregations—Living Water Assembly of God and St. Mary’s Catholic Church—to hear firsthand how Christian and traditional ways are brought together, or kept apart, in their own lives. Whether one-on-one or in a group setting, we talked in Sunday School rooms and living rooms, on Sun Dance grounds and in parish halls. Our conversations continued over Indian tacos and buffalo stew, pulling weeds and splitting wood. My questions for them revolved chiefly around issues of religious and cultural identity. What tensions, if any, do you experience by being both Native and Christian? Are there traditional Indian practices your Christian faith prevents you from performing? Should traditional Native rituals be blended with Christian liturgical practice? What does Jesus mean to you?

Rocky Boy is by far the smallest of Montana’s seven reservations, with a population of just under 4,000. It’s located in an isolated region, even by Montana’s standards, situated below Highway 2 along a lonely, windswept region known as the Hi-Line. Its very creation in 1916 is a tale of blended traditions, serving as home to both the Chippewa and Cree tribes out of pragmatic, mutual necessity. Together the tribes forged a joint Constitution of the Chippewa-Cree Indians. The people of the reservation likewise display a bold willingness to cross cultural and religious boundary markers, and nowhere is this more apparent than among the Native Christians on the reservation. Among those who identify themselves as Christians—whether exclusively so, or in tandem with the Indian ways—I found Lutherans among the Catholics, Catholics among the Pentecostals, and Pentecostals among the Baptists. Nearly everyone I spoke with from the Assembly of God mission is a former Catholic, including the pastor. Many had been part of the Catholic charismatic renewal which swept across Montana’s reservations in the 1970s and 1980s, joining the Pentecostal church only when the movement lost steam in the Catholic missions. While the Sun Dance seems to be universally shunned among the Native Pentecostals, a few still go to the sweat lodge, and others love Pow Wow dancing. Among Native Catholics, some have likewise abandoned Indian religion, but most have found a way to hold their Catholic faith with one hand, and their traditional Indian ways (whether Cree or Crow, Blackfeet or Chippewa) with the other. Many blend their Christian faith not just with one indigenous tradition, but with several at once—like the Cree Catholics I met who dance in the Shoshone-Crow Sundance at Rocky Boy.

In short, I discovered that the rivers were manifold, and their meeting was anything but tidy. Currents running from many sources were swirling with the accumulated detritus of many miles, sloshing together in foamy greeting, zealously splashing over their banks over here, cutting new paths downstream over there. Shared circumstances most...