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  • In Native Tongues: Catholic Charismatic Renewal and Montana’s Eastern Tribes (1975–Today)
  • Mark Clatterbuck

Introduction: Powerful Memories

During the summer of 2008, I was in Montana interviewing Native Christians on the Rocky Boy’s Reservation for an oral history project exploring questions of dual religious identities among the Chippewa and Cree tribes. I spoke with a wide variety of Native Christians on the reservation, including Catholics, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Baptists, and independent Evangelicals. During the course of our conversations, stark differences emerged among the various denominational groups when they explained how free—or restricted—they felt to practice traditional tribal religions alongside their Christian worship.

There was one element in their divergent narratives, however, that seemed to enjoy nearly universal approval, freely transgressing denominational lines, having affected Catholics, Pentecostals, and Traditionalists alike with equal force and emotional weight. In story after story, these Native Christians spoke effusively about a period of spiritual renewal among Montana’s tribes that shaped their religious lives unlike any other, a span of roughly ten years that many still regard as a spiritual summit against which they measure all subsequent religious experiences in their lives.

They were speaking of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal that swept across eastern Montana’s Native communities from 1975 into the early 1980s. The movement was marked by widespread prayer for physical and inner healing, tongues, the experience of “resting in the Spirit” (also “slain in the Spirit”), prophecies, and a powerfully felt sense of spiritual community. The collective religious experience of those years freely crossed sectarian barriers, often bringing Catholics and Pentecostals together in shared worship on reservations where interdenominational rivalries had deep historical roots. The intensity of those events and their enduring imprint on the religious landscape of these reservations today soon led me back to Montana to give more serious attention to the stories of spiritual awakening and healing that animated [End Page 153] the memories and spiritual lives of so many Native Christians who belong, today, to a wide variety of Christian communities.

Given both the intensity and scope of this phenomenon among Montana’s Native people, I believe this is a story that deserves a wider audience than it has received to date. It is also a story best told through the voices of those most affected by the pulse of its life flow and the rhythm of its waves. At the same time, it is a story whose telling is accompanied by a growing sense of urgency; several key players of these events—including the Seneca elder and Franciscan sister José Hobday, the Precious Blood priest Father Paul Schaaf, and the Lakota Sioux elder Joe Red Thunder—have recently died as a period of nearly forty years now separates us from the first rumblings of these extraordinary events. In the summer of 2009, I returned to hear and record the stories of many who were near the center of the movement, Native and non-Native alike. The record of their memories forms the basis of what follows.1

There are always many more voices that ought to be included in a project like this. Nevertheless, I’ve tried to assemble a fairly representative gathering of those participants largely responsible for the vitality of the movement on three of Montana’s reservations where the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR) was experienced most poignantly across the state through the 1970s and 1980s: the Fort Belknap Reservation (Gros Ventre and Assiniboine), the Rocky Boy’s Reservation (Chippewa and Cree), and the Crow Reservation. I include the voices of women and men, Natives and non-Natives, lay leaders and clergy, all of whom played key roles in the movement’s impact across these tribal communities.

Lighting the Fire: From Devil’s Lake to Wolf Point

It began near Devil’s Lake, North Dakota. In the early summer of 1975, a regional Catholic Indian Congress was held at St. Michael’s Mission on the Spirit Lake Tribe Reservation, not far from Fort Totten. During one of the services, the Lakota Sioux elder Joe Red Thunder was unexpectedly asked to pray for a woman suffering from cancer who was standing beside him. Joe’s father had been a Catholic catechist, and Joe...

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