Converting the Rosebud: Catholic Mission and the Lakotas, 1886–1916 by Harvey Markowitz (review)

Popularly known as “Sioux,” the Lakota today live on nine reservations in South Dakota and several others in Canada and the United States. The Sicangu division (formerly referred to as the “Brulé”) occupy the Rosebud Reservation. This study addresses a range of subjects that affected these people and the Indian world as a whole in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Chapters cover “Federal-Indian relations,” Grant’s “peace policy,” Bishop Marty’s stewardship of the Dakota Territory, his interaction with the controversial Father Francis Craft, and his enlisting German-born nuns and priests to staff St. Francis Mission. Apart from the challenging terrain upon which the people were scattered, efforts to establish Church presence at Rosebud were hampered by “acts of God,” anti-Catholic sentiments harbored by government officials, lack of funds, and the resistance of some to the missionary message.

Clergy, agents, and diverse Lakota citizens (notably Spotted Tail) come to life via diary accounts and government documents. Concluding chapters report the interaction of diverse actors during a turbulent time of culture-contact. Readers might negatively interpret church initiatives as “cultural imperialism” or, more positively, a form of “interfaith dialogue” apropos conditions of the time. Accounts substantiate these conflicting perceptions—their legacy being an Indian population that today both sustains Christian practice and avoids it.

That legacy reveals an array of religious practitioners among contemporary Rosebud Lakota. One now finds conventional Catholics, non “churchgoers,” those who have grafted Christian thought onto native antecedents, and those who consider themselves “pipe carriers” (i.e., persons identifying with a pre-reservation religious identity). In short, Markowitz presents an early-reservation milieu that was the seedbed of contending religious perspectives still present a century later.

The author surprisingly charges the legendary Jesuit explorer, Pierre De Smet, as being ethnocentric. This conflicts with the much-noted respect that was accorded him within Lakota country of the mid-nineteenth century (chronicled in biographies of the man). Similarly, the author’s emphasis on people’s resistance to baptism begs reconciliation with images of De Smet busily baptizing numerous souls when visiting Lakota who eagerly sought his blessing. By the same token, this illustrates the challenge which scholars face when trying to understand a complicated socio-religious landscape of the past.

For example, as the Indian revitalization movement got traction in the late twentieth century, activists and writers popularized a plaint that Markowitz echoes. He writes that the Sicangu would find it “absurd” to abandon their beliefs and practices “for the ways and teachings of a wanikiye (lifegiver) named Jesus” (p. 182). The problem with this observation is that throughout Lakota country of the early-reservation period, the Ghost Dance was widely popular—its central doctrine being that Jesus would come again—this time, to Indian people. To what extent his return would meld or replace old and new practices never materialized. However, embrace of the Ghost Dance shows a people’s desire for sacred revelation—whatever its source and tenets. Theirs was not a one-dimensional parochialism that contemporary observers so often associate with a native religious perspective.

Marquette University is the repository of diaries cited in Converting the Rosebud. It alone should beckon readers to visit Milwaukee and read the captivating accounts not included within the text. Markowitz’s contribution is that he introduces readers to these diaries, and by doing so reveals the complex world of culture contact as it bore upon religion. Inquiring minds will want to find greater clarity on this topic, and so should be grateful to Converting the Rosebud for sparking interest in this quest.