Update: The tribal council voted on July 27 to rescind a motion passed on July 26 that had suspended mission and church activity on the Pine Ridge reservation. Council members explained that many Pine Ridge residents contacted them concerned that the brand new order meant that regular church activities—wedding, funerals, Bible study—needed to be halted. After discussion about making a 90-day compliance period for the registration of existing missions and churches and the exclusion of Native American churches or faith groups from the ordinance altogether, the council voted to easily rescind the unique motion.
Images of Pope Francis meditating before the graves of Indigenous children who perished at a church-run residential school evoked remorse for past wrongs and hope for reconciliation in the longer term this week. But at the same time as the pope made efforts toward healing in Canada, back in the US a passionate discussion began at a tribal council meeting on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. It offered a poignant reminder that injuries are still being visited on Indigenous people in North America by forces of Christian evangelization and cultural assimilation.
After a brochure that literally demonized historical figures and traditions of the Oglala Lakota Sioux people was handed out to young people visiting a nondenominational service site, elders of the Oglala Sioux Tribal Council took motion, approving a latest ordinance on July 26 that seeks to contain a proliferation of Christian charity, service and evangelization efforts on the reservation.
After a brochure that demonized traditions of the Oglala Lakota Sioux people was handed out to young people, tribal leaders took motion, approving an ordinance that curtails Christian missions at Pine Ridge.
The ordinance calls for a halt to all church and missionary activity at Pine Ridge until employees and volunteers working for mission and repair groups pass background checks. It also requires a comprehensive audit of those entities to find out how much money they’re raising, in the event that they were exploiting images of Lakota children in doing so and the way they’re spending the donations they accept. Elders agreed to beef up existing registration statutes for not-for-profit mission groups that establish themselves at Pine Ridge, where those groups propose to answer poverty and social challenges that plague the community.
The young individuals who brought the pamphlet to the eye of tribal elders urged the council to “decolonize” the reservation by shutting down latest evangelical outreach programs and creating stronger tribal oversight of existing missions.
Speaking during an open session in support of the suspension, Tyler Star Comes Out said: “Churches have all the time played a violent role in our communities.” She urged an effort to “decolonize mind, heart, spirit, space, land and knowledge.”
“We take pride in our identities,” Ms. Star Comes Out said. “We’re Lakota and it’s time to return to our ways. We don’t need any more assimilation, we don’t need any more churches, we don’t need your god.
“And we’re offended but additionally heavy-hearted because: Why is that this still happening? Do you see the best way these people discuss with our parents and to our elders, and may you imagine what they are saying to our kids and behind closed doors?”
Members of the council haven’t responded thus far to requests for comment on how the ordinance might be administered. A spokesperson for the Red Cloud School, a Catholic institution administered by the Jesuits and the Lakota people, said school officials were awaiting further guidance from tribal leaders to discern how the brand new ordinance would affect school programs and its related efforts.
“Our nation is currently living within the aftermath of a cultural genocide that was committed by the Catholic Church and the U.S. government, who still have to be held accountable for his or her actions.”
The spokesperson identified, nonetheless, that staff and volunteers at the varsity and its adjoining institutions, a lot of whom are members of the Oglala Lakota community, are already background-checked based on latest child-safety protocols instituted within the aftermath of the church’s abuse crisis.
The Red Cloud Indian School was founded by the Jesuits in 1888 and administered as a boarding school until 1980. In 2021, the Jesuits and the community at Red Cloud Indian School began their very own means of truth-seeking as revelations of historical abuses in church-run boarding and residential schools in the US and Canada continued to emerge.
The ordinance passed by the council responds to longstanding grievances amongst many at Pine Ridge over the proliferation of church-related not-for-profits on reservation land. The groups engage in a gamut of uncoordinated relief and charity efforts while soliciting hundreds of thousands in donations annually. However the catalyst for the unprecedented motion to contain those self-appointed missions was the distribution of a pamphlet allegedly handed out during a presentation by a Baptist minister at a nondenominational service site, The Dream Center. Its content, which described figures and features of Lakota culture and history as demonic, provoked the outrage of young people at Pine Ridge, who demanded that tribal elders respond.
After reviewing a duplicate of the tract on July 22, Council President Kevin Killer ordered the Jesus Is King Mission and the missionary who allegedly produced and distributed the fabric, Matthew Monfore, to go away the Oglala Lakota Sioux Nation “immediately and stop any further hate speak motion.”
During open discussion before the council, Lori McAfee, C.E.O. and president of Wings As Eagles Ministries, which sponsors the Dream Center, denied any connection to the incident or the missionary who distributed the fabric, explaining to the council that she had been blindsided by the controversy. The council ordered an investigation into the events leading as much as the distribution of the pamphlet and the middle’s ongoing presence at Pine Ridge.
“We’re at some extent, where we as a collective either revive our Lakota lifestyle or the following generations will lose it ceaselessly.”
Within the wake of the controversy, all Christian missions on the reservation face latest scrutiny. The Catholic legacy at Pine Ridge was noted with particular bitterness by one other young Lakota woman who addressed the council before the vote. “Our nation is currently living within the aftermath of a cultural genocide that was committed by the Catholic Church and the U.S. government, who still have to be held accountable for his or her actions,” said Eleanor Ferguson, reading an announcement on behalf of the International Indigenous Youth Council. “Our lifestyle has been under attack since Christopher Columbus set foot on Turtle Island and inserted the Doctrine of Discovery upon our Indigenous nations. The Doctrine of Discovery gave the church the authority to justify murdering and raping our women and kids, colonizing and desecrating our sacred lands within the name of Jesus Christ.
“Not one follower of the Catholic or Christian church has or will go to heaven until this vile genocide is fully acknowledged and ended.”
Ms. Ferguson faulted historical Catholic mission work, particularly its role in administering residential schools within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, for starting cycles of intergenerational trauma that proceed to haunt the Oglala Sioux community, reflected today within the reservation’s high rates of suicide, drug addiction, intercommunal violence and hopelessness.
“We’re at some extent,” Ms. Ferguson said, “where we as a collective either revive our Lakota lifestyle or the following generations will lose it ceaselessly, which is why we’re here to demand [that] the Oglala Lakota Sioux tribal council take immediate motion against all churches and missionaries on our territory who’re using impoverished children for financial gain.
“We will not allow these people to operate on our territory until the church has been held accountable for the mass genocide they’ve committed against the Indigenous nation.”
