1895
Pine Ridge, South Dakota
Father Florentine Digmann
January 8,
I have just come to this reservation on January 1. I have come via the holy Catholic Church to Christianize these natives. It is bitter cold here, and the winters seem to last forever. Food is scarce and of low quality. I wear my cassock and a cross. The Indians call this a “black robe”.
These Indians are a strange breed of people. They have their own ways totally foreign to me. The men and women dance around in a circle in a wild way. People call this the “Ghost Dance.” We have mass every Sunday. There are a few Indians there, mostly women. The Indian woman’s lot is a hard one. Drudgery, cooking, hitching up the horses, scrubbing, and total obedience. Some of them come to me hoping for a refuge from all the work. They readily acquiesce to baptism.
The men are a harder lot. They sit and do nothing. They were given lots of land to farm, but they don’t show much interest. Why wouldn’t a man want to be a farmer and have a bit of land to produce food? They used to hunt for food, but this life would be so much easier, why don’t they see that?
Of particular concern is the medicine men. They “heal” by dancing around and singing strange incantations. We know that they are using the devil’s power to hold the people in enchantment. Still, oddly sometimes they seem to be effective. The other day, a medicine man was in a house for several hours and it was reported that a child with consumption was much improved the next day. The Indians seem to believe in these people, I can’t fathom it. Why wouldn’t they prefer our scientific methods of medicine? We have sanitariums for these people to cure them.
One saving grace of the consumption outbreak among the Indians is that they become willing to be converted on their deathbeds. This ensures that many souls go to heaven!
January 9th
Please send some better food here. The food is abominable. The steaks are as hard as stone. The coffee is a ghastly concoction of brown bread, acorns, dandelion roots, barley, and snuff. The meat’s rot is disguised with spices.
January 10th
The trick here is to determine the way to the Indian’s heart. We can see that the Indian’s ritual includes suffering just like our concept of Jesus suffering on the Cross. There is a religious dance called the Sun Dance. The dance is held over 4 days and each dancer fasts and purifies in the sweat lodge during this time, only eating moist roots and leaves. The dancer stares directly into the sun (actually right below the sun), The pain connects the dancer to the gods and also is an offering to the other people in the group. It is also a sheer spectacle of pain. I first saw this dance from June 4th to June 8th last year.
A cottonwood stripped of its branches is in the center. The dancers were laid at the foot of the Sun Pole. The medicine man drew a knife and passed the blade beneath and through a strip of flesh on each side of the chest. A hardwood skewer was passed through each of the openings and tied with rope to secure it to the man. The man was helped to his feet and had the horrible task of tearing the flesh so the skewer could come out. The man who could do this was stalwart indeed.
January 11
I had a strange confession today. The girl was from Paris and so we tried to communicate with her rudimentary English and my French. It was a tangled tale of love and enchantment. An Indian, the most annoying medicine man Black Elk, had come to Paris with Buffalo Bill Cody. He was dark and mysterious. She fell in love and so did he. While at her parent’s mansion in Paris, he had one of his visions. Charlotte and her family nursed him back to health.
I tried to tell her that the dalliance was a sin, but she laughed and said, “for the French, love is no sin.”
She told me that his vision concerned a group of Indians called the Grandfathers. The Grandfathers told him to save his people. I told her this was hogwash but she said that she believed him. He flew through the air from America to the Pine Ridge reservation and saw his parents in distress. Then he flew back to Paris.
She admitted she had his child. I don’t know what became of her.
February 1st
Today I had a disturbing dream. I was surrounded by redmen and their ceremonial garb. They were dancing and chanting as they do in their religious ceremonies. I saw that they were smoking pipes, with the terrible hallucinogen peyote.
They were mocking me and the Catholic Church. Then one of them with a grimace indicated I was to take an inhalation of the pipe. I was horrified. Don’t they know that I am a servant of God, not their demon religion? He got larger and more terrible looking. I woke up in a sweat. I was in a daze.
For the rest of the day I wandered aimlessly through the reservation. I saw things that bothered me. Indian men looking downtrodden and idle were all around the place. Children looking dirty. A woman passed by with bruises, and I knew that alcoholism was rampant around the reservation. What about all the pictures I had seen of noble Indian warriors in their regalia on their horses, with beautiful maidens surrounding them. What had happened?
It was us, the white man.
I saw with horrible clarity what had happened. We had taken away the Indian’s religion and their souls were in a netherworld. Neither Indian nor Christian. We made them send their children to our schools where they were forbidden from speaking their languages or doing their ceremonies. Those ceremonies were what made them human, as surely as the Church does for Europe and America.
February 2nd
I am going to be the Savior of the Indian! I will tell the Holy See what I think of their mistreatment of Indians and then will create a new order where Indian and white will be equal!
February 3rd
I am not going to do anything like the above. I am not the right person. Call it cowardice, if you want, but if I lose my position with the Church, what will become of me? I don’t have any other profession. My family will be ashamed of me. My mother will no longer smile when she thinks of me. I will go back home to Austria and be with my family.
July 23rd
I am very ill, I think I will die. I am glad to be out of the Indian business. I have sent for my Confessor and told him everything. I know that my Confession absolved me of this sin and I can die in peace. Still, the Indians are not prospering, and their numbers are greatly reduced. I know that we are partly to blame.
Reference: Black Elk: the life of an American visionary by Joe Jackson. 2016.
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