In the Current Issue: "Return of the Rosebud 9"
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Rites for Wounded Communities,” guest-edited by David Hogue, explores a wide range of responses in which churches and chaplains have engaged in order to help people affected by disasters and violence come to terms with the after-effects and the on- going trauma. This excerpt is from The Rev. Lauren Stanley who served as the Episcopal priest on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota for over eight years. During that time, the bones of nine children who had died at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania where they had been taken from the reservation were brought home.–– Melinda Quivik
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In the Lakota language, the word Wakanjeja (wah-ky-yeh-jah) translates into English as “child.” This word includes the Lakota word “Wakan” (Wahkan, with a swallowed “n”) which means sacred or holy, and “yeja” (yeah-jah) which means gift. Footnote 1 Lakota children are considered holy gifts from the Creator; any ceremony honoring children thus is always considered holy or sacred.
The sacred and liturgical return of the Rosebud 9 to the children’s homeland called upon Lakota values and culture dating back millennia in order to give these nine children, and their families, a little bit of peace at the last.
These children—Blue Tomahawk, Little Hawk, Pretty Eagle, Bear Paints Dirt, White Thunder, Swift Bear, Friend Hollow Horn Bear, Brave Bull, and Kills Seven Horses (also known as One That Kills Horse)—had gone to the Carlisle school at the urging and indeed the demand of Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, who believed that Carlisle and other schools that followed could “assimilate and ‘civilize’ Indian children.” The Tribal leaders of the day, the parents of the children, and the children themselves did not—yet––know that what Capt. Pratt really believed was the need to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Only when the children arrived was Capt. Pratt’s true intent revealed.
Carlisle was the first government-run boarding school for Native Americans that was not on a reservation. Its goal of forced assimilation was based on Pratt’s belief that “the only hope for Native American survival was to shed all native culture and assimilate fully into white American culture.” Students were “forced to cut their hair, change their names, stop speaking their Native languages, convert to Christianity, and endure harsh discipline including corporal punishment and solitary confinement.” But it wasn’t just about forcibly raising up a “new” generation of Native children. The schools also were created to gain “control of the tribes. The Department of War directed Pratt to travel to the Dakota Territory and recruit the first students from the Oglala Sioux and Brule Sioux.” Footnote 6 (The Brule Sioux were divided over two reservations, the Lower Brule and the Rosebud, where the people identify as the Sicangu Lakota Oyate, the Burnt Thigh Nation of the Lakota peoples.) “Government leaders essentially held hostage the children of tribal leaders to try to ensure good behavior of the tribes.”
Thousands of students from across the United States and 140-plus tribes attended Carlisle during the thirty-nine years it was open. The school had 186 graves of children who died while there, some of which were moved in 1927 to a different cemetery, years after the school closed on September 1, 1918. Not all of the graves are marked with the child’s name. It is believed that an unknown number of other students also died while at Carlisle, but no records can be found. Today, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School is the site of the U.S. Army War College.
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Lauren R. Stanley, an ordained Episcopal priest, is Canon to the Ordinary in the Episcopal Diocese of South Dakota. She has a DMin from Virginia Theological Seminary. She served for eight and a half years on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota as Superintending Presbyter of the Rosebud Episcopal Mission (West). She has been a priest for twenty-six years.
Lauren R. Stanley, “Return of the Rosebud 9,” Liturgy 39, no. 2 (2024): 71–81, https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2024.2330843.