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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Family members and supporters gathered, waiting in the heat for the children to arrive. Drummers and flute players were ready with sacred music. Tribal and traditional leaders were gathered. While we all waited, people I had known for years on the Rosebud told me for the first time their own stories of attending boarding schools, some run by the government, others by churches. For the first time, they spoke of the pain they endured, the fear they lived with, the hardship of losing their Native language and having their hair (which is sacred to most Natives) cut off, of having to wear Western-style clothing and shoes, some for the first time. They remembered teachers and house mothers who had been cruel to them, locking them in dark, dank basements, making them kneel for hours. They recalled—emotionally and physically—the beatings to which they had been subjected simply for speaking Lakota. . . 

And then the caravan arrived, accompanied by motorcycles and cars and trucks numbering in the dozens. Hundreds of us stood on the field at Whetstone Landing, waiting in reverent silence. When the wooden rough boxes containing the remains were taken out of the vehicles and carried into the giant lodge accompanied by drum songs, no one moved. No one spoke. Tears were running down the faces of the witnesses. Finally, at last, these children were back on their sacred homeland.

In the lodge, family members of each child sat, waiting to greet their relatives. There were small campfires; there was healing Native tea. Lakota prayers were said. Family members were blessed. Each family was given time to welcome their relative home. All of this took place while the people outside the lodge, the congregation as it were, watched and waited and said prayers and remembered.

After the ceremony, the rough boxes were loaded back into vehicles, and the caravan began its last 100-mile journey to Sinte Gleska University on the Rosebud Reservation. . . 

During the drive, I started receiving messages from White Thunder’s family. Would I, they asked, be willing to bury White Thunder at the Episcopal cemetery where other members of his family were interred? A moment of panic struck when I read the message: Would I be allowed to do that? Should I do that? Was it appropriate for me, a non-Native Episcopal priest, to participate in this sacred undertaking? After participating in the memorial, I drove to the university and found Eagle Bear. He is a traditional leader as well as Tribal Council member (at the time), and we had conducted close to 150 funerals together in my time on the Rosebud. I told him what the family was asking of me and sought his permission and blessing. I have great respect for Eagle Bear and have learned much from him. If he said I should not be involved, I told him, I would not. I was, I stressed, happy to be there as a witness and supporter only. He gave me his permission and blessing, so I worked with the family to make it happen.

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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.