Christianity and "Civilization" Regulations

Students at the Pipestone Indian Training School, one of the most infamous Indian Training schools known for interdicting indigenous language and enforcing "Christian values."

Some of those executed had become Christians, going to their deaths singing hymns.

Although there were modest precursors, Christian missions to the Dakota and Ojibwe began in earnest in the 1830s. Protestant missions in the area were fueled by the evangelical revivals of the Second Great Awakening, and in Minnesota initially supported by American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), a joint venture of Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists. Most of Minnesota was effectively a “foreign” mission field when the brothers Gideon and Samuel Pond arrived at Fort Snelling in 1834. They began on the eastern shore of Bde Maka Ska, (now in the heart of Minneapolis), where they ministered to the Dakota of Cloud Man’s Village, an agricultural experiment. They later joined Thomas Williamson, a doctor, his wife Jane, and sister-in-law Sarah Poage and others at Lac Qui Parle, at a mission post established through the efforts of Joseph Renville, a mixed heritage Dakota trader.¹

The ABCFM was also the first major Protestant mission to the Ojibwe. the ABCFM had established a school and mission at LaPointe, Wisconsin, in 1822, at the major trading and Ojibwe sacred center near Madeline Island, and in the 1830s extended its influence into what is now Minnesota under the direction of Edmund Ely at Fond du Lac and William Boutwell at Leech Lake. Other Congregationalist missionaries, aligned theologically with the ABCFM but disassociating their work from any ABCFM financial support related to the slave economy, built stations at Red Lake, Cass Lake, and Lake Winnibigoshish. Methodists, too, sponsored early missions. Alfred Brunson established an early mission among the Dakota at Kaposia, near what is now downtown St. Paul. Samuel Spates and other Methodists preached among the Ojibwe.

Among the Protestants, it was the Episcopalians by far whose efforts made more Christians among Dakota and Ojibwe people. Much is credited to Henry Benjamin Whipple (1822-1901), the charismatic first bishop of the Episcopal Church in Minnesota, who took an unambiguous delight in making the rounds to Dakota missions up the Minnesota River at Morton and down the Mississippi at Red Wing and to Ojibwe missions at Leech Lake, Red Lake, and White Earth. Whipple’s success was his willingness to not stand in the way of raising a Native clergy to carry out the mission. Many Dakota and Ojibwe became part of Christian communities served by Ojibwe and Dakota clergy who operated the missions almost entirely in their own languages, perhaps due to the difficult conditions on the reservations in the 1870s and 1880s to which these Native-led communities ministered. Rev. John Johnson Enmegabowh (1820-1902) became the first ordained Ojibwe priest, leading Charles Wright Nashotah, George Morgan, and other deacons and priests, and prominent lay elders. This group included women like Susanna Bonga Wright, and others fused Christian practice and thought with traditional Ojibwe ethics, marking some strategies that made the Episcopalians so successful in their efforts.²

Roman Catholic missions, which had gone the way of New France, also stepped up in the same period, led in the 1840s in the same period were led by German-speaking missionaries supported by Austro Hungarian donors. These included Slovenian priests like Frederic Baraga (1797-1868), who wrote the first Ojibwe dictionary in the region, and Franz Pierz (1785-1880), who reestablished the mission at Grand Portage and later built missions in Central Minnesota. Ojibwe and Métis, or “mixed-bloods,” at Red Lake and some at White Earth were also shaped by a mission spreading out in the 1840s from the fur trade center of the Pembina.

Christianity and “Civilization”

Although Euro-American missionaries varied considerably in terms of how they weighed the balance, they all assumed that Christianization went hand in hand with the work of cultural transformation, which they construed in terms of bringing savages to “civilization.” Native peoples found themselves particularly constrained in the second half of the nineteenth century when missionaries and government agents formerly linked “civilization” with access to food, medicine, and other entitlements under the treaties. Government agents, with the general support of missionaries, took liberties with treaty payments -- a binding legal obligation, remember -- routinely disbursing and withholding them to reward and punish behaviors. Between 1883 and 1934, reservation life was governed by administrative laws known as the Civilization Regulations, sometimes called the Religious Crimes Code, under which Dakota and Ojibwe people could be jailed and fined for participating in the Sun Dance, funerary give-away feasts, and traditional medicine and healing ceremonies.³ In 1916, Red Lake Ojibwe leaders of the ceremonial Midewiwin, or Grand Medicine Society, even cited American commitments to religious freedom in petitions for exemption from prosecution under the regulations.⁴ And forcible English-only boarding school education from the 1870s through the 1930s sought quite effectively to dissolve ties of kinship, land, culture, language, and religion, sowing intergenerational historical trauma that continues to afflict many Native people in Minnesota today. One example of this cultural oppression is the Pipestone Boarding School which enforced English language and Anglo-Saxon values via compulsory boarding school for natives.

For their part, Dakota and Ojibwe Christians in these difficult years were not the childlike blank slates many missionaries took them for; they resourcefully and creatively made room within the tight confines of colonization for a Christian practice that could embody traditional Dakota and Ojibwe ethical, linguistic, and cultural traditions. A good example of this is hymn singing in the Dakota and Ojibwe languages. Missionaries, especially Protestants, drew on the singing of Christian hymn texts translated into Ojibwe and Dakota as an effective tool in rooting out Indigenous values and traditions and replacing them with patriarchal, agrarian, Anglo-Christian ones. But the singing tradition in places like White Earth, Leech Lake and Red Lake, associated with funerary wakes became a traditional practice, sung by groups led by lay elder men and women. 

Even today, “Ojibwe Singers” frequent wakes and sing hymns in what has become a form of traditional lament: a cappella, led by a lead singer who is a moral exemplar, slowly and deliberately, often all night long.⁵ To be sure, there can be theological and social tension between even these practices of the Christian tradition and “traditional” Dakota and Ojibwe religion. To be sure, some Native Christians internalized the view espoused by missionaries that becoming Christian is mutually exclusive from Dakota and Ojibwe traditions. But not all, maybe not even a majority. This could well be another example of the principled respect in each of those traditions for other religious views, and the conviction that the Great Spirit, like all spirits, is a mystery.

The traditional Dakota and Ojibwe religions ultimately survived this onslaught of missions, boarding schools, and “civilization” regulations. The historical trauma unleashed along the way, which continues to be practiced today, is perhaps one of the great stories of Minnesota religious history.