Christian Missions to Dakota and Ojibwe

Students at the Pipestone Indian Training School, one of the boarding schools known for forbidding indigenous languages, religious practices, and cultural expressions.

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. 

St. Cornelia's Episcopal church sits in the Lower Sioux Indian Community. It was built there in 1889 for a community of Dakota people returning to Minnesota after their exile in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862.

Bishop Whipple (seated center right) outside of St. Cornelia's Church c. 1895. Credit: Minnesota Historical Society.

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.³ 

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.