Christianity and "Civilization"

Pipestone Indian Training School was a compulsory boarding school for Dakota youth, meant to enforce the assimilation of the Dakota people into Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking culture. 

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.¹ 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.² 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.

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.

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.³ 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.