Uploaded on: 06/24/2007
Ojibway Catholic finds traditional spirituality woven into faith
By Emilie Lemmons
The Catholic Spirit
Mary Lou Smith’s grandmother danced in traditional jingle dresses similar to the ones worn here by Ojibway women on the Itasca State Park Golf Course in 1932. |
Mary Lou Smith’s childhood memories are full of springtime days watching her grandmother harvest maple syrup in the woods, summers picking blueberries, autumn nights with her father as they gathered wild rice, and wintertimes playing in the snow and listening to her grandfather tell old stories in the Ojibway language.
Equally strong are the memories of a Catholic childhood, shaped by parents and grandparents who practiced their faith staunchly.
“They knew that they had to be at church on Sunday morning,” said Smith, 70, who retired about 10 years ago after a 37-year career with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “If there was a wake, they’d be there. If there was a funeral, they’d be there. Holy days of obligation, they’d be there.”
Smith’s grandparents, especially her paternal grandmother, Maggie Roberts, were very influential in her life, especially after her mother died when Smith was 14. “Grandma Maggie,” a short woman who always wore a blue dress, “was my mentor,” she said. She taught her granddaughter how to live, passing down a resilient spirit and positive attitude that Smith still carries today.
Now 70, Smith sits at the kitchen table in her modest Roseville home, ignoring the footsteps and occasional yells of her great-grandchildren. Four generations are staying at the house while they prepare to move up north for the summer.
She remembers the long rides she took each June growing up, when her family and neighbors on the White Earth Indian Reservation went to Indian congresses, hosted by different Indian communities in the area. They rode in the back of a truck with a piece of canvas pulled over the top, sitting on top of their bags and luggage, which were packed around the edges of the truck. From Thursday to Sunday afternoon, they prayed, attended Mass, socialized and camped, cooking over a fire.
“There was a lot of talking in Ojibway,” Smith remembered. “If you didn’t understand it, you were completely lost.”
Smith also remembers the wakes and funerals held after a community member died. A priest would come to give a blessing or to say Mass, but he would not stay for the feast that followed. In fact, the Indians did not have much contact with the local priests outside of Mass.
After the priest left, “they’d sing Ojibway hymns and speak in Ojibway, offering sympathy to the family,” she said. They served food from a kitchen at the guild hall, and the grieving family would clean up.
In those days, Catholicism was kept separate from traditional spiritual practices, according to Father Jim Notebaart, who leads the archdiocese’s Office of Indian Ministry in Minneapolis and is pastor of the Blessed Kateri Community there.
In the 1800s, he said, Catholic and Episcopal church leaders had been charged with evangelizing the Ojibway and Dakota tribes, respectively. The conversion was destructive to Indian culture, especially in the cases of children who were separated from their parents and sent to mission schools.
From 1890 to 1979, a law prohibited Indians from practicing their faith, he said. But the two practices may have melded at an unconscious level anyway. Father Notebaart said the Ojibway tribe lives in rhythm with the seasons — collecting maple syrup (“sugar-bushing”) in the spring, picking berries in the summer, gathering rice in the fall, and spending winters indoors, passing on stories that contained lessons on how to live. Those rhythms are echoed in the Catholic liturgical year of Advent, Lent, Easter and Ordinary Time, he said.
“The spirituality is wed to the culture. So if you live like an Indian, you also live in a spiritual way,” he said.
But for Smith, as a child, spirituality was about Catholicism and the rituals it contained through life. First Communion was scary: “We had all these prayers we needed to know. And the little hymnal was Latin on one side and English on the other. So I spent a lot of time comparing the Latin to the English.”
Even more difficult was preparing for confirmation, which Smith described as “the scariest day of my life.”
“The nuns would say, ‘Now, when you go get confirmed, the bishop’s going to ask some questions,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, boy.’ . . . I was so afraid. ‘And then he’s going to give you a slap on your cheek.’ I thought, ‘Oh, I just know he’s going to hit me hard. That’s really going to scare me.’ And then . . .” Smith laughs as she demonstrates the light tap she received. It wasn’t so bad after all.
It did not bother Smith that there was no Ojibway language in the Mass. “I was at peace,” she said. “I believed everything that had been taught me, and I tried to live exactly as I was supposed to. . . . That’s how it was ingrained in me — not the fear, but this was something that had to be done — that you were baptized, and First Communion, then confirmation, then marriage. My husband and I have been married for 46 years.”
And then, Smith said, “along comes Blessed Kateri, who gives up everything for [God].”
Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, who was beatified in 1980 and whose sainthood cause is still pending, is an inspirational figure for American Indian Christians, of whom she is the patron saint. She was born in 1656. Smallpox scarred her face and left her partially blind — and an orphan. She was captured by Iroquois and married to a non-Christian Mohawk chief. Her relatives shunned and abused her when she converted to Christianity at age 20. Kateri escaped through 200 miles of wilderness to Sault-Sainte-Marie, a Christian-Indian village, and became known for her spirituality and austere lifestyle. She died in 1680 and was venerated in 1943.
Today, Kateri conferences are held each year in a different city. Smith said they are similar to the Indian congresses she attended as a child.
Blessed Kateri “gave herself to the Lord, and she suffered for it,” she said. Indians pray to her for intercession, particularly in cases of illnesses.
An appreciation for Indian culture and language began to “creep in” to Smith’s consciousness about 30 years ago, she said. “That’s when I began to realize that there was Indian culture and Indian language out there,” she said. “People were wanting it again.”
Smith remembers the missalettes she used as a child, with the Latin on one side and the English translation on the other. “There was something in the back of my mind that kept saying, ‘There’s got to be a way to do this, where you can combine [the languages and cultures]. Even if you translate it into Ojibway, that would be fine,’” she said.
“I thought, ‘Well, that’ll never happen.’”
But it did.
Today, Ojibway language and sage and tobacco rituals are a regular part of White’s Catholic worship experience. For the past four or five years, she and her family have worshipped with the Blessed Kateri Community each Sunday in the building on Park Avenue and 31st Street where Indian Ministries is housed.
“I, who never made good fry bread, am now the fry bread maker there!” Smith said with a laugh.
About 80 to 120 Indians, mainly Ojibway, worship at the Blessed Kateri Community. It’s just a small fraction of the 53,000 Indians — mainly Ojibway and Dakota — who live in Minnesota, according to 2000 census data. Of Minnesota’s Indian population, 21,600 live in the 12-county area that makes up the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, and 17,107 live on reservations.
Along the way to the Blessed Kateri Community, Smith also discovered homes at Ascension and St. Stephen, both parishes in Minneapolis. At St. Stephen, she was on the founding board of the Kateri Residence, an outreach that opened 30 years ago to provide housing for Indian women in recovery from drugs and alcohol.
The Roseville resident said she loves the feeling of being part of a community with other Indian Catholics. And she loves the prayer life. At Mass, they use tobacco to pray for their intentions and sage as a purification rite. The altar is a buffalo hide that lies on the floor in the center of the room. Drums symbolize the heartbeat, and congregants drink holy water, rather than have it sprinkled, as a symbol of life, Father Notebaart said.
During the peace offering, strong feelings of camaraderie with the rest of the community have moved Smith to tears, she said.
“I cried last week at Mass because there was this young man, with two boys, and his sisters go to Mass there. He was a confirmed alcoholic, and darned if he didn’t get up and tell us about walking the red road [going through treatment and recovery],” she said.
“I thought about my dad, and he used to say, ‘I’ll quit drinking for you kids.’ But he never did. But this young man just made me cry. He said, ‘I got the support from here — Father Jim, my family.’ His sisters had been praying for him, and here, it worked! . . . You wouldn’t see him do that at a Mass in a bigger church.”
As pastor, Father Notebaart plays an active role in the community, despite his Dutch ancestry.
And, unlike the priests of Smith’s childhood, he stays for the feasts after funerals — which is good, Smith said, “because Father Jim likes our apple pies.”