2012 Photo Credit: Borrowed Light Photography, Travis Svihovec, for Friends of Scherr Howe
click on the audio clip below to hear an interview with Kevin Locke on this mural:
Christian Prayer Service The mural represents a group of Dakota men and women in prayer with a Jesuit priest after contact with Euro-Americans on the Northern Plains in the early to mid-nineteenth century. The image chosen by the artist depicts a small audience of Native peoples receiving the Ten Commandments from a Roman Catholic priest who had come to the traditional lands of the Lakota and Dakota to preach the teaching of Jesus and to save and convert those to believe in Him. Resolute in their mission to convert, Christian missionaries such as Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet, Stephen Return Riggs, Father Florentine Digmann, Aaron McGaffey Beede, and many others, influenced the spiritual legacy of Northern Plains life in the nineteenth century and beyond. The priest featured in the mural, Father Pierre-Jean DeSmet, devoted much of his life to the spread of Christianity amongst the Lakota and Dakota people. Born in Belgium, DeSmet lived a pious life dedicated to the teaching of the Catholic doctrine after his accession to priesthood in the Roman Catholic faith. Father DeSmet spent much of his life spreading the word of God among Native American communities across the plains and caring for the sick and infirm during a period of great change as the cultures of indigenous peoples and the settlers and pioneers of the east encountered one another. The town of DeSmet, the county seat of Kingsbury County in eastcentral South Dakota, is named in honor of Pierre-Jean DeSmet. The influence and impact of Christianity on the Northern Plains is an uneven, difficult, and contentious history on many levels. Native American people many times resisted the Christian religion in favor of their own traditional beliefs. Many others had embraced the teachings of Christ in the Bible for practical or material benefits once the missionaries arrived and built churches and schools on the reservations. Native people worked to find ways to practice their traditional spiritual ways with the biblical teachings in a balanced approach to find their own views on the world and their place in it.
Suggested Readings Deloria, Jr., Vine. For This Land: Writings on Religion in America. New York: Routledge,in Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation, Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, eds. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Markowitz, Harvey. “The Catholic Mission and the Sioux: A Crisis in the Early Paradigm” in Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation, Raymond J. DeMallie and Douglas R. Parks, eds. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Stolzman, SJ, William. The Pipe and Christ: A Christian-Sioux Dialogue. Pine Ridge: Red Cloud Indian School, 1986. Treat, James, ed. Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1996
Mural descriptions by Dr. Edward Welch, Humanities Professor – Augustana College, December 2012
Oscar Howe Tour 