I don't remember exactly how I found this place, and if I say that I stumbled over it, that wouldn't be totally true. I knew it was there---somewhere in the vicinity, an old Christian Reformed Church set down right in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota. Because its street address is Valentine, NE, some dozen or so miles away, I thought Valentine, NE, was where I would find it. A wonderful old saint I once knew, a pastor named Leonard Verduin told me stories about his growing up there, how unique it was--directly on the Rosebud Reservation.
In Valentine, I looked for Dutch names in the little phone book the young lady let me use in the Casey's in town, then asked the young man who picked up the phone if he could recommend someone in the community for me to talk to in order to get some sense of history--"Mrs. Logterman," he said, unhesitatingly. Then I asked him where I might find this Mrs. Logterman, and he explained where, "from the church."
"And where is the church again?" I asked, or something as facile, trying to hide my ignorance.
He told me--maybe a half hour north of town, said I couldn't miss it.
He was right. I knew I was getting close when suddenly the natural world turned green and not dusty, and where for the first time, a mailbox held a Dutch name. Suddenly, in the middle of the desolation of the reservation, there was an island of emerald where the Dutch had laid claim to reservation land.
I'm not proud to say that it would take me some years to discover the roots of this whole odd phenomenon--how it is that an entire colony of Dutch Reformed people ended up in a place named after something totally unseen--"lakeview." It would take me that long because I'd never heard of the Dawes Act, or certainly hadn't heard of it before that very first visit to the church and the neighborhood.
The General Allotment Act or Dawes Severalty Act went into effect in 1887, when Washington decided that the best way to deal with the Indian problem--how to get them out of the way--was to give each and every one of them a plot of land, then give or sell what land remained to whatever white folks wanted it.
The Dawes Act was a disaster for Native America. Free land was a clarion call in the late 19th century, so some Dutchman--and many others--figured it was too good a deal to pass up and took what was offered. A community grew up around it, both a CRC and a RCA, as well as a Christian school, all the rudiments of a Dutch Calvinist colony, even the infighting.
All of which means that that little church in the photograph at the top of the page remains, to this day, the heart of a community of almost totally white people, in the middle of the Rosebud Reservation, just up the road from St. Francis Mission.
There was still so much for me to learn, but I can't really easily explain how thrilled I was with discovering what I did. There I was in the parking lot of the Lakeview CRC, Lakeview, South Dakota, in the middle of American history.
There's more.
In the archives of the CRC, under the "Board of Heathen Missions" I think you will find who, when , and where the Mission to the Lakota was formed. I believe it was stated that on a Sunday, "They opened the door to the church but, no one came". The incident of Wounded Knee was still fresh on the minds of the Lakota. It should be in the Archives of Synod, CRC Denomination. It was soon after that, that the opportunity to convert the heathen opened up among the Zuni and the Navajo. The Dawes Act affected both tribes.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this. As a pastor, your post brought me back to my seminary days when the first sermon I ever preached was at Lakeview CRC 36 years ago. While fellow seminarians launched into preaching in area churches without ever fully completing their homiletics classes, I hesitated not yet convinced of my abilities. I figured that the first time I would ever get into a pulpit would be a place so far away and obscure that if I bombed no one would ever know about it. That place? An Indian reservation in south-central South Dakota. So off I went on a cold, snowy, freezing morning to Lakeview CRC some five hours or so away. My route took me hours on a two lane asphalt road which turned into miles on a gravel road which eventually turned into a dirt road and before landing at the old-style country church I felt I had just literally traversed the setting of “Dances with Wolves.” The Sunday went well and the 40 or so people assembled were extremely gracious. A sweet memory.
ReplyDeleteI always wondered why a group of Dutch folks inhabited a place on an Indian reservation. One wonders if the Dutch immigrants to this part of a needy world viewed themselves as a city on a hill with the intent of building bridges to the Lakota or if they simply viewed themselves as sojourners to a land that was free for the taking. Maybe it was both. Certainly there were opportunities to promote justice, a contextualized ministry, and a heart for the Lakota who experienced crimes against their people. As a person with a heart for mission, I would love to know more of the history of the Dutch in this part of God’s wide world.
Thanks again for your post.
I don't know if the writer was the woman I talked to that day, but one way or another I got myself a history of the church(s) community. You can't know how much it hurts to say this, but that book, along with some others, washed down the Floyd River when we lost everything in the bottom story of our house. I wish I had it. I'd gladly send it to you, but it's gone. BTW, you might enjoy reading _Touches the Sky_, a novel I wrote about a decade ago or so. It's concluding chapter is set there--I'll write about that soon. jcs
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