"We are Brothers and Sisters in Christ"

GUTHRIE – A steady drum beat echoed throughout the lodge as Sister Kateri Mitchell, S.S.A., of the Mohawk Nation, gently played a hand drum and shared the life and example of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.

“In 1656, the heartbeat of this little Mohawk, Algonquin girl began,” Sister Mitchell said, “She was a beautiful little baby and her father, a Mohawk chief, called her sunshine.”

The presentation was one of four at the second annual Prayer in the Four Directions conference on March 3 at Our Lady of the Lake Lodge in Guthrie. The retreat, “Being a missionary where you are,” was presented by the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City’s American Indian Catholic Outreach and Saint Kateri Tekakwitha Spiritual Center of Oklahoma.

The speakers were Sister Kateri Mitchell, S.S.A., executive director of the Tekakwitha Conference; Sister Theresa Chato, S.B.S.; Dr. Mary Soha, vice-postulator for Servant of God Antonio Cuipa and the La Florida Martyrs; and Mark Thiel, archivist for the Black and Indian Mission Office and Marquette University.

Saint Kateri Tekakwitha
Sister Mitchell told of how smallpox spread through Saint Kateri’s village and claimed the lives of most of the Mohawk people when she was a young girl. The disease killed her parents and left her with a scarred face and poor vision. Her uncle adopted her. When he later tried to arrange her marriage, she refused.

“She was being drawn to something more than the other people in the village. She knew what the cross was without even being able to name it and to understand it, and she lived the cross and that cross for her became her strength,” Sister Mitchell said.

“The cross in our own lives is the same. Very often we don’t want to bear it, we don’t want to pick it up and walk with it. But nonetheless, we know that we are following Christ, and during this Lenten season we really refocus our lives, and walk that journey that Christ did.”

After Saint Kateri left her village in New York she went to Caughnawaga in Quebec, Canada, and was baptized when she was age 20. She died four years later. On June 22, 1980, Saint John Paul II beatified Saint Kateri. She was canonized on Oct. 21, 2012, by Pope Benedict XVI.

Sister Mitchell brought a relic of Saint Kateri to the retreat and shared a song that tells of what Saint Kateri accomplished in her life. The refrain mentions the four directions.

“Kateri Tekakwitha, noble turtle, mother Earth, gathers her people, east, south, west and north …” She said many nations follow the four directions in the medicine wheel, and she gave examples of the four areas of a person’s whole being – physical, emotional, spiritual and mental.

The medicine wheel is interpreted differently by different tribes.

Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk
One of the many American Indian’s who supported Saint Kateri’s canonization was Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk. He signed a letter, along with 176 other Lakota people, supporting Pope Leo XIII to declare her a saint, Mark Thiel said during his presentation on Black Elk.

Black Elk was a Lakota Sioux holy man born in 1866, who by age 6, received a vision from Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. He witnessed the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, was hurt in the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890, and, for a time, he traveled the world with “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s Wild West show.

He married a Catholic woman, Katherine War Bonnet from the Pine Ridge Agency. She died in 1903.

“The next year, a Lakota family summoned him and Jesuit Father Joseph Lindebner to minister to their dying son. On meeting the priest, Black Elk deferred to him and his Christian prayer without protest and he accepted his invitation to study the Catholic faith at the nearby Holy Rosary Mission,” Thiel said.

“After two weeks of intense study, Father Lindebner baptized him ‘Nicholas’ on Dec. 6, the feast day of Saint Nicholas.”

Black Elk later remarried another Catholic woman, Anna Brings White. She died in 1942.

“As a catechist, Black Elk frequently taught the Bible with the Two Roads, a colorful teaching scroll invented generations before,” Thiel said. “Like other catechists, Black Elk wrote pastoral letters about Christian living. They appeared in Šinasapa Wocekiye Taeyanpaha or The Catholic Voice, a Lakota language newspaper distributed across the Northern Plains while the government forbade children to speak their language in school.”

Thiel said because of Black Elk’s teaching abilities, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, in Washington, D.C., funded him to preach on several reservations.

He was interviewed for a book in 1931, but he was not happy with the outcome. His daughter, Lucy Looks Twice recruited Father Michael Steltenkamp to write her father’s life story. He wrote “Black Elk: Holy Man of the Oglala” and “Nicholas Black Elk: Medicine Man, Missionary, Mystic.”

Before he died in 1950, Black Elk predicted a sign would be seen at his death. “Maybe God will show something … which will tell of his mercy,” he said.

During his wake, “the skies above Manderson danced vigorously with an extraordinary display of aurora borealis,” Thiel said.

A Mass to formally open the sainthood cause for Black Elk was held Oct. 21, 2017.

Saint Katharine Drexel
Sister Chato, of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament – the order Saint Katharine founded, said Saint Katharine would give money to bishops and would always follow-up with them asking how the money was used.

She did a lot of travel and became aware about the plight of two people in particular: American Indians and African Americans. “It really left a deep impression on Katharine’s mind,” Sister Chato said.

Sister Chato recalled what Pope Francis said about Saint Katharine while he was in Philadelphia in 2015.

“He said most of you know the story of Saint Katharine Drexel, one of the great saints raised up by this local Church. When she spoke to Pope Leo XIII of the needs of the missions, the Pope – he was a very wise Pope – asked her pointedly: “What about you? What are you going to do?” Those words changed Katharine’s life, because they reminded her that, in the end, every Christian man and woman, by virtue of baptism, has received a mission. Each one of us has to respond, as best we can, to the Lord’s call to build up his Body, the Church.”

After she was asked this question, she did a lot of praying and wrote to her spiritual director, Bishop James O'Connor, who was in Nebraska at the time.

“He initially did not support her interest in religious life,” Sister Chato said, because she had wealth from her family and was already helping people.

She continued to pray and finally told the bishop, “I really do feel God is calling me to religious life.” She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament in 1891, and opened boarding schools for black and Indian children. One of the schools she opened was Saint Michael’s School on the Navajo Indian reservation near Window Rock, Ariz.

Stella Dirkschneider, Navajo, briefly attended Saint Michael’s and met Saint Katharine while she visited the school. Dirkschneider, a parishioner at Saint Charles Borromeo in Oklahoma City, said she was one of the students selected to meet Saint Katharine because of a poem she wrote in the fourth grade.

Sister Chato said Saint Katharine realized the world doesn’t always treat people fairly or with dignity, and though the world may seem bleak and dismal, there is a light of hope, love, joy and peace by how we live our lives and spread the joy of the Gospel.

“How do you spread the joy of the Gospel?” She asked. “How are you a missionary where you are?”

Saint Katharine was canonized by Saint John Paul II in 2000.

Servant of God Antonio Cuipa and the La Florida Martyrs
Servant of God Antonio Cuipa, an Apalachee chief, wrote in his last will and testament that he always lived and wanted to die as a Catholic and a Christian. His story, and that of the La Florida Martyrs, continues to evolve. 
 
Dr. Mary Soha said as a catechist Cuipa helped priests evangelize, took care of the church and would go catechize with the priest to other American Indians who hadn’t heard the Word of God yet or were still unsure. He also would use music as part of his ministry. He made flutes, and when walking into a new village, he would play them, then give them away.

“It was this charity that taught people what true charity was. He didn’t just mass produce flutes and give them away, he gave the best of what he had and things he had made himself,” Soha said. “He went out of his way to deliver it, he personally interacted with the recipients of his flutes.”

She said he was given the privilege of reading the Gospel from the altar, and as a missionary in his own place and time, he used every talent he had as a leader, a father and an orator to call his people closer to the Son of God and the son of man.

“When he was asked the secret of his catechesis and preaching the Word of God, he would always answer ‘patience and perseverance’ were the keys to spreading the Gospel,” Soha said. “Antonio had a great devotion to Our Lady and Saint Joseph. He was often compared to Saint Joseph. He was a carpenter, a devout husband and a step-father to all his people. He truly wanted all his people to be one single holy family.”

During the 1500s through the 1700s. American Indians and priests in La Florida were killed because of their faith. The area of La Florida covered land from the Florida Keys to Canada. The king and queen of Spain claimed this land, but it wasn’t a claim of ownership, it was a claim to the area they wanted to evangelize.

On Jan. 25, 1704, a mission was attacked by the British and a huge Creek force. Most of the American Indians were slaughtered because they refused to be slaves of the British. Cuipa and others went to give aide to the people, but were captured.

Cuipa and two other chiefs were the first ones martyred. He was tied outstretched on a cross, a fire was started under his feet and chunks of flesh were cut out of his muscles, then cauterized with hot embers from the fire. All the while, he was preaching and asking his brothers to be strong, remember their faith in Jesus Christ and remember they would be joining God in Heaven. An hour before his death, he sprang to life and shouted, “Our Lady is here with me. Our Lady of the mestizo face.”

“He says something that he couldn’t possibly have known. Our Lady said the same thing to Juan Diego in 1531 and he says, ‘I am looking in her eyes and in her eyes I get the strength and the courage that I need to endure this martyrdom. Be strong my brothers, she’s with us and she will take all of us to heaven,’ and then he dies,” Soha said. “It’s the first documented Marian apparition in North America.”

Soha said, “There are 144 other people I can talk about. They died defending the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which is what makes Catholics unique and singular.”

At the end of Soha’s presentation, participants recited the prayer for the beatification of the Servant of God Antonio Cuipa and Companions.
 
“This is so much more than I expected it to be” 
Florence Daugomah, Navajo and Kiowa, said she was glad she attended the retreat again.

“This is so much more than I expected it to be. I loved it last year and I knew I wanted to come back. It’s just so much deeper and it really brought me a lot of the answers that my heart has been seeking,” she said. 

Deacon Roy Callison, director of the archdiocese’s American Indian Catholic Outreach said, “We had an overflowing crowd not only from Oklahoma, but from Texas and Louisiana as well. There were even people from Nebraska who wanted to attend, but we didn’t have enough room. With the retreat’s popularity growing, we plan to acquire a larger space next year so no one will have to miss out on the retreat.”

Sister Kateri Mitchell said Saint Kateri gathered people for the Oklahoma retreat, just as she does every July for the conference in her name.

“We all come together to share our experience with God, our relationship with God and how we’re able to walk the sacred journey of life; that together we are brothers and sisters in Christ.”

Dana Attocknie is managing editor for the Sooner Catholic.

Photo Dana Attocknie/Sooner Catholic.