Chief Chaska and the Multicultural Church




Chaska and Little Crow

  An article in today's New York Times reminded me of how the church interacts with its culture.  It told of renewed efforts to have Chief Chaska pardoned. Minnesotans know the story of the Dakota revolt that led to capture and conviction of over 300 Dakota men for the violence.  Lincoln Pardoned most of them and 38 of them were hanged in a mass execution in Mankato MN December 26,1862. Chaska (his nickname--and a town near Minneapolis carries that name) had been pardoned but was slipped into the execution group, perhaps because he had been defended by a European-American woman. 

The combination of racism and sexism with the overarching narrative of manifest destiny (by which the European Americans assumed their absolute privilege to take over all of North America and eradicate any "dusky" people who got in their way) was much a part of the culture and also the faith of the church on the 19th century frontier. 

Yet there is another side of the story in church history.  Presbyterians were part of the effort to befriend the Dakota people, many of whom became Christians.  The Pond brothers were missionaries from the revival movements on the East Coast who moved to Minnesota out of their concern for the well-being of the Native Americans there.  I served for two years as interim pastor of one of the churches they founded, Oak Grove Presbyterian in Bloomington MN.  The story of the Mankato executions and echoes of the Presbyterian mission to the Dakota people are still alive there.

The church is usually multi-cultural.  It absorbs and lives out many of the values of its context, and it also makes a prophetic stance against many of those values.  It cannot be completely completely counter-cultural as some would wish because we are always people of our time and place.  But the church's finest hours have always been those moments when it attracted lots of people of many cultures to its message and its practices and still found ways to encourage some critiques of cultures as well--including the dominant cultures and its oppressive ways.

In the story of the last moments of Chaska and 37 others, a hymn now in The Presbyterian Hymnal (Westminster/John Knox Press, 1990, # 271)  plays an important role.  It has been told that on their walk from their cells to the scaffold, the condemned sang "Many and great, O God, Are Thy Things." It is a Dakota tune, titled "Lacquiparle" for the site of the mission where it was written. The words were adapted by missionary Joseph Renville who along with the Pond Brothers developed the alphabet and writing of the Dakota language there in southern Minnesota.  On their way to die for the crime of protecting their land and their livelihood, Dakota men expressed their multi-cultural heritage with these words, translated, of course, into English:

"Many and great, O God, are thy things,
Maker of earth and sky;
Thy hands have set the heavens with stars,
Thy fingers spread the mountains and plains.
Lo at Thy word the waters were formed,
Deep seas obeyed Thy voice.

"Grant unto us communion with Thee,
Thou star abiding One;
Come unto us and dwell with us;
With Thee are found the gifts of life.
Bless us with life that has not end,
Eternal life with Thee."