Monday, April 2, 2012

*Best of DTB #165* The Catholic Defender: The American Indian

I wanted to do something different for the beginning of Holy Week and I was interested in doing something about the American Indian.

I have always been drawn to some of the Indian customs especially how they adapt to the Catholic Faith.

Consider that the Blackfeet Indians will walk a 7 mile pilgrimage of the Stations of the Cross on their Reservation.

They will cary crosses from the eldest to the youngest who can carry them.

They will also walk this trek in traditional clothing.

This reminds me of how the Polish have added their culture into the Stations of the Cross.

From Our Sunday Visitor:

Native American sister develops institute to serve her people
Sister Clissene Lewis of Arizona understands cultural challenges of community
By J.D. Long-García - OSV Newsweekly, 12/4/2011

Sister Clissene Lewis founded the Little Servants of the Cross. Photo by J.D. Long-García

FORT MCDOWELL, Ariz. — This doesn’t happen very often.

Four Yavapi-Apache crown dancers, eagle feathers in hand, circled Sister Clissene Lewis during a Nov. 12 blessing ceremony down by the Verde River. Three drums beat in unison through the smell of burning sage.

The dancers stepped North, South, East and West, acknowledging all of creation, and through it, the Creator. A medicine man sang over the drumbeat. The blessing is a healing ceremony — Apaches don’t dance for entertainment. It’s prayer.

The tribe blessed Sister Clissene the day she left for her novitiate year. The sister — who is a Yavapai-Apache and Pima Indian — is taking the next step in establishing a religious institute to serve Native Americans.

The institute, the Little Servants of the Cross, would fill a great need in the Diocese of Phoenix, and if it grows, other parts of the country. Their name describes their mission: to be little, or humble, to serve others and to follow Jesus by accepting their cross.

“It would be a great blessing to have a religious community, founded by a Native American woman to evangelize Native Americans,” Phoenix Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said. Sister Clissene is founding the institute under the bishop’s tutelage.

Understanding the culture

Sister Clissene started serving Native Americans shortly after she converted to Catholicism 12 years ago. Now, having taken religious vows, she goes to powwows wearing her little brown habit, being true to her culture as she’s true to her faith.

At A Glance
◗ Native Americans make up around 3.5 percent of all Catholics in the United States.

◗ Approximately 780,000 people claiming some Native American/Alaska Native ancestry are Catholics in the United States.

◗ More than 340 parishes in the United States serve predominately Native American communities

◗ 30 percent of U.S. dioceses and archdioceses have offices or programs targeting Native American Catholics

◗ Of those who serve Native American Catholics, most are religious orders; those who are Native American themselves are more likely to be deacons and lay Catholics

◗ Approximately 20 percent of all Native Americans residing in the United States consider themselves Roman Catholics.

◗ Only 40 percent of Native Americans live in reservations or trust lands.

Source: USCCB Secretariat of Cultural Diversity,Native American Catholics at the Millennium
“When you have a Native American doing the ministry they bring an aspect that no one else can bring,” said Franciscan Father Dale Jamison, who heads up Native American outreach in the diocese. Most of those involved in Native American ministry aren’t Native American.

“There’s a syncretism involved there,” he explained. “And we’ve made mistakes, both historically and in the present. That would lessen with Native American vocations.”

The idea of a religious vocation was foreign to Sister Clissene, too. After making her cursillo, she was asked to consider a religious vocation by a sister who heard her testimony.

“I couldn’t be a sister,” she said. “I had a daughter. I had known the married life.”

Her husband had died at the time, and her daughter was already an adult. So she began discerning religious communities a few months later, eventually settling on the Missionaries of Charity in Brooklyn, N.Y.

When her father died, she returned to Arizona, realizing then she was called to serve her own people.

“I saw hurt, I saw the suffering of the people,” she said. Sister Clissene began serving at a local Native American mission, at first just cleaning a church and helping set up for Mass.

She later became a parish life coordinator at one of the missions in the Gila River Indian Community. That community struggles with rampant diabetes, gang activity and drugs.

“For Native people, substance abuse comes from depression,” Sister Clissene said. “That depression comes from the invasion — when our people were killed or assimilated.”

Evangelization obstacles

The conflict with European settlers is burned in Native American memory. The settlers didn’t see them as human beings, she said, taking their land and putting them on a reservation.

“When you destroy a people’s way of life, from their language to their religion to their culture, that’s demoralizing,” Sister Clissene said. “That’s where the infection begins.”

Some adults living on the reservation today attended government-run boarding schools, which forbade Natives to speak their own language and made them to cut their hair — a forced inculturation.

Children have a battle within themselves, she said, between their heritage and what mainstream culture considers success.

“We’re a people who are angry and frustrated,” she said. “We’re the poorest people in our own country.”

That history, and the anger that remains, presents a distinct obstacle to evangelization, she said. The Native people who are angry with “the white man” see him and his religion — Christianity — as evil.

“You tell us that we can’t lie, cheat, steal and then you do it in the name of your God?” she explained. “How can a Church reconcile a bad missiology? You do it through their own people, you do it through love.”

Love forgives, she said, and forgiveness serves.

“Sin has no color. That’s a lie — that it’s white,” she said. “If you hate them because they hate you, you become the thing you hate. The only way you can change that is through love.”

The Little Servants of the Cross would show Native people the love of Christ through service, she said. They would also educate non-Natives about Native ways.

“It’s important to remember the past,” Sister Clissene added, “but it’s also important to move on.”

Drawn to tradition

Sister Clissene used to be a Christian fundamentalist. One day she went to a service right after a powwow, where she’d been a dancer. She wore a feather of an eagle — a sacred creature in the Native tradition.

Her pastor pulled her aside after the service, and told her to never bring such a “pagan symbol” into his Christian church again.

“It wounded me deeply,” Sister Clissene said. “I couldn’t understand how God could not accept me as a Native person.”

She began to learn more about Catholicism from a college professor. The Church’s reliance on tradition reminded her of her culture’s reliance on tradition.

“Wow! Scriptures and tradition,” she recalled saying. Sister Clissene said the parish where she entered the Church accepted her Native traditions.

Since then, she’s been drawn to serve the Church, a call that’s still being clarified in prayer. At first the idea was to establish an institute of Native American sisters that serves its own community, but now it will accept anyone who’s called to that service.

“The relationship becomes more complete through Christianity,” Sister Clissene said of the Native peoples understanding of God. “There’s a lack of understanding between Native and non-Natives. The only way to bridge this is through love.”

‘One of their own’

She will be studying with the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Tucson. Her novice master, Sister Pascal Coff, has been in vows for 60 years.

“It’s high time,” Sister Pascal told OSV in reference to the emergence of an order founded by a Native American.

St. Katharine Drexel established the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament to serve Native Americans and African Americans in 1891. But this would be the first congregation or institute founded by a Native American.

The significance of it being “one of their own,” can’t be overstated, Father Jamison said. He explained how, for example, the Native people are awaiting the canonization of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha.

“They are pining for this,” he said. “If it happened yesterday, it wouldn’t be soon enough.”

Deacon Jim Trant, director of the Office of the Diaconate for the Phoenix diocese who’s also worked in Native American ministry for years, hopes seeing “one of their own” will encourage vocations.

“I’m sure nothing like this has ever happened before,” he said. “Through Sister Clissene, Native American Catholics understand they can become religious in the Church, they can become priests, they can become deacons.”

At first, Sister Clissene and the Little Servants of the Cross puzzled the Native community. But they’ve since embraced it, Deacon Trant said.

The blessing from the Apache crown dancers demonstrates that embrace. “It’s not a Catholic thing, this is not a Catholic community,” Deacon Trant explained. “But they have great respect for it.”

The blessing, which Phoenix Auxiliary Bishop Eduardo A. Nevares attended, along with other priests and religious, showed a reciprocal sign of respect between the Catholic and Native traditions, he said.

Sister Clissene’s brother, who is not Catholic, orchestrated the blessing.

“Christ died for our sins. But before the [Europeans] came here, the Creator was already speaking to us,” Gordon Lewis said. “They defiled our tradition rather than learning our ways and how we serve God.”

Lewis said the crown dance was a sign that the Native and Catholic traditions “serve the same master.”

“If we felt the Catholic way was a bad way, we wouldn’t do this,” he said. “If we learned to be less judgmental about people’s language and culture, we could be one.”

What a great story of conversion and I want to tell Sister Clissene, welcome Home to the Catholic Faith, the Faith of the Apostles!

From Jean Elizabeth Seah of Facebook, she shares the following:

Sitting Bull (Lakota: Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake), also nicknamed Slon-he or "Slow"; (c. 1831 – December 15, 1890) was a Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux holy man who led his people as a tribal chief during years of resistance to United States government policies.

In 1883 Sitting Bull embraced the Roman Catholic faith and was baptised by a French-speaking Jesuit priest.

He earned money by selling his autographed picture and gave much of that money to the poor.

I was very grateful to speak with Maurice Proctor (center of picture) of the Piscataway tribe based out of Maryland.

Mr. Proctor informed me that this tribe of Indians converted to the Catholic Church through the Jesuit Priest, Father Andrew White in 1634.

The current Chief at the time gave the Church 4,000 acres which is still in use today as a sanctuary and public gatherings for the Indians.

Today, the Tribe is part of the Oldest Catholic Church in the United States, "The Church of St. Ignatius Loyala".

Mr Proctor has agreed to come on deepertruth radio sometime in the near future to give more on the story of their faith.


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