The Episcopal Church has not one but, rather, two Indian missions on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. This has more to do with the political history of the Dakotas than with any other single factor. The United States Congress established the Reservation, along with four others, in March 1889, when it partitioned the Great Sioux Reservation. However, whereas Standing Rock was made to straddle the North and South Dakota state line, the Episcopal dioceses of North and South Dakota are coterminous with the states of those names. There is, consequently and confusingly, a comparatively small Standing Rock Mission with churches in the northern communities of Fort Yates and Cannonball; as well as a second—and much larger—Standing Rock Mission <https://standingrockepiscopalmission.com/> comprising six churches to the south. (1)

Both nonetheless share a common point of origin: St. Elizabeth’s, mother church of the Episcopal missions on Standing Rock. And to visit that church today, in the unincorporated community of Wakpala, is to be confronted with the complicated realities of past and present mission work.

An unassuming structure erected in 1885, St. Elizabeth’s has a rich history. It was here that Chief Gall, one of the principal Native commanders at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, was baptized on Independence Day, 1891. And in the church cemetery a short drive away, amidst fecund prairie grass that ever threatens to efface the memorials constructed both to him as well as to the more recently departed, his body lies interred. 

St. Elizabeth’s first permanent minister, moreover, was Philip Joseph Deloria (Tipi Sapa), a Yankton Sioux who supervised the Standing Rock Mission from 1892 through 1925 and one of only three Americans whom Washington National Cathedral commemorates as amongst the “Saints of the Ages.” With two other Dakota men, he founded Wojo Okolakiciye (The Planting Society) in 1873. Now known as The Brotherhood of Christian Unity, that association—the members of which commit to supporting one another as they navigate the intersection between Native and Christian identities—has seen something of a resurgence in recent years, and one need look no further than a Sunday worship service at St. Elizabeth’s to meet some of its current affiliates.

For all the church’s uniqueness, however, those who call other parts of The Episcopal Church home are likely to find St. Elizabeth’s perversely familiar. A building designed to allow upwards of a hundred congregants to gather for Sunday worship might now, on good days, host a mere dozen—and, on bad ones that are sadly becoming typical, no more than four or five. Those celebrations take place twice per month to accommodate the Standing Rock Mission’s present ability to support only one superintending priest for its five active churches. On all other Sundays (and most weekdays), when the priest is travelling the Mission circuit and presiding at services elsewhere on the Reservation, the church is closed, its silent steeple watching pensively as the waves break on adjacent Lake Oahe. 

Gone are the days when services that did not include a baptism—or a burial—could fill St. Elizabeth’s capacious pews. And so, as in too many other Episcopal spaces, one hears a now-customary set of questions from those who continue to call this place home: “How can we make our church full again?” “How can we bring children, youth, and young adults back to the church?” “How can we make our programs as popular as they once were?” 

Directed both to fellow Mission members as well as to The Episcopal Church’s senior diocesan and national leadership, these questions are calls to action in their own right: Recalling an earlier time when St. Elizabeth’s claimed a centrality of place within Reservation life that it no longer maintains, they seek after strategies for recovering some version of that past for the present. But, of course, not everyone on Standing Rock pines for the Episcopal Mission’s turn-of-the-twentieth century “golden age,” and with good reason. 

That churches like St. Elizabeth’s witnessed such spectacular growth during that period reflects The Episcopal Church’s active participation in the American imperial project. Under the terms of Ulysses S. Grant’s “Peace Policy,” the US federal government made major Christian denominations responsible for the assimilation of Indigenous tribes on reservation land, replacing corrupt Indian agents with putatively more trustworthy missionaries. The goal was to make Americans of Natives, which meant, among other things, Christianizing them. And this continued to be the government’s objective well after Grant’s administration, and with it his Indian policy, came to an end. Thus would James McLaughlin, Indian Agent for the Standing Rock Agency, write approvingly in his 1890 report to the federal Commissioner of Indian Affairs that “[t]he Indians connected with [St. Elizabeth’s] are zealous and well disposed;” for, to his mind, the fact that “the Indians of this agency, with few exceptions, show steady progress and wholesome advancement in civilization” was evidenced by their “acceptance and increasing knowledge of the precepts of Christianity.” 

The very setup of Mission churches like St. Elizabeth’s reflected their status as outposts of both Christian religion and American culture. They were sites in which people gathered for Sunday worship in some or another Christian tradition, yes. But, just as importantly, they served as the focal point for local communities both sacred and profane—a place wherein people could conduct their business and acquire new skills (notably agricultural ones); socialize with one another; and find opportunities to reflect, together, upon the things of God as Europeans understood them. At least in the Dakotas, Native society was to a substantial degree reoriented around these churches and the colonial project they represented.

This occurred because, acting in concert, church and state dispossessed Native Americans of their land; enrolled, often forcibly, Indigenous children in government- and Christian-run schools (one such school was attached to St. Elizabeth’s itself); and violently suppressed Native cultures, languages, and religions. These and related strategies aimed to erase Native American populations and to establish the United States, with its immigrant population, as the rightful—indeed, the sole—inhabitant of the territories to which it laid claim. Differing from those other forms of colonization that transform a region’s original inhabitants into sources of labour for the occupying power, these initiatives instead enabled non-indigenous “settler-colonists” to displace those inhabitants altogether, to achieve enduring sovereignty over their land, and to develop that land in accordance with Euro-Christian values and interests.

However, to describe the settler-colonial agenda using the past-tense, as I have thus far, is misleading, for it is the architecture of the American present—every non-Indigenous inhabitant of the United States is its beneficiary, to varying degrees (for it is possible to be both oppressed and, simultaneously, an oppressor). Neither The Episcopal Church, generally, nor its Standing Rock Mission, more particularly, is exempt from this fact, and for that reason neither can be said to have moved “beyond” settler-colonialism. Indeed, we would do well to question whether either is even capable of doing so. 

Consider that settler-colonialism is assimilationist, erasing the differences between settler and Native in order to prevent the latter from dislodging the former: If settlers, too, are “indigenous” to the land they claim—so the logic goes—then the Native populations they displace cannot assert a stronger, more original right to inhabit and manage their traditional lands. That is why settler-colonialism largely denies Indigenous peoples a voice in the stories it tells of itself. If not only before but also outside of the settler-colonial regime there is nothing—and, especially, no flourishing Indigenous communities—then that regime can assert its own necessity, thereby shielding itself from critique. 

And that is also why settler-colonists conceptualize Native Americans as wards of the regime. Whether savages in need of improvement, illiterates in need of education, children in need of discipline, or heathens in need of true religion, they lack that which the regime provides and thus ought, for their own benefit, be subjected to its dictates. As Henry Whipple, the first bishop of The Episcopal Church in Minnesota, put it, “Indians are capable of being civilized” if only white society grants them “fair treatment” and they, in turn, adopt “the values of Christianity and acquisitive capitalism.” (2)

Settler-colonial politics animate all aspects of Episcopal life, liturgy, and polity. Sometimes this is obvious. For instance, the legal basis for land ownership in the United States is the doctrine of Christian discovery, which posits (in the words of United States Supreme Court decision Johnson v. M’Intosh) that the European “discovery” of the Americas “gave title to the government by whose subjects, or by whose authority, [that discovery] was made;” and that discovery did so, in large part, because the European powers “made ample compensation to” the Native Americans they dispossessed “by bestowing on them civilization and Christianity, in exchange for unlimited independence.” (3) The Episcopal Church can verbally repent of, and repudiate, this doctrine, then, as its General Convention did in 2009. But so long as it owns property within the United States, The Episcopal Church affirms discovery and carries out the mandate it gives settlers (and settler institutions) to expropriate Indigenous communities.

In other cases, however, Episcopal settler-colonialism manifests with greater subtlety. This includes—counterintuitively, perhaps—within discussions about the decolonization of the Church. A settler-colonial Anglican like myself might, for instance, seize on the Standing Rock Mission’s declining fortunes and its complex history to press not only for the Mission’s closure but, also, for the wholesale withdrawal of The Episcopal Church from the reservations of the Dakotas. Indeed, she might even use highbrow theory and scholarly jargon to do so. But invoking the critical might of postcolonial theory does not an anti-colonist make; and, while there are certainly arguments to be made that a postcolonial Standing Rock is a post-Episcopal one, settler-colonists must needs exercise considerable caution when formulating them.

For Christianity is a lived religion. Ordinary people embody it: people with their own idiosyncratic reasons for calling themselves “Christian”; people who understand different, even conflicting, things by that term; people who disagree as to what is meaningful about affiliating themselves with it; people whose experience of Christianity is in every case inflected by the historical, economic, linguistic, and like contexts within which they inhabit it. Christianity, in short, is ambiguous.

To see the Christianity that is practiced on Standing Rock in these human terms is in no way to diminish the moral gravity of the harms that Christians—Episcopalians included—have perpetrated against the Reservation’s Indigenous population. But it is to recognize that—notwithstanding the critiques that can and should be made of Christianity as a colonial endeavour—for no small number of that population’s members, affiliation with some or another form of Christianity is a deep source of personal and collective meaning. And it is entirely legitimate for this to be the case. 

Settlers sustain the colonial structures they might otherwise profess to renounce when they ignore the very real presence of Native Episcopalians on Standing Rock and elsewhere. They demonstrate the same contempt for Indigenous agency and self-determination when—rather than listening to the hopes, desires, and concerns of those Episcopalians—they, instead, determine what is in those Episcopalians’ best interests, even if they think this to be a return to what settlers regard as a more “authentic” version of Native spirituality. And they enact the logic of assimilation when they elide the experiences of Indigenous Episcopalians into those of settler ones; by peddling, for instance, the narrative that, given enough time, Native Episcopalians will inevitably become like their more-enlightened white counterparts in Western Europe or the Northeastern United States (typically described as “ten or twenty years ahead of the rest of the world”) in tracking a course towards secularization (a narrative that both centers and universalizes the Western European and Northeastern American experience).

Taking seriously the voices of Indigenous Episcopalians on Standing Rock means, among other things, that The Episcopal Church ought not to abnegate its responsibilities to the churches it established by abandoning sites like St. Elizabeth’s to the steady attrition of their membership. It means taking action when the congregants of those churches request assistance from The Episcopal Church—in the form of, say, technical advice, financial support, or material resources—so that they can spur the revitalization of their places of worship. And it means taking care not to impose the latest strategy for “missional” or “post-Christian” church life on Native Episcopalians when these persons articulate a desire for forms of Christian community that settler elites regard as insufficiently progressive.

It is one thing, in other words, to speak glowingly about the potential (or, for that matter, actual) closure of a predominantly white, middle- to upper-class parish in suburban New England (one built, in any case, on stolen Indigenous land) as an opportunity for those congregants who remain to “do church without walls” or the like. It is quite another to do so on Standing Rock in the face of local calls for The Episcopal Church to contribute to the revitalization of the Reservation’s struggling Indigenous churches. 

For those requests are an assertion of agency. In advancing them, members of the Standing Rock Mission are insisting—in spite of settler-colonists’ long history of denying the same—that the power and the right to determine their own destiny as Natives and as Christians are, ultimately, theirs. If The Episcopal Church is committed, in fact and not only in rhetoric, to the hard work of decolonization, it must—as a minimal first step—cede to its Indigenous members the prerogative to choose the future of the churches they call home. It must relinquish power, not through token gestures of contrition that do nothing to upset a settler system that casts Native flourishing as ultimately contingent on the gracious allowances made by Euro-American colonists; but, instead, by taking steps to ensure that the choices Indigenous Episcopalians make dictate the uses to which The Episcopal Church puts its various resources. And it must do all this even in those cases in which the chosen future revives those aspects of the colonial past that Native Episcopalians continue to find lifegiving.

Can the Mission church—with its model of sited public life, corporate worship in the Anglican tradition, and community formation—be sustained on Standing Rock? Indeed, perhaps it must.

1. It is the Diocese of South Dakota’s Standing Rock Mission that I have in view in the remainder of this essay, and to which I am referring when I speak of “the Standing Rock Mission.”

2. Quoted in George E. Tinker, Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), 109.

3. John Marshall, Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. 543 (Supreme Court of the United States; February 28, 1823).