Stands Before His People

Verne Pickering and Stephen Schaitberger have told a carefully documented story of a heroic Episcopal mission priest in the Diocese of Minnesota in their biography of Enmegahbowh. Enmegahbowh stood beside the Dakota and Ojibwe people in their tragic ethnic genocide, armed with the Christian gospel. Embraced by James Lloyd Breck and Henry Benjamin Whipple, the ministry of this first Indigenous priest in the American Episcopal Church is an example to all who continue to be engaged in proclaiming the way of love today in Minnesota’s ethnic and cultural diversity. Here is one story to remember from the Pickering and Schaitberger biography:

There was warfare between the Dakota in Southern Minnesota and the United States federal government in the late summer of 1862. The Ojibwe in Northern Minnesota watched with fear and trembling at the brutality of the warfare; the trials, execution, and incarceration of Dakota men, women, and children; and their exile beyond the borders of Minnesota. Among the Northern Ojibwe, there was political ambivalence over the incursion of the federal government and its disregard of treaty rights. As an interpreter among the many treaty languages as well as a mission priest of the Episcopal Church, Enmegahbowh moved dangerously through the brutal conflict. In this story it became known in August that warriors from Hole in the Day’s Pillager community had seized and taken prisoner several white settlers. Enmegahbowh and his wife, Charlotte, felt threatened also.  They fled with their children to a white settlement. They were stopped by Ojibwe warriors and started back home. At their return they heard war drums beating. Warriors were preparing to attack the federal Indian agency on the Crow Wing River in two days.  Enmegahbowh, Charlotte, and their children fled again for safety to Fort Ripley by canoe, a 25 mile journey on the Gull River. In the shallow waters the parents had to wade in the cold river water to shelter the children.  They arrived at the Fort with the warning of attack but their children, Alfred and Henry, became increasingly ill with time and subsequently died in November. In retaliation for a perceived betrayal the warriors destroyed everything at St. Columba’s, the gardens, oxen, and livestock.  When the Ojibwe removal to reservations took place Enmegahbowh and his family were forced by the federal military to leave the mission. They were separated from the white mission residents and would begin a new St. Columba’s on the White Earth Reservation. As the military arrived for their removal Charlotte went weeping to the graves of their children. At the White Earth Reservation tuberculosis eventually took the lives of Charlotte and all their children.  At the end of his life Enmegahbowh was cared for by a teenage grandson who also died of tuberculosis.  In 1903 this stunning priest of Northern Minnesota (then the Diocese of Duluth) died alone and grieving. His legacy in the mission of Episcopalians during the violent indigenous dislocation within Minnesota is of one who stood before all people in Minnesota’s racial and ethnic diversity proclaiming the Christian gospel.