Meet the longest-serving Native American Catholic deacon in the United States
Ben Black Bear Jr., at far left, with (back row) his wife Arlene, mother Iva and father Ben Black Bear Sr., and daughters (front row) Benita and Berlene, on his ordination day in 1976. Credit: St. Francis Mission
To hear Ben Black Bear Jr. tell the story, his path to the Catholic diaconate started in high school with a simple call to serve his Lakota people. “Our culture teaches us to think of the community first,” he recalled. “And in thinking about what I could do for my community, I settled on teaching people about the Catholic Church.” So began a decades-long journey that will be celebrated in 2026 when the Diocese of Rapid City marks the golden jubilee of Deacon Black Bear, America’s longest-serving Native American deacon.
The seeming simplicity of Ben Black Bear’s vocational call belies the deep complexities and ambiguities of its historical context. It was the early 1970s on South Dakota’s Rosebud Reservation. Native American communities were grappling with a century of federal repression and forced cultural assimilation, often with the active complicity of churches and missionary boarding schools. In 1973, members of the American Indian Movement occupied neighboring Pine Ridge Reservation’s Wounded Knee, the site of an infamous 1890 U.S. Army massacre of hundreds of Lakota women and children. The Wounded Knee occupation sparked a confrontation with federal agents that left two F.B.I. agents dead and further exacerbated relations between Lakota tribes and a U.S. government that had not granted native tribes American citizenship until 1924.
The Catholic Church was not spared the ferment. Ben Black Bear’s former Catholic boarding school at St. Francis Mission closed in 1970, as did the elementary boarding school at Pine Ridge. A year earlier, the Jesuits had renamed their day school at Pine Ridge after Red Cloud, the famous Oglala Lakota chief who had first invited the Jesuit Sina Sapa (“Black Robes”) to Pine Ridge in the 1870s.
Inspired by the aggiornamento spirit of the Second Vatican Council, in 1972 Jesuit missionaries moved to train a new generation of Lakota lay leaders in a three-year theology program organized around Scripture, church history, Catholic social teaching and liturgical studies. Ben Black Bear was part of this group. But with the opening of a new pastoral ministry in 1974 allowing married men to become permanent deacons, church leaders saw an opportunity to go even further. Ben Black Bear’s incipient call to serve his Lakota community was now merging with the Catholic Church’s urgent need to indigenize its ordained leadership.
There was just one problem. Mr. Black Bear was in his late 20s, and church law forbade the ordination of permanent deacons under the age of 34. John Hatcher, S.J., who was serving on the reservation at the time, and other Jesuit leaders appealed to Harold Dimmerling, the local bishop of Rapid City, for an exception, given the acute need for ordained Native American leaders at Rosebud and Pine Ridge. Bishop Dimmerling was supportive, but the Vatican’s Congregation for the Sacraments initially refused the bishop’s entreaties. Not easily dissuaded, Bishop Dimmerling approached Joseph Bernardin, then archbishop of Cincinnati and president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, who spoke to Pope Paul VI about Mr. Black Bear’s case.
Pope Paul VI was in the midst of drafting his groundbreaking mission encyclical “Evangelii Nuntiandi,” which argued that “the split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of our time…. Therefore every effort must be made to ensure a full evangelization of culture, or more correctly of cultures” (No. 20). Perhaps reflecting on those words, the pope made a personal indult approving a canonical exception that enabled Ben Black Bear Jr. to be ordained a deacon on June 19, 1976. Deacon Black Bear was assigned to St. Charles Borromeo Parish at St. Francis Mission, where he has served for the last 49 years.
Integrating Spirituality
Unlike past generations of Lakota Catholics, who experienced pressure to reject Native American spiritualities in favor of Catholic rites and rituals, Deacon Black Bear made it his mission to integrate the two. As an example, he noted that his diaconal care for Catholic sacramentals on the altar grew out of his childhood training in “how to handle sacred things” at traditional sweat lodges. Likewise, the popularity of elements of Native American spirituality in the 1960s and ’70s led to a resurgence of interest in reconnecting with traditional practices like sun dances among his fellow Lakota. Chuckling, Deacon Black Bear recalled, “I don’t think they understood what they were doing.” He thus found himself explaining the deeper religious symbolism of the sacred trees of sun dance rituals to Lakota spiritual seekers while comparing these traditions with how Christians understand the symbolism and meaning of Christ’s cross.
Reflecting his commitment to interreligious dialogue, Deacon Black Bear served as one of the lead translators in a multi-year dialogue involving Jesuit priests and Lakota medicine men (including his own father, Ben Black Bear Sr.). During the 1980s, he was a member of the Diocese of Rapid City’s Lakota Inculturation Task Force, which integrated Lakota religious symbolism and rituals into sacramental practices of baptism, Eucharist, confirmation and funeral rites.
Language was central to Deacon Black Bear’s project of spiritual integration. His passion for this linguistic mission grew in part from an awkward moment early in his diaconate, when he stumbled through a Lakota translation of the Our Father at a national congress of the St. Joseph and St. Mary societies, a longstanding association of Native American Catholic leaders. Chastened by this experience, he further immersed himself in developing literacy in his mother tongue. He began teaching Lakota to all grades of the local Catholic school. As head of Indian studies at Rosebud’s Sinte Gleska University, he introduced the region’s first tertiary program in Lakota studies. He preached and sang in Lakota at multiday wakes and funerals, one of Rosebud’s most important forms of community gatherings, while also celebrating baptisms and teaching Bible and catechesis classes in his mother tongue. All of this was part of Deacon Black Bear’s mission to enable his fellow Lakota to “try to understand the Catholic Church in our language.” When I met him, he was poring over baptismal records from the 1880s, examining and correcting Jesuit missionaries’ flawed English translations of Lakota names.
Like any good linguist, Deacon Black Bear recognizes that language reflects a worldview. “When you speak English, you think as a person who speaks English. When you speak Lakota, you think in that language.” Translation and learning a new language thus entail “learning how to think completely differently than how you think normally.” For Deacon Black Bear, this integral connection between language, epistemology and worldview underlies the need for an ecclesiology in which catholicity equals “unity in diversity” rather than “homogeneous uniformity.” “White people look upon me as a Catholic like they are, but I am not. I am still just as Lakota as the day I was born, and that is going to last until the day I die,” he said, meaning that a person’s culture shapes how he or she sees the world.
He also believes that this understanding of catholicity entails a willingness to retell biblical lessons in idioms that local people can understand. For Deacon Black Bear, the fundamental dynamic of preaching is one of careful scriptural exegesis, listening to the community and then creative application.
As an example, he explained how he taught the story of the prodigal son to a Lakota audience. Whereas Europeans and white Americans often relate this story through a lens of possession and inheritance, Lakota culture does not emphasize personal property. The Lakota tradition encourages giving things away rather than hoarding excess belongings. As Deacon Black Bear joked, “You never see a [Lakota] grandma pulling a trunk of stuff to another place!” For a Lakota audience, then, the prodigal son’s carousing behavior, drunkenness and isolation resonate more deeply than inheritance disputes. Deacon Black Bear therefore emphasized the ostracized son’s turning away from this behavior and the father’s welcoming of his son into a community called to love and trust him again.
Generations of Faith
Deacon Black Bear’s lifelong mission of Catholic-Lakota reconciliation continues through the next generation of his family. His son, Ben Black Bear III, and daughter-in-law, Jennifer Black Bear, coordinate religious education in local schools for nearly 300 Lakota students. Noting that her devout grandmother used to attend both sun dances and Sunday Masses, Jennifer described her mission in terms of “teaching the Catholic faith, yet also our Lakota values and culture.” They prepare Catholic children for the sacraments, work with youth leaders to coordinate community service projects, lead young people in reflections on the Sunday Gospels, and teach students how to pray the Our Father and Glory Be in Lakota.
Unlike the early efforts of church missionaries, Jennifer Black Bear’s Catholic religious ed classroom is now a primary setting where Lakota young people learn their ancestral language and, in her words, “realize that they’re Native American.” This includes studying core Lakota spiritual values such as generosity, wisdom, respect, honesty, humility and compassion.
Jennifer and her husband have also been invited to offer optional religious education in four public schools on Rosebud Reservation. For Jennifer, this desire for instruction reflects a growing awareness that “spiritual grounding matters” in countering the reservation’s malaises of drug addiction, alcoholism, unemployment and generational trauma.
Jennifer’s and Ben’s ministries have also had an impact at the national level. They helped establish the Native American Pastoral Fund with the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and represented their region on the National Tekakwitha Board, a leadership group for the over 500,000 Native American Catholics in the United States. For Jennifer, any broader public impact starts with their local commitment to the 25,000 residents of Rosebud Reservation: “We are from here. We are born and raised here. We are Lakota, and Catholic.”
Jennifer Black Bear’s and Ben Black Bear’s integrated spiritual identities are mirrored in the leadership of Rosebud’s St. Francis Mission. Founded by the Jesuits in 1886 at the invitation of the local chief Spotted Tail, St. Francis retains its close connection to the Society. The local pastor, Edmund Yainao, S.J., is a Tangkhul native of northeastern India, prompting some Lakota elders to joke, “You are the real Indian that Columbus was looking for!” Jim Lafontaine, S.J., who moved to the reservation from New England, serves as principal of Sapa Un Jesuit Academy, launched in 2013 according to the Nativity school model.
With the exception of Father Yainao and Father Lafontaine, all the leadership staff members at St. Francis are Lakota. Rodney Bordeaux, an Episcopal convert to Catholicism, is the first Lakota layman to serve as president of the mission. Harold Compton, another Lakota lay Catholic, serves as chief operating officer; he has taken a particular interest in preserving St. Francis’ outstanding historical archives and Lakota heritage museum. Caroline Decory works in fundraising and development, all while helping to coordinate food distribution for upward of 400 families and running the mission’s extensive addiction and recovery programs. All three leaders spoke glowingly of Sapa Un school, whose model of invested parents, high-quality education and integration of Catholic and Lakota spirituality aims to form a cadre of future Native leaders at Rosebud. “Education can be a way out of poverty,” Mr. Bordeaux argues. “We can’t just dwell on the past. We need to develop strong businesses and tribal governments that can carry people into the future.”
Reckoning With the Past
Mr. Bordeaux’s reference to the burden of the past reflects one of the primary challenges facing Catholic leaders on the reservation. North America as a whole, and Native American communities in particular, are experiencing an ongoing reckoning concerning U.S. federal policy toward Native American communities and the violence of the Christian boarding school era. This includes the discovery of mass graves at former Catholic boarding schools in Canada, the tabulation of excessive mortality figures in early 20th-century Native American schools and the individual horror stories of dehumanization and cultural denigration that have emerged from listening sessions across the country. In Mr. Bordeaux’s words, “[U.S. federal officials] wanted to kill us off.” Peter Klink, S.J., who has spent 40 of the past 50 years serving at Pine Ridge’s Red Cloud mission, expressed his own Ignatian “desolation” at the knowledge that Jesuit “Westernization” contributed to the Lakota people’s loss of language and distancing from their traditional cultures.
And yet these leaders are also quick to contest some narratives that they see as one-sided and as painting all missionary efforts with the same brush. Mr. Compton and Mr. Bordeaux argued that most Jesuits steadfastly tried to preserve Lakota culture, in stark contrast to the “kill the Indian, save the man” approach at General Richard Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Echoing this sentiment, Father Klink noted that Eugene Buechel, S.J., developed 35,000 English-Lakota translation cards that laid the groundwork for the first Lakota-English dictionary, still seen as an authoritative manual for the language. Ms. Decory and Jennifer Black Bear agree that while the harsh Catholic assimilationist practices of the past should be rejected, it is not fair to assume that today’s faith leaders are still operating out of the same playbook. In Ms. Decory’s words, “We’re not those people who were here before.”
For others, the negative stereotype fails to give credit to the positive legacies of the mission schools. Phyllis White Eyes Decory, who studied at Holy Rosary Mission School at Pine Ridge between 1936 and 1950, praised the educational rigor, vocational training and discipline of her former school and passionately defended the Jesuits from charges of cultural genocide. “They didn’t discontinue our culture! We learned to bead; our dress was accepted; we had Lakota dancing before basketball games.” Ms. White Eyes Decory went on to serve as secretary of Native affairs for the Diocese of Rapid City, where she worked to integrate the Lakota Azilya sage purification ceremony into Catholic liturgy.
This spirit of adaptation may offer a deeper lesson for a polarized age such as ours. In their holistic, border-crossing ministries and identities, Deacon Ben Black Bear and his fellow Lakota Catholic leaders offer a critical counter-witness. In doing so, they carry forward the legacy of Servant of God Nicholas Black Elk, or what the ethnographer Damian Costello has described as the great Lakota catechist’s and holy man’s rooting of his identity in “complementary spiritual and ritual traditions.” Theologically, they embody the Catholic “both-and” principle, the idea that the church develops through synthesizing the deepest truths of seemingly disparate traditions. Their lives also remind us that Christianity, like Lakota spirituality, is not primarily an ethical ideology or set of doctrinal teachings, but rather a spiritual walk and way of life. “More than anyone, Deacon Ben has shown us that we can walk in the ways of the Lakota and the Catholic way,” says Eugene Iron Shell, now in formation to succeed Ben Black Bear as a Lakota Catholic deacon. “He leads by humble example and shows us the way.”
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