ABSTRACT:
The Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum is named for Fr. Eugene Buechel, S.J., noted missionary, linguist and ethnologist who arrived on the Rosebud Reservation in 1902. Established in 1954, the collection now includes 2,273 ethnographic objects and over 40,000 photographs. Over the years, the museum has experienced tensions and transformations: although under community administration since 1974, the museum is owned by the Jesuits. Some community members consider this a double alienation of "museum" and "Catholic," while others value the museum's position in the community. This paper examines the transformations of the museum and explores future directions for ongoing collaboration with the community.

Article copyright 2004 Raymond A Bucko, S.J.

Fr. Buechel's Ethnographic Collection

INTRODUCTION

For some time now museums have been in the center of the debates over representation, cultural property and colonialism. At the same time, museums have decentralized with a growth of small community based museums whose purposes are very different than the nineteenth century crusade to "preserve" what was believed to be disappearing Native cultures through storing objects representative of these cultures.
The Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum, located on the grounds of the Jesuit Mission at St. Francis on the Rosebud reservation, has, at times, found itself part of the controversy entailed in this contemporary critique of museums and their purposes. Founded through the energies of Fr. Eugene Buechel, the museum sits on the fuzzy boundaries between Jesuit patrimony (matrimony being proscribed for our tribe) and community based museum.
I do not propose to solve the underlying contradictions and perhaps consonances between Mission and Museum, Jesuit and Lakota or Mission based community museum nor do I propose to untangle the very oxymoron I have just spoken. I do suggest, however, that ethnohistory, through uncovering the various cultural and historical contexts of the construction of this ethnographic collection, can perhaps, through this information, point towards approaches to these sometimes thorny issues.

FATHER BUECHEL'S INTENT

Intent is a rather difficult reality to reconstruct from the historical record even though popular culture and ideology facilely impugn intent all the time. The recent tragedies of the World Trade Center and the bombing of Afghanistan are all too painful examples of interpreting and even projecting intent. The intent of missionaries is a matter of great interest. Contemporary analyses of Christian mission intent in the past monochromatic and monolithic. Missionaries were polarized between Saint and Satan. This is more and more true both on reservations and in American society itself as we recognize both our cultural and religious hegemonic tendencies. Ethnohistorical research has revealed a much more complex and mixed reality in such areas as boarding schools and missions. Trying to understand Fr. Buechel's intent without necessarily trying to redeem or condemn will help us appreciate the complexities and ambivalences of the past as well as the present.
Fr. Buechel never sat down and wrote a reflection about his ethnographic collection that became a definable museum in his own lifetime. We have tantalizingly little information on Fr. Buechel's intent for he seems to have been too busy collecting, photographing, and performing the rituals and activities entailed in his life as a Jesuit and Catholic missionary to sit and wax autobiographical. The only direct quote I could find from Fr. Buechel concerning his museum is embedded in an article written for a mission magazine by Fr. John Scott, S.J.. Scott states:
The purpose of the museum, he [Fr. Buechel] informs you, is to preserve all that is good, and instructive, and educational: to keep intact the heritage of the Sioux, the history of their nations, and the memory of their customs and folklore. ADDIN EN.CITE Scott19532155, 7Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote215517(Scott 1953, 7)

Fr. Buechel's main biographer, Fr. Joseph Karol, S.J., wrote several pieces on Fr. Buechel's life ADDIN EN.CITE Karol2137Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote213717Karol19552126Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote212623Aguino2132Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote213227(Aguino and Karol; Karol; Karol 1955). He provides two scenarios for Buechel's collecting impulse. At one point, Karol contends that Fr. Buechel was a "natural born collector," referring to his early childhood:
The large, scientific collection within its (the Buechel museum) walls is really the final stage of a hobby that began when Fr. Buechel, as a small boy, collected chicken feathers and butterflies on his father's farm in Schleida, Thuringia, Germany. The collecting urge turned to stamps and to coins during his grammar, high school, and seminary days in the neighboring city of Fulda. It was only natural that the collecting hobby should continue when Fr. Buechel came to American in 1900. ADDIN EN.CITE Karol19552126: 15Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote212623(Karol 1955: 15)

Karol suggests a second, experiential impetus for Buechel's ethnographic collecting, referring to the fact that it was Fr. Buechel who conducted the Catholic funeral rites for Chief Red Cloud who died in 1909:
Perhaps it was the death of Red Cloud that started the missionary on his Sioux collection. The passing of the great chief may have shown him that the old Sioux Culture would pass away, too, and that its memory should be preserved. ADDIN EN.CITE Karol19552126: 14Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote212623(Karol 1955: 14)

Scott offers a similar reflection in his own article, which reflects clearly the dominant ethos of cultural disappearance, but this sentiment is not directly attributed to Fr. Buechel's thought: "Realizing that the culture of the red man was on the wane, Father Buechel long ago began collecting items of historical value." ADDIN EN.CITE Scott19532155, 6Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote215517(Scott 1953, 6).
Ethnohistory helped revive the importance of oral history and stresses the integration of this testimony with written documentation. While visiting the Jesuits at St. Francis in June, 2001, I discovered to my amazement that there is only one Jesuit left at the mission, Fr. Joseph Gill, S.J., who knew Fr. Buechel personally. Gill was a scholastic, a Jesuit in training, when he was assigned to St. Francis and had to opportunity to get to know Fr. Buechel.
When asking Gill about the motivations Fr. Buechel might have had for creating his museum, he told me that Buechel was very much in favor of preserving the culture for future generations. He said that in this he was at odds with the other Jesuits who would ridicule him behind his back. The then current generation of Jesuits, according to Gill, held for progressivism, believing that the culture of the Lakota had met its demise, that there was little or none of it remaining and that the only hope for the Lakota was to assimilate into the mainstream. Fr. Buechel also regretted the fact that while scholars, including Ella Deloria, visited him from throughout the United States, no one, Jesuit or lay, from the many Jesuit Universities in the United States ever came to consult with him.
Another quote from Fr. Buechel, cited by Fr. Scott, bears out Fr. Buechel's intent, within the context of his own mission ideology:
"The work of the missionary," Father Buechel continues, "is spiritual. But in order to labor with maximum efficiency, the missionary must know the customs of the people with whom he works. He must be acquainted with their background, their environment, and heritage. The Church has always emphasized that the missionary should adapt himself to the ways of thinking of his converts, should take what is good and noble in their way of life and preserve it, not destroy it." ADDIN EN.CITE Scott19532155, 7Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote215517(Scott 1953, 7)

Gill also said that Buechel displayed his objects in various rooms before Br. Joe Schwart, S.J. started on a museum building for the collection, stressing that the objects were meant to be viewed by the Lakota people themselves. The objects were meant to be preserved specifically for the Indian people according to Gill and to give them a sense of pride and to help them keep their culture. Gill said that this is also why Buechel wrote the grammar and dictionary and that this intention could be found in his introduction to his Lakota grammar. This is what Fr. Buechel has to say:

In time, however, they [the Lakota] would yield to the white man's ways and gradually adopt his language. And the day would come when the Indians would know but little or nothing of their own mother tongue. But blood asserts itself. The Indians have again become race-conscious and want to speak the language of their forefathers. But who was to help them? In order to assist them the author has prepared this book which may aid to preserve their speech for posterity.
The day of the Indian resurgence came earlier than was to be expected. For a new Administration has established the policy of protecting the Indians as Indians and of favoring all that is good in their culture ADDIN EN.CITE Buechel193992, ixMaster Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote926(Buechel 1939, ix).

Fr. Buechel is referring to the Roosevelt administration and Wheeler-Howard Act (also referred to as the Indian Reorganization Act) of June 18, 1934.
When I asked Joe Gill about Karol he pointed out that except perhaps for summer assignments, Fr. Karol never lived in Fr. Buechel's community. This is born out by Jesuit "Catalogues" published by the Wisconsin Province which indicate that he was officially stationed at St. Francis from 1959 until 1972. It does appear that Karol became something of Fr. Buechel's intellectual successor at St. Francis, publishing, in addition to a variety of obituaries and popular articles on Fr. Buechel and his work, a book on winter counts ADDIN EN.CITE Karol1969414Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote41428(Karol 1969) and a text book for learning Lakota ADDIN EN.CITE Karol19742129Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote21296(Karol, et al. 1974).
FATHER BUECHEL AND HIS MUSUEM
Fr. Buechel was born in Schleida of Thuringia, Germany on October 20, 1874. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1897 in Blyenback, Holland and came to the United States in 1900. From 1902 until 1904 he worked as a scholastic (a Jesuit in training and not yet ordained) at St. Francis Mission. From there he went on to further studies in St. Louis, Missouri. He came back to South Dakota to serve as the superior at Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation from 1907 to 1916.
According to Fr. Karol, Buechel first began collecting artifacts in 1912 while he was superior of Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation. Fr. Buechel moved from Holy Rosary to St. Francis in 1916 and remained there until 1926. Fr. Buechel again returned to Holy Rosary between 1926 and 1929 but it is not clear if the collection traveled with him or not. Oral history, in the person of Brother Simon, curator of the Heritage Center on the Pine Ridge Reservation, hs it that superiors urged him to take "that junk" with him when he left Holy Rosary. So too, his photographic collection was nearly burned after his death. In 1929 he returned to St. Francis and stayed there until his death on October 27, 1954 at the age of 80.
Fr. Buechel's museum first went on display according to Karol in 1921 in Hartmann Hall, which then served as both the administration building and the Jesuit Residence. In 1947 Brother Joseph Schwart, S.J. , to honor Fr. Buechel's 50 year anniversary as a Jesuit built a freestanding structure to house his collection.
I would not want to impose a postmodern mentality on Fr. Buechel and claim that his intentions were entirely to preserve, or better, to continue Lakota culture, for he, like many, held for cultural evolutionism and the progress of the Lakota into what was considered to be modern society ADDIN EN.CITE Markowitz1987628Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote6285(Markowitz 1987). However, if we can make a leap from Fr. Buechel's linguistic collecting, he wrote a grammar and prepared a dictionary, we can at least conjecture that part of his purpose was to provide materials from Lakota traditional culture for a revival which he himself expected, predicted and claims to have seen in the form of a change of Government policy under John Collier as well as, no doubt, the Lakota around him. So Fr. Karol's statement "The passing of the great chief may have shown him that the old Sioux Culture would pass away, too, and that its memory should be preserved ADDIN EN.CITE Karol19552126: 15Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote212623(Karol 1955: 15) " may more represent his own generation of Jesuits and their philosophy more than it did that of Fr. Buechel's. It should also be kept in mind that Fr. Buechel himself was part of the second generation of Jesuits on the reservation, the first coming in the 1880s.
Fr. Buechel's left the Lakota people, the world and St. Francis Indian Mission an ethnographic collection that consisted in 661 pieces. Each piece has a tag with a catalogue number (now two catalogue numbers), the name of the object (sometimes in English, more often in Lakota), a description of the object, and the source of the object. Sometimes the tags have the name of the donor or owner, and the name of the person who created the piece, and finally the date Buechel acquired the piece. Some tags cite other ethnographic work to help illumine the piece. Buechel's handwriting is, as Jesse Thunder Hawk, an undergraduate at Creighton University and co-worker on this project can attest, a challenge.
Fr. Buechel apparently did not systematically tag and number his collection until later in his life. It is not clear if he had notes on his objects to create these tags or not. The tags themselves indicate a classification based not on acquisition sequence but on typological sorting. Fr. Stroh's obituary of Fr. Buechel, written shortly after his death in the Indian Sentinel, the main publication of the Catholic Indian Missions, states: "In the last months of his life he undertook the task of describing and arranging in systematic order all the items of his collection" ADDIN EN.CITE Stroh19542151, 155Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote215117(Stroh 1954, 155). While Stroh does not specifically mention the tags, it is likely that they were written at this time.
Fr. Buechel left a variety of written materials on his actual museum. Fr. Buechel took his hand written cards and typed them. At times he added additional information. He also hand wrote the Lakota terms onto these cards rather than type them. There are also various cards which were originally displayed in his museum cases. In addition there are small descriptions of Lakota life and history as well as a map of Fr. Buechel's original museum arrangement. There are in fact two sets, one made by carbon copy except in a few instances when the second card is typed. When the two cards each had unique data I scanned both the cards. There are a total of 654 cards (some of the cards are duplicates). Fr. Buechel created a carbon copy of the majority of his typed file cards. Other cards were typed twice. In a few instances the information on the second card is different from that of the first card. When that is the case I have scanned both cards and included the unique second card with the typed files card listed above.
The tags are arranged by an alphanumeric sequence with a single initial letter and then sequential numbers. It seems that Fr. Buechel assembled this tags from other bits of data and that the letters do not represent the sequence in which materials were acquired. Tags with the earliest acquisition dates are P1 and P2, both of which are 1909, some 3 years before Fr. Karol claims that Fr. Buechel began collecting. The majority of tags are dated 1915, perhaps the date when the Oglala gave a large amount of artifacts (although Karol sets the date at 1914).
Fr. Buechel created a set of cataloguing cards with his own sequence number consisting of a letter and consecutive numbers for each letter. He also created a simple classification key to his system:
A = Wearing Apparel (12 items)
B = Beadwork (42 items)
C = Charms (34 items)
D = Dances (50 items)
F = Fauna (12 items)
H = Home (45 items)
M = Medicine (60 items)
O = Ornaments (20 items)
P = Pipes (48 items)
R = Religious Ceremonies (59 items)
S = Sport (34 items)
T = Travel (37 items)
U = Utensils (121 items)
W = Weapons (64 items)

Fr. Buechel created these cards later in his life and thus probably had another source for documentation of the objects. Most likely he used his museum tags in addition to his memory. There are a total of 643 of these cards. Mr. Jerry Weitzer, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic from the Missouri Province, assisted Fr. Buechel during the summer before he died (1954) in putting the collection in a final order. After 1974 when the collection was again attended to, several other items were identified as belonging to the original Buechel collection.
Apparently Fr. Buechel's growing collection traveled with him between Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservation, which, at that time, were contiguous (Bennet County not having yet separated itself from reservation territory). Fr. Karol states that Fr. Buechel brought the collection with him from Pine Ridge to Rosebud when he became superior there in 1916.
Father Buechel also purchased recently made craft items from people and shipped them to St. Louis for sale. According to some of the families on Pine Ridge and Rosebud, he helped them through difficult economic times in this manner. Apparently Buechel also sold a collection to a dealer in Washington State. The ethnographic material he collected, however, seems to have remained on with him.
FATHER BUECHEL'S MUSEUM AFTER HIS DEATH
After Fr. Buechel's death the museum underwent a variety of transformations. Three Native students, as part of a training program in museum management under the auspices of the University of Colorado, came to reorganize the Buechel collection. Chuck White, a Dakota/Winnebago from Minnesota, Innokenty Lestonkof, an Aleut from Alaska, and Juan Diego Aguino, a Tewa from San Juan Pueblo, New Mexico all worked on this project.[1] They rearranged exhibits, putting redundant material in storage, added climate control to the building which before that had no heat, protected the objects from light, and provided some security for the building. At this point they were working primarily with Buechel's own collection.
The museum has had a series of formal directors over the years, beginning with Harold Moore who served from 1973 until 1983. The Jesuits have made a deliberate attempt to share control of the museum with a community-based board of directors as well as to have Lakota people have served as directors of the museum. Emile Her Many Horses served from 1983 until 1991, Ben Black Bear Jr. from 1991 until 1992, Donna DuBray from 1992 until 1995 and Charmayne Young from 1996 until 2001. Mike Marshall, a Lakota from Rosebud, is the current director of the museum.
A new archive facility for the museum was begun in 1979. The Buechel Memorial Archives as created in 1972. Later a new wing for the museum itself was begun and completed and dedicated on April 28, 2000. This allows for display of about 25% of the total collection.
Although not formally under NAGPRA legislation because it is a private institution, the museum does act as an official NAGPRA repository. While the museum does not house any funerary items or archaeological finds, two scalps were found in the collection (W 51), one Crow and one Pawnee. The Crow scalp turned out to be horse hair while the Pawnee scalp was quite authentic. According to records, the scalp was taken by High Horse in 1866 and given to Fr. Buechel in 1922. On July 7, 1999 returned to Pawnee Nation Chairman in a "Releasing of the Spirit Ceremony" (described in the Mission's 2000 calendar) .

FATHER BUECHEL'S MUSEUM TODAY

Today there are 2,2073 pieces in the collection, 739 pieces remain Fr. Buechel's original collection, 1021 pieces were added during the directorship of Harold Moor and 591 pieces have been added by subsequent directors. Note that additions were made through both purchase and gift. In addition to an ethnographic collection the museum houses an extensive photographic collection which was started by Fathers Buechel and Zimmerman. Today the collection of photographs exceeds 42,000. The museum also houses Fr. Buechel's paper slips on which he wrote his Lakota vocabulary. These words were eventually edited into a dictionary by Fr. Manhart, S.J. ADDIN EN.CITE Buechel197093Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote9313Manhart20022383Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote238328(Buechel 1970; Manhart 2002). Since March of 2001 the museum as acquired 50 new artifacts, some of them gifts from community members. Thus the museum and its collection continues to grow.
In the fall of 2002 Fr. Raymond Bucko, S.J., a professor of anthropology at Creighton University, began a sabbatical project to digitize the museum collection and make it more broadly available to Lakota and other peoples through the medium of the world wide web. This work of intellectual repatriation was begun to continue Fr. Buechel's original work to make his collection available to Lakota people. While Fr. Buechel personally showed his museum to Lakota friends and visitors today they can examine his collection from anywhere that is wired to the internet:
http://www.sfmission.org/museum/archive.shtml
Father Bucko, S.J. worked with museum director Mike Marshall and William LeRoy on the actual catalogue and photographing of the objects. They were also assisted by a variety of employees of the Rosebud Educational Society and students visiting from a variety of Universities. Filipp Sapienza of the University of Colorado Denver created the database design and web interface for the project. The team completed photographing and data entry for Fr. Buechel's collection in the spring of 2003 and the material was made available on the web in the winter of 2003.

The Constitution and Bylaws of the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum was revised on May 15, 1974. In this document the purpose of this institution is put forth:
The Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum is dedicated to the acquisition, preservation and interpretive display of artifacts, photographs, documents and other similar materials relating to Sioux culture and the history of the St. Francis Indian Mission with a common ground for continuous dialogue between the visiting public, the local population and the St. Francis Indian Mission staff. The Museum while being constantly alert to expanding
its interpretive display capabilities through new acquisitions must actively seek and promote objective criticism to insure its continued validity and accuracy.

It is perhaps ironic that Lakota culture, which was thought in jeopardy of loss, remains vital while the presence and influence of the Jesuits among the Lakota has diminished over the years. Nevertheless, the Jesuit presence remains. Fr. Buechel's museum itself stands as a symbol of complex cultural and religious interrelations that have been ongoing for over a hundred years. The museum seems situated between the ideological poles of "belonging to the Lakota people" and "held captive by the Whites". The current and past realities are far more complex than these extremes reveal.
Today, in addition to the cases filled with ethnographic materials from the Lakota past, there is a case dedicated to Fr. Buechel himself. In this case is a portrait painted by a Lakota named Short Bull in 1957, some ethnographic objects Buechel collected, a set of his vestments, a botanical specimen he collected and labeled in Lakota (not sure here!), and his box camera. Outside the main building of the museum is a Church building now itself a part of the museum complex. The building contains even more materials relating to Fr. Buechel: his desk, part of his library, some vestments and an altar with religious statuary on it. When last I visited the museum Mike Marshall took me to the Church and began asking questions about the artifacts there. The roles have reversed since the time of Fr. Buechel and his original museum for now a Lakota was interviewing a Jesuit about his former customs and rituals
The challenge to those who operate the Buechel Museum, Lakota and Jesuits remains one of dialogue and access. The Museum needs to continue to negotiate its relationship between itself and the Lakota, between individual Jesuits and individual Lakota. The second challenge is that of access to the collections for local people. The Museum has worked hard to make the collections more accessible through increasing display space, by hiring Lakota to direct the museum and appointing Lakota to the board, and by encouraging school groups as well as college students to utilize the resources of the museum. At the heart of this is Fr. Buechel's collection and his intention that his own scholary work was at the service of the Lakota themselves as well as a larger world. It would certainly be hubris (as well as bad ethnography) to suggest that Fr. Buechel's work is the key to the cultural revival of the Lakota, but it is clear that the museum has been and will continue to be a significant cultural resource despite, and perhaps because of its own ambiguous position.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDIN EN.REFLIST Aguino, Juan Diego, and S.J. Karol, Joseph
The Museum of Black Eagle Buechel's: Yesterday and Today. Pp. 7. St. Francis, SD: St. Francis Indian School.
Buechel, S.J., Eugene
1939 A Grammar of Lakota: The Language of the Teton Sioux Indians. St. Louis: John S. Swift.
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1970 Lakota-English Dictionary. S.J. Paul Manhart, ed. Pine Ridge, S.D.: Holy Rosary Mission.
Karol, Joseph S
Black Eagle: Sioux Missioner Extraordinary. Mission Digest:30-33.
Karol, S.J., Joseph S.
1955 Chicken Feathers to War Bonnets -- Fr. Buchel, S.J. In Rapid City, S.D. Daily Journal. Pp. 14-15. Rapid City.
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1969 Red Horse Owner's Winter Count: The Oglala Sioux 1786-1968. Martin, S.D.: Booster Publishing.
Karol, S.J., Joseph S., Stephen L Rozman, and Rosebud Educational Society
1974 Everyday Lakota: an English-Sioux dictionary for beginners. St. Francis S.D.: Rosebud Educational Society.
Manhart, Paul, ed.
2002 Lakota dictionary: Lakota-English/English-Lakota. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Markowitz, Harvey
1987 Catholic Mission and the Sioux: A Crisis in the Early Paradigm. In Sioux Indian Religion: Tradition and Innovation. R. DeMallie and D. Parks, eds. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
Scott, S.J., John M
1953 Black Eagle's Dream Comes True. The Calumet 40(3):4-9.
Stroh, S.J., Rev. George M
1954 Apostle of the Sioux. The Indian Sentinel 34(10):154-155, 158.

[1] This effort was most likely done in cooperation with Fr. Karol, S.J. as he also collaborated on an unpublished article with Juan Diego Aquino about the renovations ADDIN EN.CITE Aguino2132Master Bibliography-Converted.enlEndNote213227Aguino, Juan Diego, and S.J. Karol, JosephThe Museum of Black Eagle Buechel's: Yesterday and Today. Pp. 7. St. Francis, SD: St. Francis Indian School.