Amy Frykholm’s evocative new novel, High Hawk, takes place on the Windy Creek Indian Reservation — a fictional setting. The story is set in the 1970s and ’80s and is told from the perspective of Father Joseph Kreitzer, a Catholic priest who has been assigned to St. Rose parish on the reservation as a kind of punishment. It is an outpost, and Father Joe tries to find small ways to fit into a culture vastly different from his own as he performs his priestly duties. Mostly he is confused by Lakota culture, but he slowly learns to listen more deeply to his Lakota neighbors, and also, perhaps, to God. In the end, Kreitzer’s honesty — about his own life and the sad history of the Church on the reservation — proves his salvation.
As a white person who has often visited the reservations in South Dakota, I readily identified with Kreitzer’s cross-cultural confusion and his struggle to listen. And as I read Frykholm’s novel, I soon realized that “St. Rose Parish” is based on the Rosebud Indian Reservation and its St. Francis Church and Mission School, which I first visited in 1988 as a student in a class at Catholic Theological Union. That class, Lakota-Christian Dialogue, was intended to introduce students to the culture and history of the Lakota people, including the role of the Church. The history includes genocide, the theft of Lakota land and the frequent exploitation and abuse of the Lakota people.
Our professor introduced us to two central concepts: “mission-in-reverse” and the “ministry of presence.” Both were new ideas at the time. We were not going to the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations to help (“save”) the poor Indians or teach bible school or paint buildings to ease our white guilt. Rather, we were going to listen and learn. The Lakota elders hosting us were our honored teachers (and were very well paid by the seminary for this service). They would try to educate us and help us better understand their culture and spirituality, as well as our own.
The elder I most remember from that initial visit — Francis White Lance, a medicine man — would become a mentor in later years. Like Nicholas Black Elk, the renowned medicine man from Pine Ridge, Francis had studied and practiced both religious traditions — Lakota spirituality and Christianity. During our week together, he tried to bridge those disparate worlds for us and helped us understand the history of conquest, of the sword and the cross, of the U.S. Cavalry and of the Church, and how they converged.
On our first day we gathered at Francis’ small, off-yellow, HUD-provided “rez shack” for an orientation. After speaking about the history of the Black Hills, the battles at Little Bighorn and on the reservation, and the massacre at Wounded Knee, he explained Lakota ceremony and the history of mission at Pine Ridge. Someone asked him how the Lakota view the Wasi’chus — the white people — who kept coming to Pine Ridge to help and study them.
“Most of us hate white people, and with good reason,” he said abruptly. Then, as our discomfort bubbled up, he broke into a smile. “But don’t worry, I might forgive you.” This tension — between what we presented as well-meaning students who sought to study and understand Lakota culture and what we re-presented as the descendants of those who nearly destroyed it — was always there. It still is. And it is a central theme and conflict in Frykholm’s novel.
In High Hawk’s opening scene, Father Joe discovers a crying infant left in a cardboard box on his doorstep. Having no idea what to do, he calls Alice, a Lakota member of his parish whom he has come to depend on as a kind of mentor and key to “the reservation’s world of mystery and strangeness. She was his one-woman altar guild and his rare invitation into Windy Creek’s deeper life, a life that, without her, he would never even glimpse.”
Alice comforts the baby and discovers a note folded into the blanket: “His name is Bernard. I know you can help him.” Father Joe thinks they should call the police and try to find the baby’s mother, but Alice says no. “He’s one of ours. I know it,” she adds, and takes him home, where she raises him along with her own kids. Bernard becomes “Bear” — and an evolving secret between Alice and Father Joe.
Many years later, in his adolescence, Bear’s identity becomes a charged theme of the book — is he full-blood Lakota, or does he have a white parent? When Bear is implicated in a murder, Alice and Father Joe begin fervently searching for his mother and a birth certificate. It matters greatly, because if Bear is non-Indian, he will be tried in federal court rather than in tribal court.
In and of itself, Bear’s story seems meaty enough to drive the whole novel. But it is only one of several interrelated plotlines that make High Hawk so compelling and complex. Another central conflict is internal to Father Joe. He, too, is struggling with his identity — and his responsibilities as a priest. When he decided to become a priest, he had thought it would lead to “some kind of special knowledge, some map to live a life by. And not just any map. A special map. God’s map.” But out on the Windy River Reservation, no one uses maps. The locals know their land with their bodies and spirits. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are. So Father Joe is often lost — geographically and culturally — and in need of some human compass to point him in the right direction.
Alice helps, but she’s not enough. Over time, the priest’s confusion leads him to question his role. He fears his ministry has become a kind of blind duty, a “series of practiced gestures. . . . Lift this, say this. Gestures. If a priest showed up and did nothing more than go through the motions, but did it adequately, you could say the man had done his job.” And that is not enough for Father Joe.
One “gesture” that begins to trouble him is confession. He contemplates what his training and ministry have taught him about the sacrament of penance, about keeping secrets and the power of silence — about how and when to listen. And he begins to wonder what to do with all the heartache and anguish, with all the secrets that have accumulated from the confessional into a dark cloud of loneliness.
Frykholm seamlessly weaves yet another strand of her plot with these others: Father Joe receives a letter from Veronica, a woman he had been seeing before and during seminary 30 years prior. Their parting had been difficult. He had chosen the priesthood, but clearly, from the new letter and his response, both had had second thoughts — and lingering desires. They begin to write to each other, and Veronica drives out to visit him. Their relationship evolves as new letters arrive and Father Joe agonizes over how to respond.
Frykhom’s last thematic strand simmers quietly for 100 pages or so before it boils over. After nearly a decade at the parish, Father Joe finally decides to look through boxes of old letters in the basement — many years of correspondence by former priests and teachers, along with the bishop’s evaluations. He has avoided the letters until this moment — instinctively fearing their contents: They chronicle the parish’s dark history, which Fr. Joe suspects but doesn’t want to confront. Some of his predecessors had been sexually abusing native children at the school. Bishops and other supervisors had known but kept it quiet. Father Joe also learns that the bishops were in the habit of “shuffling men around as they got into trouble, sending them off to the reservation when things got too hot.”
Though Frykholm has changed the names, High Hawk derives much of its power from how its author artfully works the fictional Father Joe, a complex and engaging character, into the documented history of abuse at Rosebud and its mission school. The letter excerpts she includes are based on those recovered in 2011 by lawyers for the survivors of that abuse. Their lawsuit identified at least 10 abusers at the parish and school between 1942 and 2003.
Since High Hawk, like any good novel, mirrors the complexity of real life — its joys and sorrows — no clear resolutions emerge by book’s end. Readers are left with Father Joe’s spirals of regret about his ministry, the abuse and his long silence about the letters. Even so, amid all his confusion and moral lapses, Frykholm offers a slight flicker of hope — of repentance, of honesty — a tiny light wavering amid the gathering darkness. Father Joe begins to reach out further and listen longer and risk more to support Alice and Bear and others on the reservation. It is this awakening, this latent compassion –– his recovery of his calling to suffer with his community — that offers some measure of redemption.
Tom Montgomery Fate’s most recent book is The Long Way Home, a collection of essays. He teaches part-time at St. Francis University in Joliet, Illinois.