The Cataldo Mission to the Coeur d'Alene

The Cataldo Mission

The Cataldo Mission bears in its heart the long sad struggle of the Coeur d'Alene Indians who made their bargain with Jesuits and sold themselves to suffering. They had sent a delegation to St. Louis (the center of their world, for fur, missionaries and power) to request the magic of the Black Robes. In fact, the coming of the Black Robes had been prophesied: the Jesuits would bring peace, but they would take away the old ways.

The white man's horses and his rifles had already arrived among the Indian tribes. The theft of horses was an honorable and heroic conquest. But tribes encroached on each others' land for buffalo hunts, and there ensued wars of vengeance. The Coeur d'Alene and other Flathead tribes had become vulnerable to the Crow and Blackfoot tribes of the Plains, and their once tranquil and prosperous lives were disturbed forever. Therefore, like other tribes, they wanted to the white man's magic to regain power in their world.

Inside the Chapel

Along came Father DeSmet, a Belgian who had secreted himself to the New World, against his father's will. He had been a young sibling among 23 siblings but with his own dreams, who smuggled himself to St. Louis to become a Jesuit priest. Heeding the call of the Flathead delegation, he and other young, often well-born and highly educated Jesuits, rode west with a wagon train through heat, hunger, thirst and danger on what would become the Oregon trail. The Indians welcomed and submitted to them. Under Jesuit supervision they built a log cabin and learned European methods of planting and sowing, but the St. Joe River flooded them out, so on higher ground they built a neo-classical temple to the new religion, supervised by Father Cataldo whose skills happened to be architecture and painting. And in the process of being asked to sacrifice their freedom, they learned to reject the heroism of old for submission to the white man's ways. 

In fact, they hadn't expected the Jesuits to stay past two years; the Jesuits had expected to stay forever and build an empire of Christians. As the West opened, the priests became intermediaries as the US began to force the Indians even from the land where they'd built their church on a hill, their Bitterroot Land. Suffering, humiliation and degradation were the new masters of these once proud people whom the French trappers had once named "Heart of Awl" for their stubborn shrewdness. In a fascinating exhibit at the Cataldo Mission, Indian children with eyes of bewildered suffering face the camera, shorn of their braids and their language. Finally, even the Jesuits lost their place in the new order of immigrants.

The Cataldo Mission has the rough hewn charm of the frontier. It is filled with voices and memories, recounting how even the children hauled rocks to build it, how the young Jesuits were taught table manners, how grandmothers kept the old tongue alive, telling the children Indian stories and speaking to their horses in forgotten Indian. In a masterful video at the end of the exhibit, the Coeur d'Alene Indians themselves speak of the transformation wrought by Christianity. Now many are obese--one woman sits in her bedroom filled with stuffed animals. With wry, bitter humor they tell stories of hardship, of being uprooted without time to collect their belongings, of exile in a useless land. Their path is now the path of suffering. They find solace in the ceremonies of old, in dancing and especially the sweat lodge.

The Jesuit Mission

Both Indians and priests compromised their visions, both came away empty handed in the crowded way west.

A few days later we drove along the DeSmet road, on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, past a huge tribal high school in search of the current Jesuit Mission Church. As a fascinating epilogue to this tale of the Coeur d'Alene, a sign told us it was closed, there would be no more masses due to disrespectful behavior of ATV's (all terrain vehicles, a noisy joy ride). The Father would be departing for Florence, Italy. A carload of teenagers blasted by us, there on the Rez. An ominous white Christ stood before the Mission, his eyes cold and beautiful. The Jesus that sees all, that deracinated the heroic Indians, and gave them instead a heart encircled with thorns.

Where the Coeur d'Alene and other tribes used to rendez-vous, each year, for Native games and festivities, on Lake Coeur d'Alene - before the Jesuits came

We went into a supermarket on the Rez. At one end sat laughing customers at their video games. At the other end, seated at a table, an obese young Indian, a Protestant minister, read the Bible aloud. Among his students was a Mormon store employee. They argued their interpretations--that of the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The minister's beautiful brown-eyed baby screamed in the arms of his obese, white wife.

Then we hiked among the great trees, in the beautiful still evening.