140th Niobrara Convocation

140th Niobrara Convocation
Standing Rock - North Dakota
June 14-17, 2012

The 140th Niobrara Convocation will be coming to Standing Rock-North Dakota! This years event will be hosted by both Standing Rock-ND and the North Dakota Council on Indian Ministrie(NDCIM). This Convocation some of the vistors include: Katherine Jefferts-Schori (Presiding Bishop), Bonnie Anderson (President of the House of Deputies), The Episcopal Church Archives, and many more! We hope that you can join us in this great event as we look forward to having you here on Standing Rock!



The following link provides great information and the following history -http://www.fusion4-standingrock.com/#!__140-niobrara-convocation

History of Niobrara



The first Niobrara Convocation was held in 1870 and except for few interruptions, this summer gathering has been held annually at different venues on the nine South Dakota Indian Reservations. The character of Niobrara Convocation is described by Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, an award winning author, daughter of a Lakota priest and mother of another:

The Niobrara Convocation, although it has no Indian ceremonials with it, has served the same social function as the old Sun Dance, when friends and relatives came together in the summer from all directions. The convocation custom of the Indians from the different reservations camping together was not unlike the traditional affairs held in the camp circle each summer by the various tribes.

Several presiding bishops and one president of the United States – Calvin Coolidge in 1927 – have attended Niobrara Convocations. Twenty-one hundred were present in 1987 at Rosebud Reservation when Edmond Browning was a guest. As many as 4,000 came by buckboard and model-T in 1920. An old priest told of a thousand tents dotting the hillside at the Church of Our Most Merciful Savior on the Santee Reservation near the hamlet of Santee, Nebraska.

Niobrara is the name of a small river in northeast Nebraska. Niobrara was also once the name of an Episcopal diocese which had no geo-graphical boundaries but had jurisdictional oversight of the Great Sioux Nation and thereby oversight of all Lakota/Dakota peoples of the high plains. And, Niobrara is the name of one of the Reservations of the Diocese of South Dakota, although, in fact, it’s located in Nebraska.

It was to the valley of the Niobrara River that the Santee Sioux were banished following the “Minnesota uprising” of 1862. After years of government treachery and deceit, the Santee people rose up and broke free of the Minnesota Valley reservation. Many lives were lost, and despite the fact that Santee Christians saved the lives of missionaries and some settlers, all of the surviving Indians were imprisoned and later expelled to the Dakota Territory. Thirty eight were hanged, virtually without trial and no interpreters, at Mankato, Minnesota.

A stalwart Episcopal missionary, the Rev. Samuel D. Hinman, accompanied the Santee on the wretched exodus, and within a few years almost all of the Dakotas had become Episcopalian, and today approximately half of the 12,000 baptized Episcopalians in South Dakota are either Dakota or Lakota Sioux.

In the late 1800s—when the buffalo was gone, the Indian wars over and Reservation scheme in place—the U.S. government assigned various churches oversight of Indian tribes. The Episcopal Church was assigned the “the Great Sioux Nation.” At one time 28 Episcopal chapels dotted the Pine Ridge, the largest of the South Dakota reservations and home of the Oglala Lakota. The Black Hills, sacred to several tribes, were within the boundaries of Pine Ridge Reservation. The boundary was short lived. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty that forbade Anglo presence, George Armstrong Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills in 1874 and discovered gold. A hundred-plus years later the U.S. Supreme Court ruled seizure of the Black Hills to have been illegal and in uncommonly terse language the Court stressed:
. . . a more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealing will never, in all probability, be found in our history.

The Court recommended compensation for the land; the Congress appropriated $17-million which is sitting somewhere, drawing interest. The tribes emphatically stated that they wanted the land back not the money. To this day, the issue is unresolved.

The Episcopal Church is on record in support of returning the land to the tribes. However, the Diocese of South Dakota owns a camp in the Black Hills, and it is there that the 139th Niobrara Convocation took place. This year the 140th Niobrara Convocation will take place on Standing Rock - North Dakota, where it will be the first time being held hel in ND. from the Fusion Standing Rock Website