Communique
Icons of the Land
Places of Worship on the Road to Iron Nation
The wind roared through at about 100 miles per hour that night in June 2015. In the Missouri River country of central South Dakota, it punched in the sides of grain bins as though they were pop cans and dragged power lines and poles into fields like a cat playing with knitting needles and yarn. It knocked boards off houses and churches and barns. So, a few days later, while visiting the grave of a Brulé Lakota leader named Iron Nation—one of the "peace chiefs" you will never read about in history books because they didn't make war on the U.S.—I looked up and saw two older parishioners, a man and his wife, using an electric drill to fasten boards back onto the exterior of Messiah Episcopal Church.
I could hear their drilling across the cemetery. I went to visit with them. The woman was Lakota, or western Sioux. She told me she was raised in that congregation. Her husband was raised Lutheran but became Episcopalian after their marriage. Before long, the woman was telling me how that rural church had nourished their family in more ways than one—their five children had teethed on the boards of the pews at one time or another. No wonder the family had grieved when Messiah Episcopal closed in 1981, not quite a century after it had begun. The Episcopal faith had come to the Lower Brulé Sioux in 1871; Messiah Episcopal Church dated back to 1884.
I later met the Episcopal priest who had been serving the congregation, and he told me that the leader whose grave I had come to see was one of theirs. The Iron Nation for whom the Iron Nation District is named had been a member of that parish and had worshiped in that very church. They knew him as Solomon Iron Nation. It is said that he became a convert at Messiah Episcopal Church through the work of the first priest there, Father Luke Walker. Legend has it that Iron Nation once struck Walker in the face to see if he really would turn the other cheek—the implication being that if Walker had that kind of gumption, Iron Nation might convert. Walker had, and Iron Nation did.
That helped explain why a large picture of Iron Nation was fastened to the wall in the entryway of the church, along with an image of another important leader called Big Mane. In some way, those large images hanging in the foyer of a country church on the dirt-poor Lower Brulé Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota reminded me of Russian saints depicted on Eastern Orthodox icons—heroes of an ancient faith in a new country.
The man and woman told me that a group from the parish had finally gone to the church leaders and asked to be allowed to worship in this church again, more than three decades after it had closed. The church listened; paperwork in the sanctuary says that Bishop John T. Tarrant of the South Dakota Diocese dedicated and consecrated Messiah Episcopal Church for use again on March 24, 2013. Members of the congregation worshiped without heat that first winter; to this day they keep church materials in plastic bins because this poor rural church on the Lower Brulé Indian Reservation has—who would have guessed?—church mice.
From Evening Church
Later, I mused about the two old parishioners I'd met, because the sight of them had brought to mind a painting.
One of my sons and I used to pore over books about the English etcher and watercolorist Samuel Palmer. At various times on drives through Kansas or Nebraska or Colorado, Jedidiah has said to me, "Look—a Samuel Palmer original." Usually he says it when he spots a church steeple poking above a ragged fringe of trees at the edge of a town, especially if the moon or the evening star is rising. He's alluding to Samuel Palmer's fondness for embedding churches in his paintings, notably in the visionary work he did in a place called Shoreham, Kent, in southeast England.
As Palmer's son, A. H. Palmer, has written, "If we hurriedly turn over the mass of these Shoreham productions we shall probably be struck first by the predilection shown for moons, church spires, flocks of sheep, twilights, and cornfields, and then by the fact that there is so little sameness or repetition in design."
Mark Abley has suggested that Palmer's famous early landscapes are "icons of the land." That turn of phrase might also describe the way Palmer himself thought about churches. He wanted there to be many churches in the land, and not just great churches—little English churches with scarcely enough room to hold a few families would do very well, too. His landscapes almost yearn for them.
Lance Nixon is a freelance writer based in Pierre, South Dakota, where he attends virtual services of New Life Assembly of God Church and also visits Trinity Episcopal Church virtually. He is also a fiction writer, and his latest stories about the Great Plains appeared in the November 2020 and November 2019 issues of Gray's Sporting Journal.
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