"When the Rev. Don Doll arrived on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in 1962, he was an earnest 24-year-old Jesuit who had joined the order straight out of a Milwaukee High School. The world of the Rosebud Sioux that he encountered there was strange to him. It was difficult to get his seventh- and eighth-grade students at the St. Francis Mission boarding school to line up in a row or follow a rigid schedule. The Rosebud Sioux had what he considered a permissive method of child rearing, and the younger children would return from summer vacation speaking a combination of Lakota and English. In those days, the Jesuits forbade Lakota to be spoken in school, though a formal apology to the tribe was issued and the remaining reservation Jesuit school in South Dakota, the Red Cloud Indian School, now teaches the language. “In the early ’60s, we didn’t have much respect for their culture,” Father Doll said. “We were trying to help them adapt to our society, learn their English, so they could enter the American society, without respect to their culture. We are much more respectful now of who they are, and of their experience. At least, we try to be.”" Get the Story:
Lens: A Photographer and a Prayer (The New York Times 10/19)
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