A Story of Hard Work and Humility:
Community Gathers at Sacred Heart Church to Nourish the Body and Soul
posted on March 24, 2014
Early on a cold March morning, you could just catch the welcoming scent of warm, savory soup coming from inside the doors of Sacred Heart Church.
Situated in the heart of the small town of Pine Ridge, on the edge of the sprawling Pine Ridge Reservation, Sacred Heart is one of the six active Catholic churches that together support Red Cloud’s pastoral ministry programs. It appears small from the outside, but Sacred Heart serves more than 500 parishioners, providing vital spiritual and social services to the people of Pine Ridge. On this particularly chilly morning, Sacred Heart’s staff was preparing to host a community meal and rummage sale to help support the church’s work on the reservation.
Wanda Standing Bear, the church’s community outreach minister, retired many years ago from her full time job—and this year she’ll turn 77. But preparing for the morning’s rummage sale, she rushes quickly back and forth across the room, setting up tables and chairs and folding piles of clothes into neat stacks.
“Let me just see if anyone is waiting outside and then I’ll come talk with you,” she says. Eyeing the clock on the wall, Wanda straightens a sweatshirt on a clothes hanger and then sits down at a vacant table. “The rummage sale is supposed to start soon, so I can only talk for a bit.”
Poverty is a reality on the Pine Ridge Reservation—and setting up this sale is just one of the ways Wanda helps to support a community in need. Each day, she spends time in a back room of the church, meticulously organizing donations of clothes, shoes and other supplies from across the country. During certain hours, community members know they can find Wanda in the rummage room, and she’ll help them find what they need to keep themselves and their families warm.
The occasional rummage sale offers the community good, clean clothing for low prices—jackets for a dollar, shirts for a quarter. But Wanda makes sure the homeless and those in dire need get immediate help.
“A man took a jacket without paying during a sale,” Wanda recalls. “When he came back for the next one, I told him I saw that he left without paying and told him that if he couldn’t afford it that he just needed to tell me.” Wanda explains the man was surprised that she was not angry. She assured him that she would make sure he had warm clothes even if he had no money.
“He came in a few days later to get another item—which I gave to him, knowing he had no money. And he said, ‘No, thank you, I have saved money this time.’ And he gave me the change in his pocket.”
In 1978, Wanda moved across the 2.2 million acre reservation from Wanblee in search of work. Soon she started a job with the Oglala Sioux Tribe’s career training program. After some searching, she found housing for herself, her husband and six children in a tiny apartment behind Sacred Heart and began volunteering with the church in her free time as payment.
“I was immediately surprised by how much work is needed to keep a little church and the parish going,” she says. “I was impressed with the effort everyone was making and felt inspired to lend a hand.”
Growing up in Wanblee, Wanda remembers her mother instilling in her the Church’s values and going to pray with the community every Sunday. For Wanda, there was never a question that she would be involved with the Church’s work on the reservation.
After months of working for minimum wage and devoting her free time to volunteering at Sacred Heart, Wanda knew it was time to move her family somewhere more permanent. She found a modest duplex for sale down the street and signed her name to it, spending half of her paycheck each month on the mortgage. It was a struggle to make the payments, but Wanda remained devoted to her family and to the church, which helped her get her start.
After 23 years of working her way up, Wanda retired in 2003 as a program coordinator for the tribe. She spent her entire career helping tribal members gain the skills necessary to find a job and support their families. It was always a challenge: there are few jobs on the reservation and more than 80 percent of residents are unemployed. But even after a full career, Wanda is still driven to support her people.
“I was tired of politics and ready to retire and be at home,” she explains. “But after cleaning all the walls in my house, vacuuming every room and organizing every bit of space, I knew I needed something more.”
She turned to the place that for her had stood as a symbol of peace and hope over the years, the place she had come to call her second home—Sacred Heart Church.
“At first I was just volunteering a few hours here and there, but then I was able to make a little extra money through the Experience Works program, which taught me about computers. I had a page on the computer where I could send letters—sometimes I write to my son in California or look at Facebook—but after I lost a letter I wrote to a priest, I decided that I don’t care for the machine much.”
Today, Wanda works at Sacred Heart for four hours each day through the support of the Red Cloud’s parish system. It isn’t always easy. But each day, Wanda is inspired to do more for her community. And she always gets something back.
“There’s a woman who often comes to visit—I’m not sure she has a home—and she’ll come in needing a new shirt or a warm hat. She always brings me snacks and extra food. I always tell her she doesn’t need to give me anything, but she always comes back with some bread or some extra soup and thanks me.”
As a wet snow begins to fall outside, the smell of fresh, homemade chicken soup with scratch noodles fills the church hall and community members start to trickle in. Wanda stands up and walks toward a clothing rack to help find a young woman a sweatshirt that fits.
In the kitchen, large worn metal pots simmer on the stove, full of bubbling soup. Angie Stover, Sacred Heart’s office manager and pastoral associate, stands nearby cutting brownies, pineapple upside-down cake and other treats—all homemade. When she finishes, she locates a massive bowl of rising dough and begins to knead. “This is for the frybread.”
Angie has been working full-time at Sacred Heart for more than 12 years, after volunteering extensively during her tenure as a Shannon County school teacher. Her son Robert, tall and smiling with a calm demeanor, has been at her side ever since cooking affordable meals for the community.
Robert says that cooking enough frybread to pair with ten gallons of homemade soup is tough. “It get’s hot in here, and it takes a long time. Stick around, you’ll see how it’s done,” he says with a sly smile. He offers a sample of the chicken soup and asks, “What do you think? I’ve had a lot of frybread and I’ve never had any better than the frybread we make here—I think everyone likes it.”
Angie tapes menus on the walls of the church hall. It’s now 9:10 am. “We have to start early to get everything ready and cooking. I usually get here around 6:00 am,” she says. “We ran out of soup last time, so we made a double batch this time around.”
“I think the community is looking for a place where they can be a community,” Angie explains when asked about organizing these sales.
“People want a place where they can be who they are without prejudice or expectations of being something else—everyone has some struggle, whether it’s alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty, you name it. We want to provide a healing place for people. And to me, that’s from a church community perspective.”
Sacred Heart’s frequent lunch and rummage sales provide affordable food and clothes to many of the reservation’s 40,000 residents, while raising funds to keep the lights on and the rooms warm. But some of the resources are reserved for a special, annual pilgrimage to the St. Kateri Tekakwitha Conference.
Tekakwitha is a gathering of Native American Catholics from across the country. The conference was named for Kateri Tekakwitha, a Native Algonquin-Mohawk women who was canonized in 1980. Prior to her canonization, pastoral staff at Sacred Heart became part of a “Kateri Circle”—a group that met to pray for her sainthood. Today, they meet to support and encourage Native American Catholics around the world and to pray for healing in Native communities.
“It’s like being at home,” says Angie. “Everyone is like minded. It’s an opportunity to connect with people from different tribes, but with similar backgrounds and culture. It feels like family.”
Traveling to the conferences inspires Angie and the others to return to Sacred Heart with a renewed enthusiasm to create a sacred and safe gathering place on Pine Ridge.
Wanda says she has always seen the church as a place not only to pray, but to come together as a community of like-minded, spiritual people. “It’s a special, peaceful place,” she explains. “I hope people keep supporting us in the future. There is a lot to do, and we need volunteers to keep this place going.”
Through the work and sacrifice of men and women like Wanda, Angie and Robert, Sacred Heart has become a staple in the community. Regardless of faith or religious denomination, the church welcomes all those in need of warm food, warm clothes—or simply fellowship.
All Content, ©Red Cloud Indian School, 2014
