Sinsinawa
Spectrum
A Congregation News Magazine
Dare We Take in a Child?
During a Tragic Time in American History,
Sisters Asked to Care for and Educate Mary We-Ha-Kee LaBatte
by Mary Paynter, OP
Bethlehem Academy, circa 1873. Srs. Damian (left)
and Matthias stand near the convent. Photo courtesy
of Sinsinawa Dominican Archives.
Mary We-Ha-Kee LaBatte was born into a complex world at a tragic time in American history. During the 1860s, Congress failed to appropriate money for annuity payments promised to many American Indian tribes, including the Santee Sioux. With the absence of wild game and little means to raise crops, the Santee Sioux faced starvation. This desperate situation led to the so-called “Minnesota Uprising” in the summer of 1862, the year of We-Ha-Kee’s birth.
Violence broke out in southern Minnesota, but the U.S. Army soon overpowered the Santee, crushing the uprising in a few months. After the war, many Indians were imprisoned; over 1,600 were held at Fort Snelling near St. Paul. Others were exiled to the Dakotas or Nebraska or Iowa. Some escaped to Canada. The largest mass execution in U.S. history occurred at Mankato on Dec. 27, 1862, when 38 Santee Sioux were hanged.
This was the world into which We-Ha-Kee was born. She was the child of a French father and a Santee Sioux mother. But her father had been killed in the uprising, and her mother left a widow. The white settlers, themselves struggling to eke out a living on new farmsteads in southern Minnesota, feared and distrusted the few Santee Sioux who remained in the area. The LaBatte family, too, was trapped in this net of virulent racism, poverty, and hopelessness.
Into this world, in 1865, just three years after the Minnesota Uprising and one year after the death of Father Samuel, five of the Benton Dominican Sisters, urged by Bishop Grace of St. Paul and accompanied by Mother Regina Mulqueeny, set out upriver to begin their first out-of-state mission―in Faribault, MN. The bishop suggested the name Bethlehem, and plans were made to open a boarding school.
One day in 1869 the Santee Sioux widow, Mrs. LaBatte, came to the Sisters there and asked them to educate and care for her little girl, then just 7 years old. What did the Sisters think? Probably they recalled the legacy of Father Samuel―his care for widows and orphans―as well as his enduring concern for the native peoples whom he had come to love and respect in his earliest ministry. Some may also have remembered one Easter Sunday in Benton when two Winnebago women walked to town to meet with Father Samuel. (Of course, he invited them to stay and―somewhat to the cook’s dismay―to share his Easter dinner.) The Sisters also must have recognized the probability of conflict among the white settlers who felt a deep-seated antagonism toward the Sioux and still-vivid memories of the deaths of dozens of white farmers in 1862.
What should the Sisters do?
To be continued in the next issue of Sinsinawa Spectrum!