The St. Francis Mission Religious Education Program offers religious education weekly to four different schools: Sapa Un, Spring Creek, and He Dog School and Rosebud Elementary School. We have 166 students enrolled in grades K-8. We teach the Catholic faith and incorporate our Lakota language into our lessons. We start every class with a prayer, read the Gospel weekly and learn about a saint. We incorporate our Lakota teachings and values, including prayer, respect, generosity, humility, compassion, honesty and wisdom. We teach a different Lakota word for the week that fits into that lesson. We celebrate birthdays every month and one of our classes asked to sing Happy Birthday in Lakota to their classmates.

We celebrated Catholic Schools Week with an emphasis on the different ways to pray. We encourage the students to pray daily. We set up a prayer area with the "Bandage Prayer,” where the students wrote the name of someone in need of healing on a bandage. They attached the bandage on the board and prayed for them. Weekly we assign a saint to the students and ask them to research this saint and then present what they learned to their classmates. We recently assigned to them Saint Katharine Drexel who was a donor to the St. Francis Mission in the 1800s, and was instrumental in offering Catholic learning to Native American children. We took the students to St. Charles Borromeo Church, where we have a portrait of Saint Katharine Drexel and a plaque that tells her history for them to learn more about her.

We held a Confirmation retreat for our candidates where we completed two of our Confirmation lessons, prayed the rosary together and attended Mass at St. Charles Borromeo. We discussed several topics and listened to talks including “The depth of God’s Love and Reconciliation,” a healing and repentance talk given by Father Edmund; and “Lakota, Catholic and Proud,” a talk given by Jenny Black Bear. The candidates worked on their faith journey map as well as painted their Guardian Angel jars that they will bring back at their Confirmation to give to their classmates. The goal is to fill the jars with encouraging words, Bible verses and positive messages for their classmates. It was an enriching weekend of learning, prayer and fellowship. Many thanks to Father Edmund Yainao, Ben Black Bear III and Jenny Black Bear for helping to make this a great retreat for our candidates. We look forward to our day of Confirmation with Bishop Scott Bullock at St. Charles Borromeo Church.