Serving the Sioux

Serving the Sioux

For more than four decades, Phyllis White Eyes DeCory, 71, has stood as a symbol of strength and hope among the Lakota Sioux people in South Dakota. Her leadership has been both political and spiritual, stemming from her beliefs that people must know pride to make sense of this world and also must seek a world beyond the material.

Given her own set of responsibilities—including raising nine children—friends have marveled that she has found so much time to reach out to others, most recently as director of Native Concerns for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rapid City, (pop. 59,607) a position she retired from last year.

White Eyes DeCory was born Wakinya Ska Win (White Thunder Woman) on Jan. 7, 1932 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to John Emerson and Helena (Brown) White Eyes.

When she was 10 her father told her she could one day change her last name to something more reflective of mainstream America. Lots of American Indians were doing so in the 1940s. Phyllis replied she would remain White Eyes, and her father said, “Then always be proud of your Lakota heritage.” She always has, and is equally proud of her mother’s European ancestry, she adds.

Shortly after graduating from Holy Rosary Mission in 1950, she moved from South Dakota to California with her first husband, but his drinking made it difficult for him to hold a job. So in 1961 she returned to her home state without him—with her six children, one suitcase containing a change of clothing for each child, and $1.10.

White Eyes DeCory was drawn to the village of St. Francis on the Rosebud Indian Reservation because of a Catholic mission there.

Some people on the reservation call Catholicism a white man’s religion, she notes, “but Christ wasn’t a white man,” she says. “His skin was more my color. His community was similar to a tribal culture in some ways.”

As a child, White Eyes DeCory remembered being impressed by priests and nuns who made certain “no one was ever hungry, no one was ever neglected.” At St. Francis Mission she became one of those who made sure no one went without. For 35 cents an hour in the early 1960s, she cooked for 500 people. Her husband returned from California and they had three more children. She wanted more than anything to stay home with her kids, but she kept working. “It was a necessity,” she says.

As she looked around, White Eyes DeCory saw lots of other necessary work, too. “When I first came to St. Francis, there were abandoned car bodies everywhere, and a rat-infested junk yard right in town,” she recalls. “How can anyone feel pride in a place like that?”

She and a couple friends helped renew community pride by becoming the “pitchfork ladies” and leading a reservation cleanup. The effort spread and signaled a new phase of life for White Eyes DeCory. Over the years she served as St. Francis mayor, worked for a program that helped reservation youth continue education beyond high school, and sat on the board of directors for local Sinte Gleska College. White Eyes DeCory made time for self-improvement as she led community improvement, earning a bachelor’s degree in human services from Sinte Gleska.

“And all the while she was raising her children, too,” says LeVeta Bark, a friend at Pine Ridge. “Some people, if they went through all she did, would want to walk away from everything. But in Phyllis’s case, it made her strong, especially spiritually.”

Phyllis and her second husband, LeRoy DeCory, live in Rapid City now, where finding ways of making traditional Lakota rituals part of Catholic worship was an important part of her job. But for life to really improve on reservations, she thinks, a whole generation of women needs to step into leadership roles.

It is, she says, a necessity.

Paul Higbee is a freelance writer in Spearfish, S.D.

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