“You were the mission,” Sister Monica Suhayda says, gently squeezing the hand of her dear friend Melissa Brown who’d traveled from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming to celebrate her 97th birthday in Baden.
It was a home they shared, a sacred place of both suffering and strength that Sister Monica knew little about until her arrival in 1974 at the invitation of a Jesuit priest, Father Tony Short, whom she met while studying corporate ministry at St. Louis University.
“I didn’t go there with any preconceived notions that I was going to do anything,” she recalls, only that she was grateful for the challenge of serving outside the context of a classroom. On the reservation, she had the freedom for her ministry to evolve in response to the needs of the people, many of whom were living with significant drug and alcohol dependency and the general trauma of forced relocation at the hands of the U.S. government.
“The Arapaho are a quiet, reflective, colorful people who love to sing, dance and enjoy life, and who carry the scars of injustice nobly,” she wrote in a letter to her Baden Sisters during her first year there. “Their children are a prized possession – seldom scolded or reprimanded… A sign of acceptance with the children is when they start asking, ‘Are you coming back?’ ‘How long will you stay?’ Only after you’ve convinced them that they can’t get rid of you so easily, do they open up and treat you as a friend. With the adults,” she continues, “it takes more time to be truly accepted. So we watch, listen, and try to understand these lovable, interesting people, and wait to be invited in.”
Wanting to get in touch with the people, Sister Monica used her first year assignment teaching religious education classes at St. Stephens Indian Mission to build relationships and learn about the traditions, symbols, and culture of the Arapaho and Shoshone tribes, observing that “they were rooted in spirituality – it wasn’t something they did once a year. It’s who they were.”
Witnessing the Native peoples’ expression of spirituality continued the expansion of Sister Monica’s experience of religion, which began when she was the student in a religious education class – that of Sister Baptista Young, one of six Sisters to travel to China for missionary work after World War II. For a brief, three-month period from September to December 1946, their time in Baden overlapped. “There was just something about her I loved,” Sister Monica (then, John Baptist) remembers of Sister Baptista, who taught religion and philosophy to postulants.
The child of Slovakian immigrants from Austria-Hungary who arrived in America in the 1910s, Sister Monica was grateful for her family’s rootedness in the Catholic faith and for the ways Sister Baptista expanded her experience of it: “My parents were very legalistic. You did what the pastor told you to do, and you did it just the way he told you. It was very loving and all, but it was very rigid.” Sister Baptista, she says, broadened her mind, opening the door “to say that religion is more than that. God is everywhere and in everything.”
Sister Monica infused that understanding into her work on the reservation and life among the people, which took a brief hiatus in the fall of 1975 when she returned to Beaver County to care for her ailing brother, George. She left with notes of support and encouragement from the children: “I hope you will get to come back soon,” Marlene Bull wrote in a handmade card. “We all miss you,” said another from Mary Dewey.
The following year, Sister Monica returned for what became the longest and most significant chapter in her ministry: working directly with people – adults and, at times, children – struggling to overcome addiction to alcohol and drugs. She developed a pledge modeled after the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous, keeping her door open to anyone who needed help taking their first steps toward sobriety. “They always knew they were welcome,” she recalls. “I never turned anybody away.”
“They would take it for three months, and many of them would come back and renew it and extend it,” she explains, adding that she cautioned people that change wouldn’t come overnight. “I said: ‘You’re going to take it one day at a time, one hour at a time, one minute at a time. This is strictly between you and the Creator. It’s not for anybody else.’” It was a simple pledge, but it touched hearts – thousands of people over nearly fifty years of service on the reservation.
She kept a basket with the palm-sized cards next to her chair in the living room, taking them into her hands every day to pray for each one’s journey of recovery. “It’s very difficult. You’re mourning with them. You’re crying with them… All you can do is hold their hand.”
Sister Monica loved that people would come to her at all hours and knew they could always find her in one of two places: at home or at the Heritage Center and Gift Shop, which she founded in 1984 to help raise money for outreach and counseling materials and create a place for Native American artists and craftspeople to display and sell their works.
A decade later, she was given the opportunity to oversee repairs and renovations to St. Stephen’s Church. Working with Native artists and a crew from the reservation, they transformed the chapel into one that looked and felt like the people who filled its pews, was more accessible to the elders, and “incorporated their symbols with ours,” she explains – like the teepee as a tabernacle for the Blessed Sacrament, and a mural depicting their conception of Eternity. She remembers an older woman stopping in one day to say: “Sister, we always gave our warriors an eagle feather if they did something that was great. Jesus deserves the eagle feathers.” The woman put them on, and they’ve been there ever since.
Scenes of the renovations at St. Stephen’s Indian Mission Catholic Church on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming
The Arapaho and Shoshone people have left an indelible mark on Sister Monica, and she on them. In preparation for her return to Baden this past Fall, parishioners planned a special farewell Mass and children’s powwow to honor her, surprising her with a buffalo hide to bring home – a gift that signifies deep respect for a beloved elder.
But it was an unexpected encounter in her final minutes there that she considers the greatest gift: “I had packed my suitcases, and we were getting in the car, and this car drives up. Ron (Ron Mamot, Director of the St. Stephens Indian Mission Foundation) calls and says, ‘Hey, Sister Monica, someone wants to take the pledge.’ And I thought, ‘Oh! As it was in the beginning, no schedules, no dates or anything.’ They came and they were ready and he was my last pledge. And I felt,” she paused, waiting for the words that might express the depth of her love and gratitude for that moment and a half-century of moments like it, “I felt touched by grace. I just thought that was a beautiful way for me to end my ministry there – a special gift.”
